Most epic movie ever made: War and Peace (1965-67)

By Thomas Mirus and James Majewski ( articles - email ) | Sep 25, 2026 | In Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

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In the 1960s, the Soviet film industry decided to make an adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace that would blow any Hollywood epic out of the water. They gave it a virtually unlimited budget, with battle scenes using over 12,000 Soviet soldiers trained using the historical French and Russian drill manuals from the time of the war with Napoleon, using real period paintings and furniture borrowed from Russia’s museums. The result was the most epic film ever made, divided into four installments taking over seven hours in total.

But Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace has something more than a big budget and battle scenes on a mind-blowing scale. It is also one of the most creative and poetic films ever made, a very faithful adaptation of the novel yet using all the tools of cinema in the most unexpected ways to bring Tolstoy’s vivid prose to life in scenes of dancing, hunting, dueling, love, betrayal, forgiveness, and spiritual awakening.

Links

Watch War and Peace for free on the official Mosfilm YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaTJrWP-PVcB-kpfOvzzp_7m4RdJPc0MC

Transcript

THOMAS: Hey everybody, welcome back to Criteria. I’m Thomas Mirus, and I’m here with my co-host James Majewski.

JAMES: That’s me.

THOMAS: And we’re here with Nathan Douglas, our guest co-host. Welcome back, Nathan.

NATHAN: Great to be back, guys.

THOMAS: Alright, I’m really excited today because I’ve been waiting to talk about today’s movie ever since I saw it basically a year ago. We’re talking about the epic Soviet 1960s adaptation of Tolstoy’s *War and Peace*, which immediately became one of my favorite movies when I saw it.

And if you guys don’t mind, I’m just going to give the basic pitch for this movie. First of all, for those who don’t know: what is *War and Peace*, the book? It is basically the Russian national epic by Leo Tolstoy. It depicts the whole of Russian life during the period around the invasion of Napoleon in 1812 with a lot of different characters, but particularly one really main character, Pierre Bezukhov, and also Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova, who are kind of the main three characters in this film—insofar as it was released in four parts, and three of the parts are named after characters, and those are the characters that they’re named after.

So, in 1956, King Vidor, a great Hollywood director, made this adaptation of *War and Peace* starring Audrey Hepburn. And it was a huge hit in Russia, not because they thought it was accurate, but because they loved Audrey Hepburn. But this was a bit of a problem because, like, you know, this was the Soviet Union. So you can’t have the capitalistic United States making this tawdry Hollywood adaptation of the Russian national epic.

So the Minister of Culture started looking into making their own adaptation. And there was this open letter in the Soviet press signed by a lot of the filmmakers of the day, which said, quote, “It is a matter of honor for the Soviet cinema industry to produce a picture which will surpass the American-Italian one in its artistic merit and authenticity.”

So this was like a mission that they were on. You know, there was a search for directors and they ended up picking this guy, Sergei Bondarchuk, who was mainly an actor for most of his career up to this point. He was 40 when he started working on this film, and this was only the second film that he had directed, although his first one had gotten quite a lot of praise.

It took five years to shoot this, almost as long as it took Tolstoy himself to write the novel. And during the course of shooting, Bondarchuk had two heart attacks, including one where he was clinically dead for like four minutes, which inspired a death sequence late in the film where you see this wall of white light envelop the character.

The film is an epic, released in four parts, as I said, totaling over seven hours. You can watch all four parts for free on YouTube in good quality, or you can watch them on the Criterion Channel like we did. They were released between 1965 and 1967, and they won the 1969 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Now, the pitch that somebody’s going to give you when talking about this film is like... I think it’s arguably the most epic film ever made. I mean, thousands of actors. They had a virtually unlimited budget. One estimate is that the production was worth $700 million or even $1 billion, but only $29 million in currency actually exchanged hands because so much of the resources were used without paying anybody, such as the help of the Soviet military and items that were from museums.

Most of the indoor props—vases, furniture, paintings, chandeliers, etc.—were actual period historical items that the state forced more than 40 Russian museums to lend to the production. There were at least 12,000 Soviet soldiers involved in the battle scenes who were trained in the period formations and steps using old drill manuals from the time from the various armies involved in the historical conflict. The Ministry of Defense assigned several high-ranking generals to help with the production. 25,000 costumes were made for this film, and the one thing the state said no to was Bondarchuk’s plea to be able to use Kodak film and German cameras because it needed to be entirely Soviet-made if it was going to be a response to the American capitalist production.

And as for the adaptation itself, I mean, it’s epic, it’s wonderful. The reason I love it, though, is its cinematic qualities. It’s a very, very faithful adaptation to Tolstoy’s novel in the sense that a great deal was cut, even for a seven-hour film, but nothing was really changed. But it’s also incredibly imaginative and creative in bringing Tolstoy’s vivid writing to life with a lot of unusual and unexpected cinematic moves and even some sort of avant-garde, strange touches throughout, even though it is in many ways a straightforward period literary adaptation.

And that, above all, is why the film charmed me so much: how imaginative it is in its use of cinematic techniques to bring the heart of the story to life. So that’s basically the pitch for what the movie is and why it’s significant. I don’t know why I hadn’t really heard of this for long before I saw the movie. I happened to be reading the book for the first time last summer, and so I started watching the parts of this film as I was finishing reading the book.

I think that’s what got me into it originally, but I didn’t know how much I would love it.

JAMES: It’s probably because how many people can be bothered to watch a seven—or eight-hour epic? Right?

THOMAS: But they watch long TV series, you know?

JAMES: Yeah. I have never felt so unprepared to discuss a film. Really, in part because I could only watch the whole thing once. I just didn’t have time to go through the whole thing a second time. But also because it’s just so dense with things to talk about. It’s like... part of why I feel unprepared because there are just so many things that I know that I’m going to forget in the course of this conversation.

I too, upon watching this, felt like this is instantly one of my favorite films of all time. And another word that I would use to describe it is “generous.” It feels that the filmmakers are being so generous with their care and their attention to each moment and to the kinds of cinematic and artistic gestures that they’re introducing into these different sequences to convey something to us, the audience.

And so, referring to these cinematic techniques that you were talking about, Thomas, you just get this sense of being kind of showered with gifts. Like, there’s this plenitude that’s being offered to you as an audience—ways to key into what’s going on in the story tonally or with different characters. And it’s just so sumptuous and rich and bountiful. You know, it really just feels like a cinematic feast that you’re sitting down to.

And what’s remarkable is that each part really feels that way and not even in the same way. Each part ends up having its own kind of character, its own kind of language. And even individual sequences within the parts can be really quite distinct. So it’s a very remarkable film, and I kind of almost want to describe it as a perfect film.

There are some things that I kind of cooled on, especially in the final part, which I think is perhaps my least favorite of the four parts. But certainly through the first part and through the second part, I was just thinking, “I don’t know how this could be better.” Maybe “perfect” isn’t the right word, but there’s a completeness to it. It just feels very complete and well-executed and intentional. Happy to be talking about it. Nathan, first thoughts? You just watched this for the first time.

NATHAN: I just watched it for the first time, yeah, and I’m here to throw some cold water on you guys.

JAMES: Oh no, are you kidding me?

