War and Peace: Saint Petersburg Fiddles, Moscow Burns

Such simple joys prove fleeting, as the action moves to a broader canvas with a wide shot of soldiers swarming onto the field at Borodino, site of Napoleon’s infamous 1812 rout of the Imperial Russian Army that nevertheless—in Tolstoy’s contested reading, at least—would help turn the tide in Russia’s favor. No less balletic than a Saint Petersburg ball, the Borodino battle sequences form the pyrotechnic jewel in the crown of Bondarchuk’s War and Peace. By official order, the director was provided with military planes, fifteen thousand soldiers, and the free run of museum collections for props, along with an estimated 120,000 extras, twenty-three tons of explosives, and ten thousand smoke grenades. One can only marvel at the technical virtuosity of the special effects, mounted with aerial and crane shots, split screens, dissolves, and slow pans across hundreds of corpses strewn bent and twisted on the battlefield. The battle—which forms the long centerpiece of the third part (The Year 1812), intercut with swerves to Moscow and a still-oblivious Saint Petersburg—is crammed with indelible images: a crowd of naked grunts running joyfully to bathe in a lake; a soldier looking down at his own severed leg; old, fat, half-blind General Kutuzov brandishing a half-eaten chicken leg as he waves off a timid officer bearing tidings of defeat; a spinning cannonball that falls at Prince Andrei’s feet, threatening to seal his fate; the close-up faces of the brave, loyal, ordinary men who occupied an increasing share of Tolstoy’s compassion via his hapless witness, Pierre Bezukhov.

The genius of this sequence lies not just in its epic scale but in the way Bondarchuk commutes between ritual pomp and bloody chaos, glory and futility intertwined in a war that, a sonorous voice-over intones, runs “counter to human reason and human nature.” Toward the end, on one hill stands Napoleon (Vladislav Strzhelchik), a spectral, impassive automaton, driven only by lust for power and indifferent to the massive suffering he has inflicted on the enemy and on his own army. On the other stands Kutuzov, emblematic of war’s irrational incoherence as he alternately babbles like a buffoon and plays the wily sage, plotting to strike back at Napoleon merely by waiting him out.  

Inevitably, perhaps, War and Peace will be remembered for the bravura battlefield set pieces enabled by Bondarchuk’s boldly experimental flair and resources that, proportionally speaking, would dwarf those allotted to many blockbusters today. But he also deftly applies silence (interrupted only by ambient noise—a ticking clock, the bark of a dog, or the chirp of crickets), in both the action and the domestic drama, to heighten the sense of terror: devastation in the former, and private anguish in the latter. 

The sacking and burning of Moscow that dominates the fourth part (Pierre Bezukhov) of War and Peace took ten months of planning (burning structures don’t lend themselves to retakes), with six cameras deployed on the ground and more in helicopters above. It is here that Bezukhov comes into his own, not just as a mouthpiece for Tolstoy’s grand humanism but also as a flesh-and-blood man, flawed and bumbling, for sure, but minutely observant like his creator, and capable of change and complex reflection. 

Critics complained that Bondarchuk, in his forties during the production, was too old to play Bezukhov, who is in his twenties when we meet him. But the director’s bearlike girth and lumbering gait, his bespectacled moon face and perpetual air of blinking befuddlement, prove a great fit for Bezukhov’s role as a kind of holy fool whose awakening conscience and compassion carry us through the cataclysmic changes brought about in his country and in the people he loves. Stumbling from scenes of carnage at Borodino to a Moscow set ablaze by its own fleeing citizens, Pierre, his face and ridiculous white top hat spattered with mud and blood, careens through the chaotic melee of fighters, fire, and explosions. 

In the final chapter of War and Peace, Bezukhov bears appalled witness again, this time dressed as a peasant, to the sacking of Moscow by Napoleon’s troops. His attempts to save civilians land him in captivity, where the kindly nobleman acquires the same respect for the courage, loyalty, and generosity of the common man that moved Tolstoy to educate and free his own serfs. With Pierre to guide us, the portentous voice-over that often clogs the action is hardly necessary. All the inner life we need shows in Bondarchuk’s minute facial changes, from bewilderment to anger to sorrow and pity and, finally, to serenity as he arrives at a new understanding of the world and his place in it. 

Pierre may lack physical courage, but he enlarges into a Tolstoyan hero when, hungry and ragged in a shell of a building, he suddenly erupts into raucous laughter. A lowly soldier has taught him the meaning of life in the will of God, a deity remade into a true egalitarian whose will is found in all people and things. One doesn’t have to be a believer to stand in awe of the physical grandeur, the spiritual inquiry, or the ecstatic hope for human happiness of Tolstoy’s vision. We just have to be willing to give ourselves over, like Pierre, to becoming joyful specks in a vast universe filled with wonder and terror, over which we have no control. 

Bondarchuk died in 1994 of heart disease, having been dismissed by many of his peers as a party hack. Let him now rest easy in his grave: War and Peace, which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1969, now has the restoration it deserves. For all its moments of bombast and revisionist history—Bondarchuk rightly held himself accountable to Tolstoy, not Henry James, and to literature, not history—I found this flawed epic, in all its monumental too-muchness, its embrace of the moral life and of human happiness as worthy of discussion, every bit as thrilling the second time around.