War and Peace (1965–67, Sergei Bondarchuk) (Patreon)

Gonna address this behemoth piece by piece, the way it originally premiered in the Soviet Union (over a period of three years, from July 1965 to November 1967). Though you're getting the whole thing at once, I'm actually writing each part/film up without yet having watched the next one; since I've never read Tolstoy's novel, nor even seen the Hollywood version starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda, I have no idea what's still to come, narrative-wise. (Got a reasonable handle on the Napoleonic Wars' basic trajectory.) 

PART I: ANDREI BOLKONSKY [52/100]

Far and away the longest of the four, at 2.5 hours; as far as I can tell, it introduces all of the major players, though Natasha is just a moony-eyed kid at this point. My most damning note is simply "Harry Potter," by which I meant that the target audience is presumed to know the book backwards and be eager to see beloved characters and favorite scenes "come alive" onscreen. (Russians would of course also feel a nationalistic pride in the depiction of perhaps their greatest military victory.) A parallel construction of sorts sees Andrei barely survive the Battle of Austerlitz only to sink into despair following a personal tragedy, while Pierre remains at home and gets brutally cucked; while Part I ends with both men somewhat demoralized, however, no particular effort is made to give this initial salvo a satisfying solo shape. Thus far, I'm largely indifferent to everything derived from Tolstoy, responding mostly to Bondarchuk's sheer ostentation—not just his stately pans across cavernous, opulent sets and battlefields teeming with extras (though the latter in particular are often impressive; there's a forerunner to Joe Wright's big Atonement shot here), but such jarring oddities as Distort-O-Cam for the POV of Pierre's dying father, or Natasha spying on a couple's kiss and seeing an afterimage when they depart, or the truly insane dripping-water sound design when Pierre "proposes" to Hélène. Brief formalistic flourishes, but they cut through the general illustrated-classic torpor. My fear that much of the dialogue would be French overdubbed by Russian (with a male voice speaking even the women's lines; that seems to be the convention in Russia, judging from dubbed sitcom episodes and such that I've encountered) was not realized, thankfully, though the film is weirdly inconsistent re: which non-Russian languages (there's some German as well) get dubbed, subtitled, or simply left untranslated altogether.

PART II: NATASHA ROSTOVA  [68/100]

Having apparently time-traveled to read the above complaint, Bondarchuk now dramatizes a chunk of the novel so discrete that one literally need not have seen the previous film. I won't go so far as to claim that it fully functions as a stand-alone entity—the ending, in particular, would look insanely pretentious stripped of context (a whole lot like the sledgehammer epilogue of Nemes' Sunset, in fact)—but focusing exclusively on Natasha's love life allows for a marvelously unhurried pace that avoids any hint of "and then this happened" turgidity. The opening ball alone occupies nearly a reel, allowing her to journey from anticipation to awe to anxiety to well crud there are no synonyms for "euphoria" that begin with 'a.' It's unfortunate that Bondarchuk and his fellow screenwriter rely so heavily on voiceover narration to convey the characters' mental states (especially when Andrei proposes), but that crutch at least gets balanced by purely visual touches, like the subliminal flashes—two frames each—of what I think is meant to be jewelry, accompanied by an aural chime, during Natasha's infatuation with Kuragin. Also one of the best uses of split-screen I can recall, first dividing the frame between Andrei and Pierre on the left (at varying distances from the camera, taking up 2/3 of the real estate) and Natasha on the right, then returning to that setup with Natasha despondent and the room at left entirely empty. Tolstoy's concept of romantic turbulence never deviates from formula—much of it plays like Austen minus the wit—but it doesn't feel laminated. I predict this one will be my favorite, but maybe what we've got here is the prestige-cinema equivalent of one of those TV shows about which people say "You just have to get through the first three or four episodes, then it gets really good."

PART III: THE YEAR 1812  [59/100]

Thought for a while that this one had lost me entirely—its first 20 or so minutes (of only 82) are devoted to the slow death of Andrei's father, a peripheral character onscreen whose loss is not exactly deeply felt, given that he mostly acts as a stern impediment. Granted, it influences Andrei's subsequent musings on mortality, but that in turn entails more voiceover narration (here serving roughly the same function as a Shakespearean soliloquy, to be fair, but without the Bard's poetry; perhaps the original text is more stirring in Russian). In any case, that's all mere prologue for the Battle of Borodino, which ranks high among cinema's greatest achievements in orchestrating battlefield chaos. The sheer number of people, horses and explosions at play is staggering; Bondarchuk juxtaposes ground-level horizontal tracking shots with swooping aerial views, providing a general's-eye view that's both coherent and terrible (in the old-fashioned sense of the latter). Stuff like a grunt getting his leg blown off a few feet away from Pierre, who's wandering around in his finest (including an absurd white top hat), will be nobody's idea of subtle, and there's inevitably something less than cathartic about "winning" by not losing as decisively as your opponent had expected (though I guess it worked for Rocky). Still, exciting enough to partially compensate for the soporific first half. Department Of Things I Probably Should Have Known But Didn't: To a Russian, Napoleon might as well be Hitler. I'd never seen him demonized like this before, to the point where he's literally described as inhuman.

PART IV: PIERRE BEZUKHOV  [49/100]

Some leftover spectacle, with the burning of Moscow arguably better realized than that of Atlanta (so much ash!), but this is basically a feature-length epilogue designed to wrap things up as expeditiously as possible, of little interest to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the novel and/or deeply invested in Russian history. Andrei's more or less comatose throughout (though Bondarchuk indulges in some light surrealism as death approaches); Natasha becomes a mere appendage (after being almost entirely absent from Part III); Pierre quickly winds up just one more haggard face among a mass of anonymous POWs. Attempts to fill this vacuum with figures who've barely been present onscreen, e.g. the Rostov kid (who's Natasha's brother, yes? it's really not very clear if you've come in unversed), only frustrated me further. Ends in a predictable flurry of jingoism, though I did laugh at the brief attempt at magnanimity that's followed by "But when all is said and done, who asked them to come here?!" Fair point, really. 

Averaging my four individual ratings, looks like I'd give the whole seven-hour shebang a 57, which does seem roughly accurate. But my main takeaway is that airlifting Natasha's story from the novel and creating a single standard-length film from that was a terrific idea, and should be widely mimicked. (That's also basically what every cinematic adaptation of Wuthering Heights has done.)