NATHAN: Maybe just not cold. Maybe we’ll say like a little lukewarm, slightly less warm. But hey, we’ve got to mix it up a bit. No, it is extremely impressive. It’s an incredibly impressive work. A couple of things that really stand out to me in the context around it is that—Thomas, you were kind of alluding to it—it’s not a film that’s really been on the cinephile radar, at least in the West, for what seems like very long. Or if it has been, it seems to have gone through a period of, you know, it had its splash and its moment in the ‘60s and then it kind of seems to have faded away.

I only became aware of it, I think, around 10 years ago. And it was from friends sharing clips of the Battle of Borodino. And I’m sure you can easily go find this on Instagram or on YouTube. But from what I recall, that was at least for our generation. This film kind of exploded onto internet cinephilia all at once, probably because Mosfilm put the films on YouTube around that time.

THOMAS: I think that’s why I first heard of it—that Mosfilm, the studio, the formerly state-owned film studio, put parts of it on YouTube. And I had added them to my watch list years and years ago, but only got around to watching it when I was reading the book.

NATHAN: Yeah, it had this galvanizing effect. All of a sudden, it was apparently the biggest film ever made, and no one had heard of it or it had been forgotten. So it’s interesting to finally come to it after putting it off for 10 years. But yeah, it’s extraordinarily impressive. It’s overwhelming. All the press that you’ve heard about it is certainly the case. I think for me, the question is: does it achieve a level of depth that we expect from a great adaptation of a great literary work?

And like you, James, I haven’t read *War and Peace*. Is that the case?

JAMES: Yeah, correct.

NATHAN: So I’m experiencing the story of *War and Peace* for the first time through this film as well. And somehow, actually, I managed to go without spoilers my whole life without reading a synopsis of *War and Peace*. So actually, I really enjoyed experiencing it in this form. But the scale of it is incredible and laudable and truly magnificent. But I think that the real test, of course, is: is that all there is to it? I don’t think the answer to that question is yes, that is all there is to it. I think there’s a lot going on in terms of depth, but it’ll be interesting to kind of unpack that.

But certainly at first blush, it’s incredibly impressive. The thing artistically that really stood out to me on this first viewing was I really appreciated how unique the approach to each scene was. You both kind of alluded to this already with some of the different techniques that are being used. But when you’re watching the film kind of unfold its rationale for how it’s approaching this adaptation as a cinematic adaptation, there’s always that question of: are we going to kind of go back to the same tools? Are we going to establish a kind of set style and stick to that? And the answer to that question is: Bondarchuk seems to be approaching each scene as its own mini-film, which has its own stylistic approach.

And that’s incredibly fascinating to watch unfold throughout the film because every 10, 15, 20 minutes... and these are—what’s also great is these are long scenes. These are not—if this was being adapted today, you know, you probably would see something closer to a more montage-driven sort of approach to this massive scale of storytelling. And so there’s something very pleasurable about this kind of more restrained, classical approach to the structure of the story and really approaching each scene as its own condensed drama. Every time we go to another scene, we’re kind of reloading the approach. And so that makes it a lot of fun to watch formally. And yeah, I’m excited to kind of just see what stood out for you guys.

THOMAS: I mean, to give some examples of that: an early scene is the party that we see Pierre go to, this dissolutely drunken party where they’ve got a baby bear chained up they’re playing with, and they’re daring each other to sit on the upper-story windowsill while drinking with their hands out like this and not fall off. And the camera’s all tilting around crazily, and it’s sort of chaotic.

And then you’ve got many absolutely wonderful dance sequences. But one in particular—I want to say it’s in Part Two—it’s when Natasha and Prince Andrei really meet and dance together. And there’s this whole big ballroom dance where the cuts are accompanied by these jingle sounds, first of all. There’s these flashes of light or colored cloth across the screen when it cuts. Then there are parts where the dance sequence is framed in just sort of—I don’t know what they are—glistening lights of some kind, chandeliers, whatever, candles.

And I know that during that sequence, they had a dolly rolling through the ballroom amidst the dancers, and the director was literally roller skating in front of the camera and passing these pieces of color, these colored fans, in front of the camera to do the cuts or to just have these flashes of color.

There’s the wolf hunt sequence, which ends with the fisheye wolf POV as all the people are gloating over this wolf that they caught. There’s so many other... I mean, obviously there’s the battle scene, which we’ll talk about, but there’s so many different distinct set pieces that are remarkable and memorable, not only for the wonderful settings and costumes and the incredible music that this film has and the wonderful performances, but specifically by the way that it’s shot.

And not only the camera movements, but like sounds that happen—the sonic background, the strange tinkling bells in the opening party sequence (not the Pierre one, the one before that). I could go on, but there’s just so many different memorable sequences that are every bit of it, like you said, generosity. Every aspect of how it’s done is kind of memorable.

JAMES: You know, there’s an old *South Park* episode where they order Kentucky Fried Chicken and Cartman grabs the bucket first and eats all of the skin off of all of the chicken. And it’s like this horrible, horrible crime. And there’s something analogous when you’re talking about *War and Peace* and you just start listing off all these amazing sequences that all of us would love to talk about, Thomas, but you just gobbled them all up.

THOMAS: I didn’t exhaust them! I just gave some examples.

JAMES: No, I mean, it’s true. There’s a lot of really great moments and maybe we can, if we have the time, just later go around and answer the question: which one is our favorite? But yeah, it just made me wonder: who is this guy, Sergei Bondarchuk?

THOMAS: Oh, by the way, I don’t think I mentioned he also plays Pierre in the movie.

NATHAN: Yes.

JAMES: And it also just made me wonder: who is he working with? To what extent is he relying on the sort of directorial impulses of a team of directors, perhaps? I mean, so many people are involved in this. And another thing that comes through in the film is that this is a real cultural artifact. You really get the sense of the whole spirit of a people being brought to bear on this project. And also kind of thematically, there are sort of gestures toward Russian patriotism and pride. And you get a little bit of the state propaganda feel in places, but I hesitate to describe it that way because it’s also more than that. You really get a sense of the pride of a people.

THOMAS: Yeah, it’s a big part of the book as well.

JAMES: And so it’s interesting as that as well, which I don’t know that you can often point to a film and describe it as being that, except perhaps maybe anecdotally. But this really feels quite completely the product of a people. So it makes me wonder about the kinds of support that Bondarchuk had in achieving this kind of singular vision through each of these sequences of the film, where they all feel so distinct and so complete in themselves and, yes, eminently clippable, which is probably why there’s this proliferation of clips online that work so well—because you could take just a few minutes from any portion of this film and it’s going to be really striking.

NATHAN: Yeah, it’s interesting. You know, you mentioned the propagandistic aspect and for sure there are parts where you can sort of feel that that’s probably what’s going on here.

But I was quite struck at even just how the film is reflective of the time it’s made, the period of Soviet history that it’s in, where here we have this very warm portrayal of the aristocracy. It’s not an uncritical one, but I was surprised at how much of a shift it is in terms of sort of Soviet national cinema from what was the original kind of wave of Soviet cinema in the 1920s and ‘30s that was built around solidifying Soviet identity in the Revolution and the need for the class revolution. And here we have 30 years later, 40 years later, this very warm portrait of this other period and this pride. They’re taking great pride in it, pulling out all the stops to enjoy the sort of lavish spectacle of it.

