It took me a half a dozen tries to get all the way through the three-hour-long 1965 film Doctor Zhivago, a love story set amid the backdrop of the Russian revolution but filmed elsewhere. Starring Omar Sharif as a doctor-poet, and Julie Christie as an unconvincing 17-year-old raped by her mother’s love interest, a member of the old guard, the film manages to make an illicit love story pretty nap-worthy. Sharif, as Zhivago, is married to the girl he grew up with (played by Geraldine Chaplin) after his mother died prematurely. He keeps running in to Christie’s Lara (a point about which the audience is always forewarned by the interminable playing of the mildly annoying Lara’s Theme), who seems to enjoy the cultural performances afforded by her mother’s beau if not quite all of his attentions—as indicated by her shooting of him. He survives. Then the war and the revolution intervene, Lara’s other (and age-appropriate) beau is part of the new world order, Zhivago is conscripted as a doctor on the front who conveniently runs into Lara when both serve as health care providers near the battlefield and later after they’ve fled Moscow for the country. 
Along the way, viewers learn that the post-revolutionary world isn’t exactly better than, just different from, the prerevolutionary one. Property is commandeered for the people, who seem to like ratting each other out a bit too much. Lara and Zhivago meet bad ends, but their daughter grows up to seemingly become a good communist worker who operates a dam. Lara is memorialized in poems about her by Zhivago, who always seemed ambivalent about his wife but also muted in his alleged passion for Lara and in his response to the world events that occur around him. Lara was likewise not overly taken with her revolution-minded love, who later became her spouse and the father of her first child.
I wanted to like Doctor Zhivago, but I don’t know that it taught me a whole lot more about Russia that I didn’t already know. Life was good for some people before the revolution, and good for others afterward. A true societal change breeds its own corruptions. Perhaps most poignantly, Zhivago’s father-in-law remarks that Zhivago and his wife may look upon their wintry, hungry exile at their dacha as the best time of their lives. Whether old-world, class-driven Russia was better than the work-driven Soviet Union is up to the viewer to decide. Whether the Soviet Union was preferable to today’s Russian Federation seems to be a matter its people are still considering.
© Lori Tripoli