Doctor Zhivago

A DVD review from The Movie Snob:

Doctor Zhivago (A-). This is a long movie, well over 3 hours long, so I watched it in two parts over the course of the weekend. It is the tale of Yuri Zhivago, who is orphaned as a young boy somewhere in the eastern wilderness of Russia, and then adopted and taken to Moscow by well-off friends of his family around 1900. Zhivago grows up to become a doctor and a published poet, played by Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia). The movie then becomes both a romance and a political drama. Taking the second element first, the movie effectively illustrates the political turmoil of the last days of the czar and the chaos brought on by Bolshevik Revolution. Zhivago, a compassionate man generally in sympathy with the purported aims of the revolution, soon enough finds himself menaced by its agents because of his perceived “bourgeois” attitudes. As for the love story, the young Zhivago marries the devoted Tania (Geraldine Chaplin, Nashville), the daughter of his adopted parents. But World War I and the Russian civil war separate them for a long while, and he is thrown into the company of a beautiful nurse named Lara, played by Julie Christie (Troy). And this is only roughly the first half of the movie. Highly recommended, although I should warn you that “Lara’s Theme” will keep playing in your head a long while after the end credits have rolled.