And yeah, I mean, it was kind of heartening to see that there is a real fervor for “this is who we are.” That comes through and that I think ultimately transcends whatever propagandistic purposes the state may have had in putting it together. I do feel the film as this kind of humanist, old classical Russian kind of expression. I guess Tolstoy’s spirit is what ultimately transcends whatever concerns they had in the moment making it.

THOMAS: Yeah, well, you know, this is the Khrushchev Thaw era, and I was just reading earlier about that—Bondarchuk is part of this younger generation of directors that’s kind of replacing the Stalin-era directors of Soviet cinema. And one thing that comes up to me is that, again, there’s a lot cut from the book.

One of the things that’s completely absent from the film is the stuff about serfs and, specifically, Prince Andrei and Pierre being concerned in various ways about how to deal with their serfs and how to better them or what’s their proper relationship. And there’s this whole plot that’s essentially cut, too, where Pierre becomes a Freemason. It’s alluded to, but it’s not really part of the film. He becomes a Freemason and his ultimate spiritual awakening at the end of the book is kind of away from Freemasonry in part.

Anyway, I’d be interested to go back to the book. I don’t know whether the Soviets would have liked what Tolstoy was saying. Tolstoy is very concerned about the serfs, but I’m not sure if it would have been along the lines of Soviet ideology of the proletariat, necessarily. I’m just not sure how that would have fit in. I don’t know if it was cut for ideological reasons; I think probably there just wasn’t room for it. And it’s also maybe a little bit too abstract, the stuff that Tolstoy is discussing. And there’s a lot of sort of long philosophical sections of the novel that I think were mostly rightly cut.

JAMES: Would you say the way the film opens with this kind of monologue—it’s not really a monologue, but it’s the voiceover around ideas. It’s making reference to how ideas are kind of driving history, driving the formation... I don’t remember exactly how he says it. But then the film closes with that, too. It has this kind of bookend. Do you think that’s kind of the most that it goes towards trying to...

THOMAS: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot more of that, especially at the end. Basically the ending—there are a few dozen pages of pure philosophical essay at the end of *War and Peace* where the plot is already over, and it’s literally just Tolstoy giving you his thoughts for like 30 or 40 pages. And there’s very little of that in the film, and I think it’s the better for it.

JAMES: I have a question about the opening. So obviously throughout the film, there’s a lot of really wonderful on-location sequences, on location and in the weather. And the landscape of Russia sort of plays a very prominent role in the film, and I suppose in the story as well. So in the opening sequence, we get a lot of these shots—sort of like pastoral shots of Russia. But I was wondering if it was contemporary Russia that we were seeing. It seems like I could discern rather modern-looking towns or roads. And that doesn’t really come up again through the rest of the film. So it just made me wonder if that wasn’t deliberately contemporary.

THOMAS: Yeah, I never noticed that.

JAMES: Because you also, if I’m recalling correctly, you’re also getting these sound cues—these kind of like ghostly echoes of something. I might be misremembering. They’re like weird... it sounds like a scientific documentary about molecules. It sounds like these electronic sounds. The effect that it had on me was sort of reflecting on history and on the landscape and on the memories that are contained in the earth. And so I don’t know if you guys picked up on that at all, but there’s this kind of amazing panning out away from the landscape up into the clouds and further, further, further. And for me, it gives this impression of sort of going back and now taking us back in time, back to this place that’s still here and not here. Am I off?

THOMAS: I think most, if not all, of the parts—the different films within this larger film—begin and end with some kind of like big sky landscape shot. And in some cases, it’s like an overhead shot of roiling armies, and there you get the sense of the bigger scope of war and the march of history in that sense. But then other times it’s just the pure landscape. And there’s a lot of use of the landscape and the sky whenever somebody’s having some kind of spiritual awakening or near-death experience, staring up into the sky, which is not all that unusual in cinema. But this backwards movement, pull up into the clouds, this is a visual motif that repeats specifically towards the end of various parts. But yeah, this kind of gesture toward contemporary Russia, I don’t know if that was just me.

NATHAN: I didn’t notice it. At the very beginning, I was having the same question about, “Are those modern roads that we’re seeing?” And I kind of took it as just... not so much that it was trying to maybe do this time travel or start in the present and go in the past, but I think it is so fascinated with flying over the landscape and creating this soaring sense. It’s very spiritual; I think it’s trying to create a material expression of these spiritual ideals and encompassing them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not worried about showing contemporary Russia, because it is about situating the story in kind of this idea of an eternal sense of who we are.

THOMAS: I don’t know the timelines on these films, but I wonder if there’s some Tarkovsky influence, because at the beginning of *Andrei Rublev*, there’s obviously the guy flying over the landscape. And then at the beginning of *Ivan’s Childhood*, which we just discussed, there’s that flying dream sequence at the beginning. So it felt very similar in some ways to me, especially when Prince Andrei gets injured. I don’t know, it’s almost like it feels like it’s depicting him flying through the air or something, but the camera just flies through the air and away from the battlefield into the woods. Kind of like there’s all sorts of odd things with flying like that throughout.

NATHAN: It’s interesting because it made me think a lot. I was wondering the same thing about the Tarkovsky question. I think what this film really shows is that it would be wrong to think of Tarkovsky as sort of the unique poetic force in this regard; there are a lot of artistic choices in this film that are evocative of what you see in Tarkovsky’s films of the time as well. I think it’s safe to say that there’s something more broadly—this is just broadly part of the Russian poetic sensibility in film at this time.

It made me also think about another filmmaker, Mikhail Kalatozov, who made two very famous Soviet films in the 1950s—one called *The Letter Never Sent* and then the other one in the 1960s called *I Am Cuba*. And both of those films, especially *I Am Cuba*, have this incredibly flexible camera—the camera’s kind of just going everywhere. There’s a very famous shot in *I Am Cuba* where it’s at this giant pool party and the camera is basically going in the pool and coming out. And again, you can find this on YouTube and watch it.

It seems in the whole culture of the time, there’s this profound joy and openness to throwing the camera just in all sorts of crazy ways that are both, in some cases, very ultra-realistic or trying to go for this kind of neorealistic grit, and then at the same time going for the grand, expansive, more classical kind of thing. And you see that in this *War and Peace*. It’s doing everything. It’s kind of throwing everything at the wall and saying that this can all coexist as part of a poetic sensibility. And that’s the thing: it doesn’t feel to me like a pastiche. It does feel to me like a filmmaker working out, “Okay, what is the best approach for this?”

THOMAS: Because there are some really nice static shots that are perfectly framed and super formal. You get profiles or reflections in a mirror or frames within the frame. And that also coexists with some of these more chaotic sequences where the camera is super expressive or doing something unexpected. It all coheres together.

NATHAN: Yeah, there’s an immersive quality. Again, when you’re kind of the very “on the ground” kind of feel. I think of the burning of Moscow—an astonishing set piece, even if you shoot it in a very sort of restrained way. But part of what blew me away about it was that they are doing this more verite at times, taking the camera in this more documentary kind of approach.

THOMAS: They had a cart on tracks that they were going through this fire with.

NATHAN: And everything’s on fire around you. I don’t know what their insurance company was thinking, if they had one.

THOMAS: But the effect is very immersive, very gritty, very horrific. It feels like... I don’t want to say “documentary,” but it feels like the kind of things that you would see in a newsreel or something about some tragic, horrible occurrence. But, you know, as long as we’re talking kind of generally still—and perhaps that’s all we can do with a film of this scope—one thing I wanted to say, too, was the use of color and of lighting throughout the film is really, really awesome, especially at a time like nowadays where I feel like we’re so often starved of color in film.

