Doctor Zhivago

David Lean's Doctor Zhivago is a mountain of a film at 200 minutes, best watched in the dead of winter on a Sunday afternoon when you have nothing to do except watch the flakes fall and eat comfort food.

I get to watch this film in July. Perhaps I should turn the air conditioning down.

So, uh, I guess grab a blanket, put on some hearty soup or perhaps a casserole, curl up with your loved one (or alone if you are so inclined or perhaps have a small couch), and don't forget to turn the space-heater on because your windows are no doubt drafty.

Zhivago is presented in "roadshow" format, meaning you get an overture and an intermission built into the DVD presentation (obviously no curtain, unless you want to get crafty).

Doctor Zhivago is David Lean at the height of his power, but unfortunately he took a few critics' negative reviews personally and only made two more films (neither of which I've seen) before his death in 1991. Doctor Zhivago is now available on Blu-Ray, and judging from this review, I may have to break my "no double-dipping" rule at some point.

Doctor Zhivago is a piece of a bygone era — a time when films like this were events, and audiences allowed themselves to be swept up in epic stories that didn't involve superheroes or fantasy creatures or remakes of television shows. Hollywood was more apt to create epic human stories because audiences were more interested in story. This is as close to a novel as a Hollywood film gets.

Of course, audiences were only so bold. Zhivago is Anglisized, so Russian characters all speak fluent English with British accents, and when they attempt to say distinctly Russian words such as names or locations or the occasional "comrade," the actors all affect a vague Russian/Eastern European accent. If you've ever been critical of Hollywood for making films set in foreign lands where everyone sounds English or American, you probably weren't talking about Doctor Zhivago, even though this film commits the same faux pas. American audiences may have been interested in a different kind of story in the 1960s, but they were not interested in reading subtitles. Some things never change.

Other things do. Zhivago is unabashedly sentimental and focused on the relationship between Yuri and Lara set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which right there will turn modern American audiences off. The history of a country that isn't America? Who cares? What, you mean these people don't single-handedly defeat communism? Where's Iron Man, then?

As for me, I'm guilty in a way. I don't get around to Doctor Zhivago often, mostly due to the substantial time commitment this film requires. To think, David Lean's preview cut was 20 minutes longer; screenwriter Robert Bolt's script was cut somewhat to make the film; Boris Pasternak's original novel on which this film is based is a hefty undertaking at 500-plus pages, and Bolt had to excise several characters and pare back many others.

I don't resist watching Doctor Zhivago because the story is boring; on the contrary, I resist watching Doctor Zhivago because if I get absorbed in this film, I have to commit more than 3 hours. Unlike, say, Das Boot, which was originally intended as a five-part television series, Lean's film is not something you break apart, except at intermission, and only then for a few minutes.

At least, this is the way I look at the film, and most epics for that matter. Epics are not like books you can put down and come back to later. If you want to watch Doctor Zhivago, you need to commit. Fortunately, the film is so good, commitment is only as difficult as finding a 200-minute block of time.

In the end, all I had to do was find the right Sunday afternoon.