Although presented by Robert Powell, who speaks as Boris Pasternak himself, this is a Russian film and all the players are Russian - even the composer of the excellent and very approproiate music throughout the film is Russian, and Robert Powell actually stands for all the English of the film, while all the actors speak Russian. Andrei Nekrasov has made an admirable and thorough effort to enter the mind of Pasternak and interpret his moods and poetry into this film, which is much more than a documentary and biopic - it is a transformation of Pasternak, his spirit and poetry into the film media, and as such it is touchingly successful. Of course, a large part of the film is devoted to Doctor Zhivago, retelling his story, but at a certain point it breaks into reality as the ordeal of Olga Ivinskaya, Pasternak-s ultimate love, and her atrocious sufferings at Lublyanka and hospitalization are presented. So it's a mixture between Pasternak's fiction and reality, his idealism and compromises with reality, his difficult trials in relation to his fellow poets and his great love, which ultimately crowned his life and achievement. "Doctor Zhivago" remains a lasting classic on level with "The Brothers Karamazov" and "War and Peace", as Pasternak especially today so long afterwards definitely stands out as the one great follower and pursuer of the great Russian novel tradition. The film is as poetic as Pasternak himself, and its submissively refined intermixture with brutal reality in horrible realism of the dictatorship of Stalin makes it next to a masterpiece.
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