Probably everywhere except for street art—I feel like that’s just as a quick tangent—I feel the only time that I ever really get to experience vibrant color in my day is when I see graffiti or some of these really tacky murals that exist inside of urban spaces. And it makes me feel really bummed out because most of the time I don’t really like these murals, but it’s also the only time that I get splashes of color. But here there’s a lot of really wonderful use of color in the costumes and in the set pieces, but also in the lighting.

So many really excellent lighting choices about the use of darkness and using colored light to illuminate different parts of a scene. And so that was something that I really, really liked. And it also sort of exists in its way in the battle sequences or in the big set pieces, like the burning of Moscow. There’s an attention to contrast and the use of color and how these things are coming through.

NATHAN: Yeah, there are aspects of that. I agree that the color work... the film is overwhelming in most respects. But it’s funny, one thing that did stand out to me that I found hard to deal with at times was, I think, actually the makeup. Especially maybe it was more in the first film—you see it a lot because there’s a lot of indoor hard lights being thrown on actors—but it seemed to me that there was a weird kind of mismatch between the makeup... a lot of these actors just look like ghosts, you know?

Now, that could be—I don’t know if that’s an issue with maybe the restoration or the quality of the print that is the basis for the restoration and they just couldn’t get it to what it was originally meant to be—but I think it is the case that older works, the style of makeup that was in vogue tends to be more overcompensating, trying to compensate for the harshness of those lights, harder sources back then. Now, this is not a deal-breaker by any means. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying, like, “Oh, that’s a thing.” But it is, again, striking of its time and it brings a kind of theatrical quality to it.

I guess, you know, you can say, “Oh, it’s reaching for this grand expansive scope.” And it’s trying to do this naturalistic approach in a lot of scenes, especially with the war scenes, trying to get this “you are there” realism as close as it can. And then sometimes these things can kind of take you out. But I guess I appreciate it ultimately as a film that is part of a tradition—part of a wider tradition of literature and theater and ultimately, we can say, poetry—that is trying to capture expansive spiritual concepts. And anyway, I guess I would just... it’s one of those things that kind of stands out, but of course, we’ve got to just take it for what it is.

JAMES: I appreciate that there’s this impulse toward realism, especially in the battle sequences, but it’s not a realism that you get nowadays where realism means gritty, washed out, and devoid of color. It’s a kind of realism that I feel you get when you’re at the Met and you see some of these incredible large paintings of a battle, and it’s so exploding with color, detail, and information.

You know, I’m not an art historian, so I don’t know what period of painting I’m referring to, but in those battle sequences in particular, there are just some shots that feel like they’re probably using some of this Romantic or Classical style of painting military battles as source material. But to your point, Nathan, the result really is overwhelming in this different kind of way.

It’s not just limited to the battle sequences, but to these grand balls or to these other moments where the visual sumptuousness and magnitude of what’s being shown is hitting on so many different levels. Color is important, and it’s so underappreciated; I don’t feel its lack as much as I do until I see it, whether on a mural or in a film like this.

NATHAN: What did you guys think of performances?

JAMES: Dude, great. Sorry, go ahead.

NATHAN: Yeah, I totally want to hear you talk about this, James. But I was very struck by Bondarchuk’s performance. And actually, I didn’t even know until I finished watching it that that was him. I didn’t know he was an actor, that he was more established as an actor before he was a director. So I was stunned to see that the director is playing the lead role, basically. But I thought it was an extraordinary kind of performance of minimalism, you know, of this kind of... he does get a chance to run the full range of emotion eventually as part of his character’s arc. But for so much of the film, he’s just so kind of locked inside.

THOMAS: He’s an observer. He’s there in the battle, just observing and walking around almost comically. And he observes people. He’s watching other people do things. He’s just pushed into his marriage passively. Yeah. So it makes sense that he performs it that way.

NATHAN: Yeah, but I think the thing is that it’s... I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m surprised at how well it works, because it’s a very hard assignment to have an actor kind of just be always reacting in a very passive and kind of interior way. But he does a marvelous job at it, I think. And the fact that he’s also the one directing it, I think I’m just very blown away at how he balanced those things.

THOMAS: Yeah, he wasn’t originally going to play the part. He cast this Russian bodybuilder because Pierre is supposed to be like a really big guy. And the bodybuilder—he was training him to act and the bodybuilder was like, “I can’t act.” So he ended up casting himself, and it was somewhat controversial because the character’s supposed to be in his mid-20s, whereas Bondarchuk was in his 40s. But it’s a wonderful performance.

JAMES: Yeah, it works, and I did find myself kind of wishing that he were younger. But one thing that I just personally couldn’t get over was that for some reason I just kept seeing Mr. Samgrass from *Brideshead Revisited*. And I just couldn’t get rid of that association in my mind.

THOMAS: That’s funny.

JAMES: So that kind of worked against, I think, a little bit of what he was doing with the characterization there. But the performances are awesome. And I think that actually there’s a way in which they mirror other aspects of the film, like what we were talking about with the camera work—how this sort of more formal classical vision can coincide with this more expressive or chaotic one. As we’re observing here with Bondarchuk’s performance, there’s both the opportunity for minimal, quiet interior film performance and then also much more expressive or grand or theatrical gestures, which I really loved.

I think across the board, a lot of the performances strike me as leaning theatrical—whether it’s Prince Andrei, who just feels like Hamlet through and through, or Prince Andrei’s father. There are so many great expressions or use of language. Or some of the women and the kind of hysteria that is manifested in a couple of moments—whether it’s Natasha when her elopement is...

THOMAS: Oh, what an incredible scene. Yeah, the music is so intense.

JAMES: When that gets thwarted, or when... I forget who it is that finds out about someone’s death. Maybe it’s Prince Andrei’s sister, or...

THOMAS: Well, there’s the scene where they find out that Nikolai has died and Natasha’s mother is freaking out.

JAMES: Yes, and she just freaks out, you know? And it’s a gesture that’s too big to be contained by the camera, but it works. So I really loved the performances across the board. Another amazing, amazing sequence for me is the duel sequence between Pierre and—I forget the other guy’s name.

THOMAS: I think it’s Dolokhov.

JAMES: Yeah, something like that. There’s another performer who’s very Shakesperean, very theatrical—I could see him in the role of Tybalt or something. That sequence is so amazing, so tense. There’s so much going on, the weather. But then when they’ve exchanged fire and he’s on the ground and chewing snow—this gesture, to me, is so well observed. It does so much on the screen.

THOMAS: It’s just like one line in the book, but yeah.

JAMES: Yeah, yeah. So the performances... man, there are a lot of moments like that, you know?

THOMAS: Just to note, I mean, the actress who plays Hélène, Pierre’s first wife, was Bondarchuk’s wife in real life. So it explains why she also looks a little older than the character would have been—like young beauty.

NATHAN: Yeah.

THOMAS: But the guy who plays Prince Andrei, he just carries himself with this cold nobility, but this longing underneath for something to escape from his emotional prison or something.

And also the way he’s dressed is incredible. That’s one where you really understand why women like a man in uniform. He just looks like... I mean, he is a prince, actually, but he looks like a prince.

