{"id":505507,"date":"2026-05-27T17:43:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T17:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/505507\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T17:43:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T17:43:12","slug":"maverick-the-epic-adventures-of-david-lean-review-a-rich-tribute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/505507\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean’ Review: A Rich Tribute"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tPerhaps the defining paradox of visionary British film director David Lean<\/a>\u2019s life is the discordance between his professional career, shepherding monumentally scaled productions, often in far-flung locations with zero infrastructure, and his messy personal affairs, hopscotching from one marriage or relationship to the next in a futile search for lasting happiness. \u201cI\u2019m able to live through a film as I can\u2019t in everyday life,\u201d says the subject in one of many archival interviews excerpted in\u00a0Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean.<\/p>\n

\n\tBarnaby Thompson\u2019s exhaustively researched film is made with the full cooperation of Lean\u2019s estate. But even when it levitates into awestruck paroxysms about the unprecedented grandeur of classics like\u00a0The Bridge on the River Kwai\u00a0and\u00a0Lawrence of Arabia<\/a>, it avoids banal hagiography. While the talking heads assembled include many of the world\u2019s great contemporary directors \u2014 all eager to acknowledge Lean\u2019s profound influence on their work and cinema in general \u2014 there\u2019s no attempt to gloss over the tyrannical perfectionist he could be during arduous shoots.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMaverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tConsummate artist, complicated man.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue<\/strong>: Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Classics)
With<\/strong>: Wes Anderson, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Francis Ford Coppola, Brady Corbet, Alfonso\u00a0Cuar\u00f3n, Nia DaCosta, Paul Greengrass, Steven Soderbergh, Celine Song, Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve, Joe Wright,\u00a0Cate Blanchett, Kenneth Branagh
Director-screenwriter<\/strong>: Barnaby Thompson
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 45 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRobert Mitchum describes him as \u201cmonomaniacal\u201d after working with Lean on the critical failure that threw the director\u2019s career into limbo,\u00a0Ryan\u2019s Daughter. On that same film he insisted the cameras keep rolling while veteran actor Leo McKern came close to drowning, tossed about near the rocky shores of Ireland\u2019s Western coast during a fierce once-a-year Atlantic storm.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen there\u2019s Omar Sharif\u2019s frank assessment of Lean after making\u00a0Doctor Zhivago, the 1965 epic that found massive commercial success despite being widely dismissed for crushing the spirit of Boris Pasternak\u2019s novel, trivializing the Russian Revolution and reducing the complex story to soppy romance.<\/p>\n

\n\tSharif describes Lean as a difficult, selfish man to work with, driving people too hard in pursuit of what he wanted from a scene. \u201cHe had no pity for anyone, including himself,\u201d says the actor, whose fame grew considerably thanks to his work with Lean on\u00a0Doctor Zhivago\u00a0and\u00a0Lawrence of Arabia.<\/p>\n

\n\tComing back from 14 years \u201cin the wilderness\u201d after the debacle of\u00a0Ryan\u2019s Daughter\u00a0had shaken his confidence, Lean made his final film,\u00a0A Passage to India, in 1984, on which his dogmatic approach caused open rebellion among the cast. Narrator Cate Blanchett<\/a> recounts that Judy Davis was the most strident of them, hurling invective at the director and telling him point-blank that he had no idea what he was doing. (Davis received an Oscar nomination for best actress, while her co-star, British acting royalty Peggy Ashcroft, won for supporting.)<\/p>\n

\n\tLean comments on the unpleasantness of coping with \u201cthese personal hates\u201d from mistrusting actors. But his own words appear to validate the frequent charge that he cared more about visuals than performances. Musing on the role of actors on a shoot, he says, \u201cThey are \u2014 and I say this in the best possible way \u2014 puppets.\u201d Is there really a \u201cbest possible way\u201d to suggest that actors are props operated by pulling their strings?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile there\u2019s no evidence that he subjected his cast to the kind of psychological torture for which fellow uncompromising contemporaries Hitchcock and Kubrick were known, he could clearly be moody and impatient. Nigel Havers good-humoredly recalls telling Lean he had been unable to sleep the night before shooting began on A Passage to India. \u201cNeither did I, I was so nervous,\u201d Lean reportedly told the actor, who adds: \u201cHe took about a couple of hours before he got back in the groove, shouting at people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite these impressions of Lean being a spiky character, this is by no means a reductive portrait of the great director as an insensitive despot, and Thompson has gathered an impressive lineup of accomplished directors to acknowledge the many ways in which Lean built the model for the modern blockbuster.\u00a0Revisiting the breathtaking location footage from his most ambitious projects makes you realize how much movie fakery we have now come to accept.<\/p>\n

