The movie covers the years prior to, during, and after the Russian Revolution, as seen through the eyes of poet/physician Yuri Zhivago, who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during the First World War and then the October Revolution.
David Lean's 1965 adaptation of Pasternak's romance of the Russian Revolution is intelligent and handsomely mounted, though it doesn't use its length to build to a particularly complex emotional effect.
Lean and Bolt pay tribute to a Tolstoyan ambition in Pasternak's samizdat novel, and also to a real contemporary relevance: the story of a suppressed writer.
Maurice Jarre's music is as beguiling as ever and Lean squeezes all the pathos that he can out of the romance between Sharif's Yuri Zhivago and Julie Christie's febrile and gorgeous Lara Antipova.
Despite the grim and brooding background, Zhivago has a surging buoyant spirit that is unquenchable. Doctor Zhivago is more than a masterful motion picture; it is a life experience.