JAMES: But he also has a very cool visual transformation over his arc. Because, you know, when we first meet him, he’s this very stately, impressive military officer type. And then he kind of despairs of that and then has a very different visual look, not just in his costume but in his bearing. There’s a slight sort of dishevelment in his hair or there’s a gauntness in his look. Just looking at him, you can read so much.

THOMAS: Yeah, there’s this whole period—I mean, after he and Natasha break up, where he decides to just basically retire from the city and he goes out onto one of his estates to just manage his serfs and live a rural life, basically, and be detached from things. It’s sort of conveyed in some of the look, even if that part of the story is not there.

The actress who plays Natasha... I mean, Natasha’s my favorite character in the book. She’s just this totally enchanting girl who has this amazing maturation throughout the book. And I think they cast a 19-year-old ballet dancer for this part. She has to do quite a bit of dancing in the film and she does an amazing job. And she’s one of these women who looks more beautiful when they’re crying, which is always great.

But yeah, the intensity and liveliness of this character, especially when contrasted with like Pierre and Prince Andrei, who are both very restrained in different ways, is wonderful. And you see why they’re both drawn to her. But then also her greater sobriety towards the end after she’s been sort of chastened is played very well.

THOMAS: One thing that we haven’t touched on is the music.

JAMES: Yes.

NATHAN: The music is great.

JAMES: Now, is it all original compositions?

THOMAS: I haven’t looked into it enough to know if it’s all original. I felt like there were some themes that I recognized, but that might just be because I already saw the movie once and because the themes are very memorable.

I mean, it’s very classical sounding, but yes, it is an original score by and large. And it’s like... people will talk about the music being another character in a film, and sometimes the music isn’t really good enough or memorable to deserve that cliché. But in this case, it really is true, because there are a lot of scenes that are wallpapered with music, which is usually a negative term, but it works really well. It’s very active, very complex music. There’s a lot of merging different... fading out different music over each other, especially in the battle sequences where you get the themes of the different armies and their trumpet sounds and stuff. And then yeah, it’s just a very active and memorable score that is giving you... it’s like the use of color.

This is like a problem with music in general—lack of melody. But in film scores, too, it’s rare that you have a real theme for a character anymore. They have them, but they’re just usually not that interesting or memorable. They’ll be like, “This is the sonic texture that we use for this character.” I think the last thing I saw that had themes for characters was, I think, *Mad Men*. But yeah, I don’t know where to go with that, but it’s a very active and complicated and rich score, and extremely romantic.

JAMES: Yeah. And before I say a little bit more about the score, I’ll also note that the use of song in the film is very pronounced as well. There’s a lot of sequences where people are singing various folk songs or marching songs. Oftentimes it’s soldiers that are singing, but not only. And that’s really nice to hear too, because song isn’t really a big part of contemporary Western culture, at least not so much in the United States. I don’t know about other parts in Europe. But we’re not often singing together, not in the way that we see in this film.

And it’s not contrived. It’s not artificial. It feels very organic; these are the songs of a people. So there’s something... what is it, diegetic is the word? But it’s also expressive. The song is being used not just to illustrate a place, but to say something about what’s happening at this moment. I think about the sequence when Natasha is dancing, for instance.

THOMAS: It’s one of my favorites—it might be my favorite sequence in the film.

JAMES: Or, of course, the last song that’s sung by the Russians and the French soldiers together towards the end of Part Four.

But also, all the way in Part One, the sort of exuberance with which the soldiers are singing as they’re marching off to war for the first time—there’s a cool tonal dissonance there. And then that was something that I wanted to say about the score as well: the score is also sometimes doing very surprising things, much like all other parts of this film. Not just the score, but the sound design more broadly. There’s a lot of really nice touches with sort of more abstracted sound bits—chimes or dings or whatever. Water dripping.

JAMES: Yes, the water dripping. Is that when he’s being pushed into proposing to Hélène? Or he doesn’t even really propose to her; I can’t remember. But where they’re sitting quietly, there’s this melodic dripping noise. It comes up in more than one place, actually. But one point where the music really struck me was when Natasha is arriving at one of the balls—I can’t remember if it’s the first one. It’s like this very anxious music as she’s going up the stairs. Super ominous, you know?

And it really doesn’t feel correct for what we’re seeing, or even how she’s feeling at that moment, because at that point she’s still very wide-eyed and excited and happy and expecting this to be a great experience. But there’s something very foreboding about the music cues that we’re getting through that. So yeah, just another example of how surprising, but also generous, the film is with all of these levers that it can pull.

THOMAS: Yeah, I think it’s interesting to compare the songs that the soldiers sing in this movie to the songs that they sing in *Band of Brothers*, which is another thing that I watched for the first time last summer and then watched again this year. Because the songs that they sing on a couple of occasions in the series are these very sardonic songs about how crappy it is to be a soldier, basically, and “we’re all going to die,” and just gallows humor type things. Whereas the songs in this are not even military songs per se, seemingly.

I mean, the song they sing when they’re marching is just some kind of ballad about a woman with these very whimsical lyrics and very folksy. And yeah, there is a certain irony because they’re going off to war and Tolstoy is really not pro-war at all, even though he very much honors the bravery of the Russians in repelling this unjust attack against their country. So there is an irony to it, but there’s also just... I think it’s a reflection of a cultural difference and a difference in probably military culture. Then again, the songs that they sing in *Band of Brothers*, in one case, it’s after they’ve already been through a lot of war, so maybe there’s a difference there, too. But yeah, good observation about the communal singing and dancing and a lot of different things that we don’t do.

NATHAN: A lot of different things. There’s a lot going on. And it makes me kind of want to ask the question: the maximalism that we see on display... we’ve been talking a lot about how impressive the film is as this kind of maximalist, everything’s going on. And I want to ask you guys: do you think that works all the way through? Does it pull that off, or is there a case to be made for the film not necessarily landing all of its punches with this really all-in... again, I keep saying “maximalist” because it’s just throwing everything at the wall. Do you think it doesn’t land some of those?

JAMES: Toward the start of our discussion, I said my least favorite part is the final part. And I asked Thomas at the time: had they completed all of these parts before releasing the film or were they still in production as the films were being released? I don’t know, of course, what accounts for why I feel this way with Part Four, but I get the impression maybe that there’s like a tiredness by the time you arrive at Part Four—maybe an exhaustion or just not trying as hard.

What I referred to in Part One or Part Two about how much care and attention goes into each sequence, that seems to be more muted and sort of diffuse throughout Part Four, which is still really great, but you don’t get quite the same... perhaps with the exception of the amazing burning of Moscow. But there’s something... I don’t know...

NATHAN: Well, it’s trying to cover a lot of territory in Part Four, it seems.

JAMES: In my opinion the sequences in Part Four are no less good than the earlier sequences, but I think that the plot cuts that are made in Part Four sap the sequences of a lot of their power. I think that’s the part where I feel the cuts from the novel the most.

So, I mean, you’ve got a lot of like long sequences—generous sequences like the scene where Petya, before his riding into battle, is hearing this dream music in the night, if you remember that whole sequence. And there’s the burning of Moscow. There’s all the sequences of the French army retreating in the winter in terrible shape. Those are great. But there’s stuff that’s cut... like, who’s this Petya? He’s been mentioned a couple times, but we barely know who this kid is. You know, he’s Natasha’s youngest brother.

