“Don’t you want to believe it?”
“Not if it isn’t true.”

Some people who’ve never seen Lawrence of Arabia (or Oliver Twist, or Hobson’s Choice, or The Bridge on the River Kwai) consider Doctor Zhivago to be David Lean’s best film and it’s easy to see why. A decades-spanning romance set against a backdrop of WWI and the Russian Revolution, it dresses up Boris Pasternik’s sweeping novel with lush production value—awesome location shoots, artful compositions, snowy panoramas, period attire, grand set pieces, a memorable score. At one point a locomotive barrels through an icy section of track like the train in Snowpiercer. From an aesthetic standpoint it’s impeccable. Any number of shots here would make wonderful postcards, even the ones that bear the obvious markings of practical effects work. It’s the kind of movie that deserves to be seen on a silver screen (regrettably, I had to settle for HBO), offering a spectacle intended to showcase the cinema’s superiority to television.

Still others consider it to be overwrought and pretentious. It’s easy to understand this point of view too. It’s awkwardly paced, narratively meanders to nowhere, and though the nucleus of a married poet-physician (Omar Sharif) falling in love with the nurse wife (Julie Christie) of a radical revolutionary (Tom Courtenay) holds some promise, the melodramatic approach to the material reduces its potentially epic storyline to banal banter in fancy costumes, almost wasting a great cast (Geraldine Chaplin, Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness, and Klaus “I am the only free man on this train” Kinski—wait, what’s Klaus Kinski doing here?) in the process.

There’s no sense of real history playing out here. The danger, the politics, the philosophy, the skepticism, the romance, the poetry (my goodness, man, there isn’t any poetry at all!)—everything is held at a respectable distance, as our leading man remains frustratingly equanimous no matter what befalls him; a feeble hero at peace with his inability to alter the course of events, content to recycle his poignant memories into poems that he hopes are of some eternal worth. We never hear his poems, though, only see their stylized inspiration in Lean’s beautiful compositions. Although occasionally broken up by military action, train rides, and even an intermission, this is a film defined by overbearing stillness. It tries to rest the entire weight of itself on its alluring images and stately procession, which might work—maybe for three hours, even—but utilizing so much meticulous production work in service of such a cloying, superficial narrative is a real shame.

I’ve enjoyed reading about the film much more than I enjoyed watching it (Roderick Heath’s insightful essay on the film is superb), but its most passionate defenders—those who see it as more than a grand soap opera, as a weighty treatise to be considered seriously—seem to be eisegeting themes that perhaps are more fully present in Pasternik’s novel. On the other hand, maybe having a baby at home and breaking a three hour movie up into five separate sessions isn’t the best way to form an appreciation for it, nor to see beneath its shimmering surface.