Doctor Zhivago Makeover for a classic

...Rather than passively succumbing to powerful forces outside themselves, as Sharif's and Christie's versions seemed to do, the newer lovers make decisions-often wrong ones, as when Lara, clad in her first black evening dress, deliberately encourages the villainous rake Victor Komarovsky (Sam Neill...

...If the boob-tube god is in the details, Masterpiece Theatre's latest opus has attained a state of considerable divinity...

...Each frame harbors carefully arranged-and, I'd bet, historically accurate-textiles, artworks, furniture surfaces, and objets d'art that conjure a world so fully imagined it's almost distracting...

...The initial scenes in David Lean's celebrated 1965 epic include a wintry funeral sequence whose stark images imprinted themselves like nightmares on my eight-year-old mind: the snow drifting over straggly rows of Slavic crosses...

...How would it feel to run through the snow-covered Ural Mountains, as Yuri does in one haunting Masterpiece Theatre scene, trying to catch up with one's family as the train that carries them gathers speed, heading who knows where...

...Yet to say that the new Doctor Zhivago explores relationships, and whets the intensity of its doomed romance, is not to criticize it on the visual level...

...Of course, it was not on account of haberdashery descriptions or interior-decorating tips that Doctor Zhivago helped earn Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature (an honor the novelist, living in the Soviet Union, was obliged to decline for political reasons...

...And television has only profited from the elimination of the famous tinkly balalaika leitmotif "Lara's Song," which helped win Maurice Jarre an Oscar for Best Original Score, but which, after years of Muzak renderings, sounds cloying, just as some of the movie's other sound effects-those deep drum rolls at Really Suspenseful Moments, for instance- tend toward portentousness...

...Intimate episodes early in the new Zhivago-a scene in which Lara gossips on a balcony with a friend, a tableau of Yuri discoursing dreamily on love while seated with his friends in a cafe-take us inside the characters' minds in a way the movie, with its more historical, panoramic emphasis, never did...

...Explaining the decision to reshoot this potboiler, adapter Davies has remarked that Lean's movie, while masterly in its way, "goes for the visual spectacle rather than dealing with the relationships in depth, which I think on television we can do better...

...Fortunately, even though it has tapered down the spectacle, the TV version preserves this dizzying sense of incommensurate scales...

...As directed by Anne Pivcevic, Davies's screenplay turns the heroic doctor-poet Yuri Zhivago and his star-crossed love Lara-played here by Hans Matheson and current show-biz "It" girl Keira Knightly (Bend It Like Beck-ham, Pirates of the Caribbean)-into more interesting, willful, active personalities than they were when solemnly interpreted by Omar Sharif and Julie Christie...

...I don't know, but I'm old enough to imagine.to imagine...

...There is no question that his product bears out his point...

...Now that I am no longer eight years old, the really frightening aspect of Doctor Zhivago is this clash between the personal and the historical-characters flailing against war and politics, as these world-changing forces sweep loved ones away...

...In addition to my decades-old fear-shot memories, there was my adult cynicism about remakes in general, knowing as I do how often artists and studios have tripped up in their obdurate determination to retread old ground...

...the corpse-the hero's mother-in its icy white dress...

...or the red-and-blue con-structivist backdrop in the amateur play staged by Yuri's university classmates...

...The partisans Yuri encounters are a ragtag bunch, fewer in number and more disheveled than the small battalion he met in the movie, but they roam against a backdrop of such graphic devastation (in one war-ravaged village, a hacked-off foot dangles from a roof) that their plight is clear: caught up in a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions, they cannot shake themselves free-nor can Yuri Zhivago...

...Check out the voluptuous gray fur collar on the bathrobe Komarovsky wears as he caresses his pet bulldog...

...The keenest associations bear no erasure, so it was with trepidation that I steeled myself for Masterpiece Theatre's all-new two-part Doctor Zhivago, adapted by Andrew Davies from Boris Pasternak's 1955 novel and airing on PBS on November 2 and 9 (check local listings...

...Let us recall that, in 1995, director Sydney Pollack had the gall to revisit the 1954 Hepburn-Bogart vehicle Sabrina, producing a version that starred Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond-and now let us quickly stop recalling this, since there are some things too painful to contemplate...

...The Masterpiece Theatre team has also shrewdly jettisoned the movie's distracting frame tale, which depicted Alec Guinness, as a reserved but user-friendly Bolshevik searching for Zhivago's child and spouting large quantities of voiceover-a device that ultimately distanced viewers from the central love story...

...The remake may do without some of the overwhelming vistas that earned plaudits for Lean-revolution-charged cityscapes, troops on horseback attacking at full-tilt, on one occasion across a frozen lake-but it is bathed in the voluptuous lighting and warm color that's par for the Masterpiece Theatre course, and it has been art-directed to a fare-thee-well...

...Fortunately for my phobias and aesthetic sensibilities, the TV Doctor Zhivago turns out to be vastly different-and, arguably, much more successful-than the movie, the latter's numerous Academy Awards notwithstanding...

...The saga's power lies in its juxtaposition of individual and global story-its portrait of a man struggling to rescue his life from the cataclysms of history...

...and, most horrifically, the cutaway shot to the inside of the sealed coffin as the mourners shoved dirt into the grave...

...or the oil portraits that stare accusingly down at Lara as she leans against a billiard table, waiting to be seduced...

...the men closing the coffin top and pounding in the nails...