25 years ago, when I was in high school, I saw a dubbed, slightly shorter version of this film. I had read a translation of the novel the summer before and found myself completely taken with the power and sensuality of this unique cinematic spectacle. Hearing of its restoration and return, I decided yesterday to give the film another (seven hour) look.

Predictably, the movie -- like Tolstoy's novels and short stories -- has become far more significant with passage of time and my own ascent into middle age. More than any other film adaptation I have seen, it is incredibly faithful to its literary source and to the values of the country whose story it tells.

I hate most of the brain-dead movies that Hollywood studios have created from great novels in recent years. From Emma Thompson's inappropriately cheerful Sense and Sensibility to the flaccid and humorless Vanity Fair with Reese Witherspoon, these movies are completely tone-deaf to the sensibilities of the writers whose stories they have chosen to adapt. The interest of the studio is to create pleasing entertainment for a too-sappy, too-serious public that has absolutely no sense of and little interest in history.

We may mock the woefully bad art that emerged from the late Soviet Union, but the lack of commercial pressure combined with the strong arm of the state (albeit one with an inferiority complex) allowed Bondarchuk to do what would have been impossible in the West -- make an incredible movie based upon the nation's most famous work of fiction.

What makes this movie better than Selznick's Gone with the Wind or Lean's Dr. Zhivago (both of which it resembles at times) is that its action unfolds with a kind of musical rhythm, part Tchaikovsky ballet and part Spaghetti Western, that simply engages your body and senses in way these other movies do not. The emotions of the characters, whether euphoric or melancholy, are always grounded to larger forces at play in the story, never resolving themselves in maudlin, superfluous gestures.

There are far too many scenes in this movie that are worthy of discussion. One of the most memorable occurs at the ball which takes place at the beginning of part three. The joy and merriment of the dancers is quickly transformed into fear and hysteria as word of the advancing French army spreads through the room. In a reversal of a scene at a previous ball in part one, the Tsar and his men evacuate the hall in a grave procession, the inverse of an entry with pomp and gaiety that took place in happier times.

Such reversals are evident everywhere in the scenery of the film, often reflected in the changing flora of the natural landscape Tolstoy so frequently invokes. The catkins push themselves out from bare-limbed birches one moment, then are shedding their golden leaves the next. We lose track of the passage of time as children are born, mothers and fathers die, and husbands and wives are lost. But the cycles of life continue to turn along with, and in spite of, the ensuing calamities and human folly. In this regard, the movie seems very "old country" to me, an authentic embodiment of a world our ancestors understood much better than we do today.

How many Hollywood pictures can you describe as having this quality?

In many ways, I enjoyed this film more than I ever did Tolstoy's novel (which I have only read in translation, of course). The familiar repetitious quality of his descriptive language manifests itself beautifully in the medium of film. Even the more ponderous historical and metaphysical theorizing that Tolstoy lays out in the novel finds its place in the movie's more surreal, even psychedelic moments.

The movie has also taken on a new relevance vis-à-vis current events. Napoleon, who defines his invasion of Russia as a mission to spread "freedom" across the Europe, uses language eerily similar to George W. Bush as he retreats from Moscow and encourages his abandoned army to fight on for his principles. I read somewhere once that War and Peace was Russia "scholar" Condoleezza Rice's favorite novel. While she may not have "gotten" the book, you think at least she might have picked up a strategic thing or two. Why did Saddam's army withdraw from the battlefield and allow the United States Army to enter Baghdad, Dr. Rice? What would Field Marshall Kutuzov have done?

Will an American ever produce a movie that is as "American" as this film is "Russian"? I am still waiting for one of our blessed countrymen to direct a film adaptation of Moby Dick, perhaps with some unusual tech-billionaire financing. Too bad Robert Altman is no longer with us.

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Jim Demetre

I did want to say just a bit about the Jane Austen movies. I've been reading her novels for over forty years--way before the current vogue began.

Unlike Tolstoy's novels, hers are set in very limited circumstances: domestic, female, and well-enough-off. I have read, and know nothing to the contrary, that she never wrote a scene where a woman was not present. And yet, not long after her death Sir Walter Scott wrote that she "had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me."

The movie-makers have mostly failed to establish the same distance from the characters that Austen keeps. That distance is what makes Emma so hard to film (the Paltrow Emma had nothing to do with Austen, as if all the novel consisted of was the plot). I thought that Ang Lee did get that distance here and there in his Sense and Sensibility. The great thing about the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice was its refusal to play the class struggle for laughs. It wasn't a humorless production, but Mrs. Bennett was a serious social and economic threat to her daughters. And unlike earlier productions of P&P, this Lady Catherine was not amusing at all, but bitterly earnest.

Forgive my digression--now maybe somebody will respond more directly to your post and we'll talk about Tolstoy!

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Victoria

I think you hit the nail on the head; most Austen adaptations have chosen to go light when depicting the high stakes game these young women are forced to play as they attempt to get hitched and secure their futures. As you say, the A&E/BBC Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth is an exception to this rule.

Since my initial post, I have been thinking about which adaptations of English novels are the most successful. Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon seems to me an almost perfect manifestation of the author's sensibility and world view. I can almost imagine Thackery laughing as watches the hapless Ryan O'Neal wander across a war-torn Europe on the big screen.

Also, I wanted to share a brief clip from Bondarchuk's War and Peace that I found on YouTube. Here we see Natasha dancing at her uncle's cabin after the hunt.

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Jim Demetre

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Jim Demetre

The thing that strikes me about this film is that (to the best of my recollection) the primary actors all resemble some of the West's more prominent players of the day. Natasha (Lyudmila Savelyeva) could have been Audrey Hepburn's stunt double, as could have Prince Andrei (Vyacheslav Tikhonov been Chirstopher Plummer and Laurence Harvey's love child. The most striking is Bondarchuk (a nice Ukrainian boy!) himself as Pierre Bezukhov. He's the spitting image of Rod Steiger, I kid you not. See the film yourself and tell me that I'm wrong.

Although it clocks in at slightly under nine hours, this production falls short of the book, which is the greatest novel ever written. Still, it's far better than the American version with Henry Fonda, of all people, and Audrey Hepburn (honestly, this really has to be a coincidence) as Andrei and Natasha, respectively. It just doesn't have the breadth of the Russian production.

I heartily recommend that everyone read the book prior to seeing the movie. Apparently, there's a new translation out that makes all others look amateurish, not that Condoleeza Rice would care. She, unlike me, has read it in the original Russian.

Anyhow, I've seen this version ofWar and Peace three times (all dubbed, unfortunately) and, though it's superior, it pales in comparison to its source. That's all I've got to say.

The copy of War and Peace that I had in my library (which I can no longer find) was a Penguin paperback translated by someone whose name I can't remember. I should probably get the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, but I have yet to read my copy of their highly praised (and Oprah endorsed) Anna Karenina. (I must confess that I've always been more of a Karenina person than a War and Peace guy.)

This movie, too, is best looked at as a translation of the novel -- one that attempts to recreate Tolstoy in an entirely different medium. If you have never read War and Peace (in Russian or otherwise), however, you may find the story somewhat difficult to follow. However powerful, it is not really an effective stand-alone substitute.

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Jim Demetre