But I think the cut that it suffers from the most is that of Platon Karataev, who is this old soldier that Pierre meets while imprisoned by the French and who’s kind of this wise sage character. And he’s in there, but you don’t nearly get as much of his folksy wisdom about God’s providence as you do in the book. And that really informs Pierre’s spiritual awakening at the end of the story. And you just don’t get as much of the sense of the substance of his influence on Pierre.

And to be honest, for me, having read the novel once, I already didn’t find Pierre’s spiritual awakening to be totally convincing in the novel, because Tolstoy’s spirituality is kind of like his own idiosyncratic brand of Christianity that’s almost pantheistic. I don’t even know if it is Christianity. So it’s already perhaps a weak point at the conclusion of the book, and it was even weaker in this part—the conclusion of Pierre’s story. And that’s the final film, the one named after him. And he’s a character throughout the film, so it’s not like he’s not given a lot of fleshing out, but we don’t really quite understand what he’s going through after the scene where he witnesses this execution and almost gets executed himself, which is also a big part of what happens to him.

JAMES: Yeah, but also just cinematically, I feel that there’s less that’s surprising me in Part Four, even though there’s still a lot of really impressive sequences. The execution is quite memorable, I would say that. There’s a pronounced increase of the use of freeze frames in Part Four.

THOMAS: That’s a good point.

JAMES: And that almost never works for me. They make appearances, I think, in a couple other places—in the battle, at the end of the battle—and actually, I’m okay with those. But something about their use in the fourth part was both more frequent and less well-used.

THOMAS: Another thing that they do is when he finally reunites with Natasha at the end of the film, we get flashbacks of all these scenes of Natasha from earlier in the film, which to me doesn’t really work.

JAMES: Yeah, right. Same, same. So that’s kind of what I mean by it feels a little lazier, if I can call it that. Because if this had been Part One or Part Two, they would have found some sort of very interesting and idiosyncratic and surprising way to convey the uniqueness of this moment. But then with Part Four, it’s sort of like... I don’t know, you feel a little bit like we already have this great epic and so now we just need to conclude it. I don’t know, I don’t want to be cynical.

NATHAN: No, there’s a kind of dissipation, definitely. The energy is flagging throughout. And I’m glad we’re talking about this because I think it really touches on something with this kind of massive scale—in terms of not just physical scale but the time. Seven and a half, eight hours to watch this. I don’t think any of us watched this all in one sitting, right?

THOMAS: No, nor are you supposed to. I mean, they were released separately in theaters like *Lord of the Rings*.

NATHAN: It does make me wonder if the effect of the whole altogether would be more powerful watching it... trying to watch it in one day, which I don’t recommend. I think it works quite well as episodes, in a way. But the thing that I’m kind of coming back to again and again reflecting on it is: as amazingly impressive as Film Number Three, the Battle of Borodino, basically is, I do wonder if that installment and the emphasis on this being the world’s greatest depiction of warfare ever captured on film—which is what they’re going for—kind of breaks the whole thing.

And the reason I say that, or I’m wondering that at least, is because for me, my favorite moment in the entire film as a whole is the end of Film Two, when we have this kind of stunning cut. We just had the incredible sequence with Natasha almost being kidnapped and eloping with Anatole, a great rake—Bondarchuk has a great eye for rakes. Anyway, but that’s a very, very powerful, emotionally powerful sequence and she escapes this terrible fate but doesn’t appreciate it; her passion for this man who she wants to sweep her away is just overwhelming. And then we cut right from that climax to Napoleon invading Russia.

And it just does something that only film, I think, can do so well uniquely in this moment: going from this very intimate scale of this human passion of a couple people—and the stakes are enormous because her life hangs in the balance—but then immediately placing that next to human passion overriding reason on the level of nations. And I think that’s where Bondarchuk achieves... I think that’s where he achieves what, even if this wasn’t consciously his goal, I think unconsciously he achieves what he was chasing with the film: this going from the most intimate thing to the most massive historical thing. And it’s all related because it’s about passion overriding reason and the consequences of that. And at that moment I was like, “Yes, I am all in. Let’s do this.”

And then, of course, in the next film, we go immediately into the battle. And what’s interesting about that is that, again, it’s incredibly technically impressive and overwhelming, but it does kind of beat you down. And not just in the way of like, “Oh, war is awful and you’re supposed to feel beat down,” but I think narratively it does kind of break the flow. The question is: does it do it in a productive way? I imagine that they thought it would be in a productive way, but I wonder if it was too much focus on that and then they have to rush through the rest.

JAMES: I totally feel that. Absolutely, 110%. I think that if there had been more done with the plot and thematically in Part Three, then there would have been more space for Part Four to be more of what perhaps it needed to be.

THOMAS: I’m fine with the battle being as long as it was, but the way I would improve the film is to make Part Four an hour longer. I would have just made Part Four an hour longer and put in some of the things that they cut that give the necessary power to what they did include.

JAMES: Well, maybe we can finally spend a little bit of time talking about the battle sequences, which I appreciate. I’m glad we didn’t just go straight there.

NATHAN: It’s what everybody is here for. We know everyone’s been waiting on the edge of their seat.

JAMES: The thing is, it’s not even the thing that I most appreciated about the film. So I’m glad that we’ve spoken about all these other aspects, because the battles can easily steal the show because they’re amazing. I mean, it’s insane. Totally bonkers, the scale of what is being done with these battles. And it’s not just because there are a ton of people, but they’re incredible set pieces, incredibly choreographed with all this different stuff going on.

THOMAS: With cannons firing.

JAMES: Yes, yes. And what the camera has to do to catch all these different moments. It’s just amazing.

NATHAN: Yeah, let’s put a little bit more, I think, flesh on that. Because obviously war scenes have been depicted throughout film history with everything that you kind of just said, but I think maybe the thing is to emphasize what I hear you responding to, James. It’s not so much necessarily the spectacle of all this happening, but it’s this idea that it’s all happening at once. It’s all happening simultaneously. And the camera is this kind of participant that’s just... giving the effect of the long takes, right? It’s a feeling of you just wandering around. And so obviously the amount of work that it takes to coordinate all this organized chaos is astonishing, right?

THOMAS: I can’t even imagine how they did that. And like, if they even tried to make it safe—I’m sure they did to some extent, but you know...

NATHAN: How many horses?

THOMAS: I think there are like 1,500 horsemen in that battle. I think that was the number that I saw.

JAMES: I can’t imagine how you have the vision to even set that as your goal, because you still don’t see things at that scale done today. If anything is attempted, it’s largely through CGI. But another thing that’s so nice about the battle sequences is that there’s so much storytelling that takes place throughout. And specifically being very interested in characters—there’s a lot of time spent with individuals and close-ups on individuals, both characters that we know and other characters that we don’t. And so there’s a real... I mean, from the very first battle that we see—we get a pretty brief battle sequence in Part One.

THOMAS: Yeah, I mean, it’s very impressive, but it’s not really a lot.

JAMES: It’s brief compared to what happens in Part Three. But yeah, super impressive. But before they even start fighting, there’s a lot of time spent with these individuals and these sort of human stories that are a part of what we’re about to see. And it actually made me think of *Lord of the Rings*—not just the Peter Jackson films, but not just because that’s an example of battles at the same scale or grandiose vision, but because of the storytelling that takes place throughout those battle sequences within the films and the interest in following particular characters. I just have to think that Peter Jackson looked to *War and Peace* as an inspiration for the way that he was going to handle the way battles were done in his film trilogy.

