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| War and Peace (1968) |
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 (10/10)
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Runtime: 411 |
| Public Rating: 8.50 (2 votes) |
Director: Sergei Bondarchuk |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Drama |
Year: 1968 |
| Writer(s): Sergei Bondarchuk, Count Leo Tolstoy |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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Forget “Titanic” and that handful of other $200 million epics that have come out since then, if you adjust for inflation, the Soviet version of “War and Peace” is THE most expensive movie ever made, at somewhere between a whopping $500 and $700 million. Clocking just under seven hours, and featuring 120,000 extras in a single battle sequence that must last 80 or 90 minutes, “War and Peace” is a work of mad genius, and if it weren’t flawed it wouldn’t come across as so passionate, so beyond any excuse for a rational act. Before the movie I was worried that it would be no different than an American epic of the ‘50s and ‘60s, stiff and static and overwhelmed by its pricetag like “Ben-Hur,” but twice as long. Then “War and Peace” started with sweeping vistas double-exposed while a Tarkovsky-esque narrator thoughtfully proposes how “honest men should unite” – and a booming score accompanied sweeping views of the Russian countryside from practically orbit – and I said “Yes!!”
“War and Peace” is like “Gone with the Wind” but twice as long and twice as inventive. While “GWTW” is often static and overbright, “War and Peace” revels in shaky handheld shots, double-exposures, freeze-frames, deep shadows, split screens, and a good case for converting to Russian Orthodoxy simply because Their Stuff is the Coolest and Their Music is Badass. 39 years before a cameraman followed Jason Bourne jumping through a window, director Sergei Bondarchuk almost kicked his cameraman out a window to get the dizzying effect of revelers drinking on windowsills. And there’s a bear. It’s only fair that “War and Peace” cribs from the movie “Gone with the Wind” because Mitchell’s novel would not exist without Tolstoy’s before it. And that 90 minute battle between Napoleon and the Russians is a dizzying, geographically disorienting labyrinth consistently violating the 180 degree rule, but that’s the movie for you in a nutshell. Summary? Two members of the gentry, one a soldier and the other, like Tolstoy himself, are unsure of what to believe in. Love polygons and war with Napoleon ensue.
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