Doctor Zhivago—I heard that the movie was popular when it was released. Before watching, I was worried a bit, because the novel is difficult to transfer to the screen, in my opinion anyway. There was no reason to worry—it was worse than anything I could imagine. To fail to adequately re-tell the story is one thing, to consciously dumb it down is another. The Pasternak's novel is complex, subtle, nuanced, and the crew apparently set up to demystify it. The main personages are simplified beyond recognition. Lara's seducer Komarovsky got it worst: he was appointed as a positively bad guy, as a proof of which the screenwriter made him to rape poor Lara—and after Lara's shot at him, denied him any feeling of regret and remorse. Sigh. The rest of the gang has to demonstrate exactly one emotion at time, and to do it to the maximum possible extent, to make things plain clear, I suppose. They did made things clear, at the price of looking false, pretentious, unnatural and... well, dumb.

When it comes to any thing communist, it gets ridiculous. I had to stop the movie and check the text several times, because I couldn't believe Pasternak could write anything so silly, and of course, he did not. Bad, bad, bad propaganda. Didn't they read the classics of the genre? To be effective, propaganda must be based on real facts—and there are plenty in the novel. Why to invent something stupid instead? Partisans picked up the doctor, who cried that he left a wife with a child and the comrade Big Boss answers: "It doesn't matter"—with the face the Terminator would be envious of. In the original text, they simply said "Our feldsher (medical assistant) is killed. Come with us, and if you don't, don't be mad at us, we'll shoot you". No lachrymatory scenes about an abandoned wife and child. The followed scene pictures two terminators, one of whom is a Party guy, I suppose, who finally took over, and proclaimed in a schisohprenic voice that the doctor will stay as long as the Party wishes. The text said that the doctor tried to escape several times with no good results, but he got away with it—the Big Boss liked him.

And the balalaika—yes. I mean, no. There is no such thing in Pasternak's original text. The main hero's mother neither played balalaika, nor handed it down as her only (???) property. Balalaika is a very folksy instrument—an aristocratic woman would play piano, not balalaika. Not that it was totally impossible, but like the British Queen thrashing a drum in a progressive rock band, this artistry would require some explanations. None were provider by the provider of the balalaikas, Mr. David Lean. Perhaps playing balalaika was considered as self-evident for Russians as the pursuit of happiness for Americans.

In the novel, Yuri's brother (Comrade General) found Yuri's lost daughter during the WWII, on the front line. She tells a horrible story about her mother giving her to some random family the mother run across, to hide her for a couple of days, because the Red troops were to invade the place. Apparently she's never seen her mother since then. I don't even want to re-tell the rest of the story, it's not pretty. In the movie we see the girl peacefully working at something resembling a hydroelectric power station, and she is provided with a boyfriend (!?) and... that's right, balalaika. The couple cheerfully march right to the bright future, with the Comrade General watching them with a smile. By this time I started to wonder whose propaganda I am watching. Why this "happy end" out of the sudden?

I am far for suggesting that all movies should closely follow the books they are based on—not at all. But this one just goes silly as soon as it steps out of the original. One might wonder why the novel was given a Nobel Prize, after watching this movie. Frankly, I doubt it deserved a Nobel Prize, it's an original work indeed, and very worth reading, but it struck me as written by somebody as lost in this world as me, rather than a genius.