THOMAS: I think one big difference between the way this is shot and the way a lot of modern warfare things are shot is that the battle sequences, there are parts that are focused on the characters during the battle, but for the most part, the battle is about the whole battle. It’s not about hand-to-hand combat. In other words, the action is not this heavily choreographed one-on-one combat that we see in modern action movies. It’s heavily choreographed, but it’s mass movement.

JAMES: I guess that’s what I’m trying to say—is that the film manages to hold these two things at once.

THOMAS: I also really like the veneration of the Holy Mother of Smolensk, when they venerate this icon of Mary and ask for her protection before the battle. It’s quite touching; it’s very moving.

Yeah, I think that the comparison to Peter Jackson is natural, but I think what makes it more impressive is that it’s real people. You know, I have certain things about the way it’s shot as well, but the fact that it’s all real...

NATHAN: There’s that shot that kind of closes out the battle where we’re just pulling... I guess we’re on an airplane or something... further and further. And I mean, that is truly one of the most jaw-dropping shots of film history where you keep waiting to see like, “Okay, where’s the end of the set?” There is none. It’s like you really are seeing dozens of square miles of this battlefield. And it really does give you that sense of “Wow, this is there.”

THOMAS: Another film to compare it to is the *Napoléon* epic, the Abel Gance silent film. The only film of comparable length that we’ve discussed on this podcast—similar length, maybe, probably a little shorter. They make a real reference to this in—I don’t remember which part this is, it might be Part Two?

JAMES: I think it’s the opening of Part Three.

THOMAS: Well, it’s when they’re actually making peace, the two emperors, so I think it’s before Part Three because it’s before the re-invasion happens. So anyway, yes, it’s Emperor Alexander I meeting Napoleon, and you’ve got the armies saluting them on the two sides of the split screen. So that’s an obvious reference to Abel Gance’s *Napoléon* film.

I’ll also mention, I just learned this today, that in 1970, Bondarchuk made his first English-language film, which was called *Waterloo*. And it’s about the Battle of Waterloo. So we return to the subject of Napoleon. Rod Steiger played Napoleon and Christopher Plummer played the Duke of Wellington. And there were 17,000 extras, which is, I believe, the largest number of extras in any film.

JAMES: Wow. Is the movie any good?

THOMAS: I haven’t seen it; I just read about it for the first time this morning.

NATHAN: Like and subscribe, comment below if you want us to watch *Waterloo*.

THOMAS: I’m assuming it’s not as long because it’s just about that battle. But yeah, it’s really wonderful.

NATHAN: What was your guys’ favorite... we haven’t really talked about favorite moments. I mean, I kind of shared mine about the ending of Episode Two. I also do love the duel and everything about Film Number Two as a whole. Film Two is my favorite of all of them—just the drama around Natasha and her maturation and everything is just unbeatable as far as individual storylines go. But yeah, what was your guys’... was there any particular moment where you’re like, “This is it”?

THOMAS: The first two films are my favorites. I love the cabin dance sequence where Natasha’s Uncle—I don’t think he’s his real uncle because he’s called “Uncle” in quotes in the book, but he’s a family friend—is playing the guitar, this sort of folksy song. And she’s doing this Russian folk dance that just delights everybody. And it’s this scene where you get this voiceover about how she’s somehow imbibed the spirit of the Russian people, despite being raised by a French governess and all this stuff. And it’s just this delightful scene.

And I love the duel. And I love basically anything with Natasha, but I also particularly love the scene where Andrei—I think this is the end of Part One—where he’s going in the carriage through the forest. This is after his wife has died in childbirth. He’s going on a carriage through the forest and he’s basically just dead inside, and he’s seeing the beauty of the beginning of spring, but then he sees this old oak tree that just looks kind of withered and isn’t reviving, and he’s like, “Yeah, the old oak tree has got it right.” He knows the naivety of all these other little trees. He’s basically saying to himself, “I’m just going to live as though I weren’t alive anymore.”

And then he has this encounter with Natasha—this incredible sequence where he’s staying in the house that they’re staying in and she and her friend, Sonya, are in the room above. And he’s looking out the window at night and he hears them singing together and talking about the magical atmosphere. And there’s this incredible night camera flying over the night landscape.

And then you get him going back through that same landscape again but it’s all verdant and green, and even the oak tree has gotten into the spring and it’s like, “Alright, I’m alive again.” It’s one of my favorite sequences in the book and one of my favorites in the film as well.

JAMES: Obviously the duel. Great. Everybody said that. I was on the edge of my seat in Part One, when they’re having this debaucherous party and they’re all drinking at the windowsill. I mean, it’s so tense. But my favorite cinematic moment is in Part Three when the cannonball lands a few feet away from Prince Andrei.

And he’s watching the fuse burning down as the cannonball is spinning around and sparking and smoking. And he has this existential moment of his life essentially flashing before his eyes. And then there’s this amazing line: “I love this life!” And he’s yelling it. And the camera swoops and there’s this gust of wind blowing through the trees. And it’s just this ecstatic moment of pure poetic genius. There’s nothing about what you’re seeing that’s obvious in illustrating this moment, but it’s perfect.

THOMAS: That’s incredible. I also like whenever Pierre gets angry. Especially with the rake, Anatole, whatever his name is, taking him... and then the guy smiles when Pierre offers to give him money to get rid of him, and then Pierre goes, “Oh, vile and heartless breed!” Great line.

JAMES: There’s another good moment—I think it’s after the big ball in Part Two where... I can’t remember exactly what’s going on plot-wise, but people are going home and sleds are going through the snow. And the voiceover is whispered. It’s all at night, and it’s dark, and the voiceover is whispered. There’s just something very unsettling and very perfectly observed in that choice to have the voiceover be kind of quiet and subdued after this really extravagant experience of the ball.

NATHAN: Can I ask you guys, since you brought up the voiceover... it took me a while to get on the wavelength of, “Oh, okay, this whole voiceover motif is a recurring thing to bring us inside the characters’ thoughts.” Do you feel like that’s appropriate in this adaptation? Or is it kind of cutting corners? Is it taking shortcuts to interiority in that sense?

JAMES: I liked it. I liked it most of the time because we also get it with characters that are not main characters—

THOMAS: like the wolf. You get a wolf inner monologue.

NATHAN: Is that in the book? Do you recall?

THOMAS: Probably. The one thing I looked back at was because James asked me whether the snow-eating was in the book and I looked back and found that it was. So I’m guessing that basically everything is in the book.

JAMES: One of the best moments for me is one of these minor characters—in the film at least, he probably plays a larger role in the book—when in the first battle he’s thrown from his horse and there are some enemy soldiers approaching. And then one of them tries to start taking shots at him. And he’s sort of processing all of this interiorly, like, “What? They don’t want to hurt me, not me, whom everybody loves?” something like that.

THOMAS: Yeah, something like that.

JAMES: And he’s running for his life and he’s kind of having this inner monologue of panic at the prospect that he’s about to die.

THOMAS: So that’s Nikolai, Natasha’s brother. And yes, he is a bigger character in the book.

