War & Peace

You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life . . . It is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed . . . The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And this is greatness.

So said Leo Tolstoy in 1908, when he was 80, peering into the future of an infant art. He might have altered his opinion had he seen this Russian adaptation of his masterwork, War and Peace. It has escaped greatness, except in cost and length. The film took $100 million and five years to make. After extensive cutting it is now six hours and twelve minutes long. In the Soviet Union it was released in four different segments; in the U.S., audiences must see it at two separate showings.

The movie is awesome in war and pusillanimous in peace. For a single engagement, Director Sergei Bondarchuk could deploy 120,000 troops--supplied by the Soviet government, which has a stake in the film as message as well as art. And Bondarchuk makes the most of his forces. Cavalries plunge and break in tidal waves; columns of infantry writhe to the horizon and beyond; choruses of cannons shout like narrow mouths of hell in a series of vivid instants that recall the trancelike battle paintings of Uccello. With a knowing artist's eye, the director composes vignettes reminiscent of the harshness and heartbreak of Goya etchings. Again and again, the dolor and grandeur of Russia's convulsive struggle with Napoleon provide a panorama truly worthy of Tolstoy, a writer who did not believe in leaving anything out.

But in the book, the war was only the background framing the twin heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov) and his friend Pierre Bezukhov (played by Director Bondarchuk), who represent the two faces of the aristocracy. The outlines of the plot are familiar even to those nonreaders who saw the 1956 miniversion, with Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, and Henry Fonda. Andrei, a sophisticate and soldier, is unable to alter his archaic sensibilities and perishes in the war. Pierre, muddling through the chaos around him, does nothing right, but because he has the capacity to grow and change, he survives. Between the two flutters the lissome Natasha (Ludmila Savelyeva) as she grows from spritely adolescence to tragic womanhood.

It is in the telling of their lives that the film fails. Pierre and Andrei are at best only shallow, literal representations of Tolstoy's rich characters. To portray Natasha's giddiness, Savelyeva never walks when she can dash, never smiles when she can give shiny-eyed grins that reduce her to a caricature coquette. Amateurish cutting and arbitrary shifts from color to black and white mutilate the film. Moreover, the dubbing is disastrous: the actors' faces show feelings far more profound than the dull words that cannot quite fit their mouths.

Yet, after all the excesses and errors, considerable power abides. Tolstoy's book may not have been reliable as history or wholly satisfactory as fiction; yet it achieved, in the words of Tolstoy's biographer, Henri Troyat, "the majesty of a second Genesis." Bondarchuk's film catches part of that majesty by showing Mother Russia dressed in the 19th century's bloodstained finery, overshadowing her doomed, noble children. She, and she alone, is worth two trips to the movie house.

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