Review: War and Peace Is an Epic Film of Epic Cinematic Gestures

If one were to judge the history of cinema solely on the basis of scale and ambition, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace might well be considered the greatest film of all time. A seven-hour-plus adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic doorstopper, Bondarchuk’s film was by far the costliest production in the history of the Soviet Union, and it certainly looks it. Priceless artifacts, countless military weapons, thousands of lavishly costumed extras, and a menagerie that includes hundreds of horses, rare wolf-hunting borzois, and a beer-drinking bear are swept before our eyes in a constant stream of ecstatic stimulation. Maximalist in every aspect, War and Peace is, like the novel on which it’s based, a work that wants to contain as many thoughts, emotions, and perspectives as possible. And Bondarchuk goes about accomplishing that by utilizing every wild cinematic technique he can think of.

In contrast to Hollywood epics of the era like Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, which are marked by long, static processions of extras marching around expensive sets, Bondarchuk never simply shoots for coverage. His camera instead darts and dashes through grandiloquent interiors and hellish battlefields, roving through burning buildings and flying through the air like a cannonball. Where another director might have resorted to a simple wide shot or close-up, Bondarchuk gives us a sweeping helicopter aerial, a complicated superimposition, an expressive split screen, or a camera that seems to float above a ballroom just as Mikhail Kalatozov’s did over the streets of Havana in I Am Cuba.

Bondarchuk often seems here to be attempting to synthesize the entire history of epic historical filmmaking into a single work. He borrows the pioneering split-screen technique of Abel Gance’s Napoleon, the legendary crane shot from Gone with the Wind, and the eerily majestic iconography of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, to name just a few, while also anticipating at various points the hallucinatory combat sequences of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and the idyllic poeticism of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

All this restless innovation and titanic ambition, however, has a tendency to deaden the senses at times, particularly early on in War and Peace, when Bondarchuk’s experimentation comes off as little more than amateurish noodling. The filmmaker’s woozy sonic effects and blurry camera filters come off as dated and distracting, while the use of an off-screen narrator to translate French dialogue in the very first scene is downright confusing. The film can sometimes seem over-eager to impress: Never content to simply allow us to feel the emotional weight of a relationship, Bondarchuk is constantly intervening as a director—underlining, amplifying, and bludgeoning us with heavy-handed visual metaphors.

Bondarchuk’s restless approach often causes him to obscure Tolstoy’s complicated narrative and its vast, inter-connected familial relationships. The film essentially condenses the novel’s sprawling, digressive narrative into a murky love triangle between the socially awkward misfit Count Pierre Bezukhov (Bondarchuk), his friend and philosophical opposite, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), and the idealized, waif-like woman, Countess Natasha Rostova (Lyudmila Saveleva), with whom they both fall in love. Of the three, only Natasha leaves much of an impression, thanks in large part to Saveleva’s radiant performance. A trained ballerina, Saveleva flits and flutters through War and Peace like a butterfly, imbuing her scenes with a litheness and effulgence that provides stark contrast to the portentous philosophizing that Andrei and Pierre are prone to.

If Bondarchuk struggles to convey the story’s gradual shifts in relationships and psychology, he nevertheless demonstrates the ability to give cinematic life to Tolstoy’s rhapsodic depth of feeling. In one of the film’s more emotionally resonant techniques, Bondarchuk jarringly cuts between two scenes with wildly different emotional tenors—a joyous dance and a man dying, for example—emphasizing one of Tolstoy’s great themes: the simultaneity of human experience. While one person is suffering, another is celebrating; while one man is enjoying a banquet in St. Petersburg, another is engaged in bloody combat against Napoleon’s armies.

Bondarchuk’s War and Peace is in some ways less a straightforward adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel than a symphonic representation of its themes—its sense of drama, portent, and grandeur. That’s never truer than in the film’s astonishingly stirring set pieces, which find Bondarchuk variously capturing the buzzy excitement of a ball, the calamitous anxiety of battle, and, in the film’s most haunting passage, the wrenching pain and despair of a city under siege. Bondarchuk’s delirious rendering of the French army’s brutal invasion of Moscow, during which Napoleon’s forces burned the city to the ground, represents the most sustainedly apocalyptic vision of war’s madness and cruelty this side of Elem Klimov’s Come and See. War and Peace couldn’t possibly do justice to every aspect of Tolstoy’s mammoth tome, but at the very least, it captures the essence of the author’s scornful description of war: “an event … opposed to human reason and to human nature.”