JAMES: Yeah, yeah. And it’s just such a kind of trite thought to have, you know, that everybody likes you, and so you can’t die. But I think I appreciated the use of voiceover because it just felt like it was of a piece with this film really just trying to do everything and use every bit of cinematic vocabulary that it could to try to get things across. And it’s a literary adaptation, the voiceover exists somehow, and the narrator is there. I think about *Brideshead Revisited* again. But I don’t know, maybe you think differently, Nathan.

NATHAN: No, the way I posed that question sounded like I was kind of winding it up as, “Ah, it doesn’t work.” But no, I do appreciate it. I just think it’s an interesting choice. I guess at the heart of me asking it is: in a film that is so... it’s kind of coming from these very philosophically materialistic principles. It seems clear to me from the film that Bondarchuk, I think, believes in some aspect of the soul, or at least he’s honoring Tolstoy’s vision in that regard.

But I think it is striking that for so many other events that he’s trying to bring to life from the novel, again, there’s this focus on the immersive, trying to achieve this kind of realism. And of course, one of the ways that cinema can be very powerful is to use that kind of approach to bring you into the interiority through implication—it’s a harder way to do it, it requires enormous skill with the actors, and I feel like especially with Bondarchuk’s performance himself as Pierre, he’s in that territory, he’s not giving you everything through the performance; you have to kind of lean in as an audience member. But there’s profound work being done to bring you the evocation of the interior life. And I think when you have those kind of resources at your fingertips, to resort to the inner monologue is a bit of a shortcut.

Now, I don’t think it’s a problem in the film; it’s enough of a stylistic choice from the very beginning all the way through that it works. But I think it’s worth thinking about just broadly in the sense of adaptation of literature, right? Because the novel is the highest form we have of demonstrating interiority in this kind of intellect-to-intellect, soul-to-soul kind of way of experiencing it. As a medium, film, because it doesn’t have that directness, has to translate that through other material. And so it’s all valid to use—I’m not against it—but it’s just worth thinking about as a principle of adaptation.

THOMAS: The listeners will notice that we never gave a synopsis of the plot, because that would just be too much. There’s just too much going on, even in this reduced version. But I will ask—I mean, we talked about favorite scenes and set pieces—but do you guys... and this will come back to your question about whether it reaches the level of depth or sort of spiritual profundity, Nathan... do you guys have favorite character arcs or character developments or sort of moral developments that happen in the film?

JAMES: I think Prince Andrei is my favorite character. I like the journey that he goes on. But if I’m honest, I think that maybe this is a shortcoming of the film: that at the end of the day, there’s a lot that needs to be read into these characters or these moments that the film isn’t doing enough to excavate them for you. And so sometimes things maybe run a little thin.

THOMAS: So how would you characterize what you saw as Prince Andrei’s development through the film?

JAMES: Well, he goes on a little bit of a roller coaster from being kind of cold and not a very great husband and sort of concerned about greatness and ambition, to sort of repenting of that, having this experience of war, and then wanting to return to his wife and be reconciled, but being denied that by her death in childbirth. Then this sort of existential despair that is then revived by the encounter with Natasha. But then it is lost again when Natasha isn’t faithful to this promised engagement. And then the return back to military matters, but now more jaded. I don’t know, there’s something very tragic about the arc.

THOMAS: Yes, and then they reunite, but he’s dying and he forgives her, but it’s sort of too late. It’s not too late in a way, but it’s too late in another way.

JAMES: I think why I like him is because of the tragedy of the arc, but there’s still something very satisfying about it. And because he plays these distinct moments so well—the actor who performs Prince Andrei—there are a lot of really nice quiet moments with him as he’s trying to process everything that’s going on.

NATHAN: Yeah, for me, I think it is Natasha. She just goes through such a transformation from being not mature to being very mature. And it’s a striking change in her and in the performance. And that’s one reason why we’ve been talking about Part Four and just some of the shortcomings: I would have liked to have seen a lot more of her now that she’s a more mature, spiritually serious person. And there is that beautiful reunion with Prince Andrei where he forgives her—that’s really important.

THOMAS: We also see her praying in a church when the war is declared.

NATHAN: Yeah. You know, and she just becomes a much more interesting character. She was already interesting, but now that she’s gone through this fire, this purgation, kind of—it’s like I want to spend the rest of the movie with her. I want to see who she is, and we don’t really get that. And instead, Part Four spends a lot more time on Pierre’s transformation which, because as you were saying, Thomas, a lot is missing, it is really brushed over in that it doesn’t really come across very clearly—the profundity of what he’s going through. At least after the point where he survives the execution, everything up to the execution, I think, is very powerfully done. And then from that point, I just kind of get lost with Pierre in terms of what’s going on with him and how he’s changing. So I would have liked more Natasha there instead.

THOMAS: Yeah. I would say about Pierre—he is someone who is kind of paralyzed and overwhelmed by life, but also sees the vanity of the world. That’s kind of where we start with him: the pointlessness of it all. And he’s sort of being dissolute but also searching and reading a lot. And he’s kind of able to... I mean, he goes to the battle to understand what’s going on. And then when Moscow is captured, he’s eventually imprisoned and sees these executions. And that’s where he is shaken out of his paralysis through suffering.

We should also mention that he decides he’s going to assassinate Napoleon immediately prior to that. But then where it gets fumbled is this encounter with Platon in the prison. The nature of his spiritual awakening isn’t clear. What we get is—and this is from the book—he’s retreating, they’re going with the French army out of Russia as prisoners of war, and he’s not allowed to move past a certain point in the camp and he has this like enlightenment / freak-out where he’s like, “Me? They would imprison me? Me, who exists everywhere and in all things?” I forget exactly the line, but it’s like, “You can’t imprison my soul. My immortal soul.” is basically the line.

And then there’s this whole section in the book after they actually get married, he and Natasha, and it’s kind of interesting because you get like he’s still changed, but you can’t maintain this pitch of existential enlightenment forever. So you sort of go back into mundane life and some degree of regression to your old self, even if not a complete one. It’s sort of an interesting epilogue there in the book that’s completely gone from the film.

JAMES: Well, you know, if, as I suspect, Peter Jackson was a student of this film when making the *Lord of the Rings* trilogy, I think that probably maybe that’s one of the lessons that he learned: that a film of this epicness needs to have seven different endings, and it needs to go on a whole other hour than you think it does.

THOMAS: Because this film basically ends after he reunites with Natasha.

JAMES: Right, and it ends far too soon, and it really does need to have four or five more proper endings before we can call this a day.

THOMAS: I’ll say I also really like the friendship between Prince Andrei and Pierre. It’s very nicely portrayed.

JAMES: But speaking of endings, yeah, I think...

THOMAS: How many epilogues have we gotten through?

JAMES: I think we’ve probably talked about these films enough. You know, each one could really merit its own kind of discussion, but I hope that for those listening, they won’t be intimidated by the length. I think that even if you just take your time and just start by watching Part One with no intention of watching Part Two, just watch Part One and be amazed. And then you probably will want to watch Part Two, but you can get around to it whenever you want. There’s no need to say... unless you’re recording a podcast.

THOMAS: I watched them over a couple of months the first time. Alright, well, thanks guys for this discussion. Thanks for taking the time to watch this. I was really looking forward to it, so I’m glad we all liked it.

And for the listeners, again, I’ll link to this on YouTube. You can find it on YouTube to watch; it’s in good quality, English subtitles and everything. And if you’d like to support this podcast, please go to catholicculture.org/donate. We need money. So help us out. And God bless you all. Thanks for listening.