Welcome to another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com! It may be summertime but there's still time for a Best Picture nominee of years past.
This one is a doozy. It's the 1962 Best Pic winner (one of seven trophies this film took home that year), the David Lean-helmed epic Lawrence of Arabia, starring Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Claude Rains, Omar Sharif, and shockingly billed last with an "Introducing" credit, Peter O'Toole in his breakout role. The film tells the somewhat true story of T.E. Lawrence, a British officer stationed in the Middle East during World War I, who led a successful Arab campaign against Turkish forces and found himself torn between British and Arabian loyalty. Shot on 70mm film, Lawrence was a massive cinematic roadshow event, playing out over a sprawling 216 minutes plus overtures and intermission. It proved highly influential, inspiring in many ways Frank Herbert's Dune series, the original Star Wars, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on (Steven Spielberg cites this film as his all-time favorite and credits it as the movie that made him want to make movies).
But does it live up to the iconic status it's achieved in the last sixty-plus years? For me that answer is "Well, yes and no."
I'll lead off with praise: from a visual standpoint this film is one of the great achievements in cinematic history. The enormous 70mm frame is filled to the brim with absolutely breathtaking landscapes and tableaus, and the HD remaster looks as vibrant as the day it was made. The locations used in Jordan, Morocco and Spain are among the most gorgeous I've ever seen captured on celluloid. Lone figures as tiny, dark specks at the edge of a sea of desert sand, cavalcades of camel-bound forces making their way across barren terrain, the morning sun just beginning to break the plane of the horizon - these are the lasting images from this film.
The performances are all very strong. O'Toole became a star playing this unconventional, temperamental soldier who was sent off into the desert largely because his superiors didn't know what else to do with him. Lawrence's achievements on the battlefield and in regional politics can partly be chalked up to "No one told me I couldn't," a theme that seems to also resonate with David Lean and his collaborators in the gargantuan task of making this very film. Other noteworthy performances include Omar Sharif as Lawrence's hard-won ally Sherif Ali, one of the Arab leaders; Alec Guinness as Prince Feisal, whom Lawrence wins over with his honesty and knowledge of the culture; and Anthony Quinn as Auda Abu Tayi, the leader of a rival tribe Lawrences unites with Ali's.
Now for my issues with the movie. Lawrence of Arabia is LONG. I mean real long. There are certain three-hour-plus films that either fly by or feel long in a good way, where you're so wrapped up in the journey you aren't ready for it to be over. Schindler's List, Titanic, The Godfather, Barry Lyndon - these films all fit into one of those two categories. LoA for me just felt long in a patience-taxing way, and I think the reason for that is there isn't a strong narrative thrust or characters to become emotionally invested in. We get a sense of Lawrence's unusual personality but we aren't really given a reason to feel anything about him. We're shown some of his exploits but they aren't portrayed as particularly heroic (aside from one scene where he turns back into the desert after a dangerous trek, to rescue a fallen comrade), nor barbaric. We admire his out-of-the-box thinking, such as his idea to attack the Turkish stronghold of Aqaba from behind to avoid their massive sea-facing cannons (which involves the aforementioned desert crossing), we admire his sense of honor as he volunteers to execute a tribal member who has broken an alliance, his sense of empathy as he mercy kills a mortally wounded friend. But we aren't given all that much of a character study, in a film that feels paced like one. Nor are the battle scenes very specific. We see forces charging, some vague destruction as they overtake a city, and then we cut to characters discussing what happened. This film has maybe the most non-specific depiction of war I've ever seen, neither exhilarating nor upsetting.
There's also a very strange prologue wherein we see Lawrence having a fatal motorcycle accident and those who knew and/or admired him clashing about what kind of man he was, but this is never followed up at the end of the film. We never flash forward to the "present" again, begging the question, why was this prologue included at all, in a film that would've benefited from significant trims? Conversely the film's final scene is baffling in its inconclusiveness. Lawrence has ultimately failed to unite the Arabic tribes and is ordered back to Britain, and we see him being transported by jeep, away from what he seemed to hope would be his new home. The End. That's it? No attempt to tie things back to the film's opening or explore how this failure affected him later on? After close to four hours everything just ends with a whimper? Maybe I need to watch the second act again....
It's sort of a confounding film, this one. A visual masterpiece about a story and characters I didn't find all that compelling. Roger Ebert compared this film to 2001: A Space Odyssey along these lines, but 2001 wasn't about its characters at all, but rather about humanity's place in the universe and its relationship to technology. That was pretty explicitly the point of it. With Lawrence I didn't get the sense that Lean and his collaborators were going for a larger conceptual statement like that. It felt more to me like the storytelling was simply missing something. The dialogue is very dry, the characters aren't sharply drawn, and there isn't an emotional hook. So what we're left with are some stunning visuals and the question, "Okay but what does it all mean?"
On balance I'll give Lawrence of Arabia ***1/2 out of ****.
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