I’m wrapping up reading Doctor Zhivago. I’d seen the David Lean film, which is great in its own way, but I think the NYT review from 1965 nails the problem with it: “Mr. Bolt has reduced the vast upheaval of the Russian Revolution to the banalities of a doomed romance.” The other problem is Julie Christie’s consistently perfect tan, which looks a little more French Riviera than Ural Mountains.

It’s definitely more than an epic love story; even the love story isn’t really a love story, but more of a mystical pile of D.H. Lawrence crap. (I like D.H. Lawrence, but, face it, it’s crap). And as you might expect, it’s more than what the polemecists who censored it (in the USSR) or praised it (in the West) saw it as.

Maybe a fuller review is forthcoming once I actually finish.

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