\n\tSteven Spielberg reveals that he rewatches\u00a0The Bridge on the River Kwai\u00a0every time he\u2019s about to start shooting an action-adventure. Francis Ford Coppola and Denis Villeneuve talk about how Lean\u2019s fearless sense of scale, never at the expense of story or character, informed their work. Paul Greengrass credits him as being one of a handful of directors who invented the language of film craft. Steven Soderbergh recounts how Lean, who started out as an editor, would habitually shape a first cut without dialogue or sound, letting the images alone tell the story \u2014 an approach Soderbergh stole and still uses to this day.<\/p>\n

\n\tWeaving together an opulence of archival material and smart clip choices, Thompson and his editor Paul Van Dyck proceed chronologically through Lean\u2019s professional and private life, starting with his childhood in the drab South London borough of Croyden with a strict Quaker family. He was dyslexic and a failure at school, prompting his emotionally cold accountant father to regard him as a dullard who would never amount to much.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHis father abandoned the family when Lean was 15, and while they remained in contact, the casual cruelty of his father\u2019s letters and his complete dissinterest in his son\u2019s work speak volumes about the admiration, even respect, David Lean spent his entire life fruitlessly seeking. He sent an official invitation to attend the royal premiere of\u00a0Lawrence of Arabia\u00a0to his father, who replied that it was too far to come. He is believed to have died without seeing a single one of his son\u2019s films.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaverick\u00a0outlines Lean\u2019s entr\u00e9e into the British film industry in briskly entertaining fashion. Having taken up photography as a hobby, he knew movies were where he wanted to be. He took an entry-level \u201cteaboy\u201d job at Gaumont Studios and within three years had moved up through the ranks to the editing room. He springboarded from cutting newsreels to features, most notably Powell and Pressburger\u2019s\u00a049th Parallel\u00a0and\u00a0One of Our Aircraft is Missing. Alfonso\u00a0Cuar\u00f3n\u00a0observes that this was when he started absorbing the importance of scale and spectacle in movies.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo\u00ebl Coward, already a huge name in England, chose Lean to direct his first feature, the 1942 war drama\u00a0In Which We Serve\u00a0\u2014 though Lean insisted they share co-director credit. It was nominated for a best picture Oscar, the first of many for Lean\u2019s films. Coward (the subject of Thompson\u2019s 2023 feature, Mad About the Boy) then offered Lean his choice of scripts to direct, which led to one of the most beloved classics of British cinema,\u00a0Brief Encounter. Even out of context, the first meeting at the train station of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard is ineffably moving, a model of restrained desire.<\/p>\n

\n\tAdmirers of Lean\u2019s superb 1940s Dickens adaptations,\u00a0Great Expectations\u00a0and\u00a0Oliver Twist, might wish Thompson had lingered longer over them. But he correctly pinpoints the pivotal moment in the director\u2019s career as 1955\u2019s\u00a0Summertime, the Katharine Hepburn vehicle that was the first British film shot entirely in an international location and one of the all-time great screen portraits of Venice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat experience confirmed Lean\u2019s boredom with studio shoots and his hunger to work outside in inspiring locations. He found a powerful producer to help facilitate that shift in Sam Spiegel, a collaboration that yielded the first of the quintessential Lean epics,\u00a0The Bridge on the River Kwai, shot entirely in the jungles of Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. The detailed analysis of the climactic scene in which the bridge is blown up as various plot strands come together is thrilling. The film won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director.<\/p>\n

\n\tLean stuck with Spiegel for his next enterprise,\u00a0Lawrence of Arabia, shot predominantly in the deserts of Jordan. When the original writer walked off, Spiegel connected Lean with playwright Robert Bolt, an important collaborator who, like the director, was the product of a puritanical childhood, during which he was considered the dunce of the family.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s fun to hear major-name directors geeking out over the sheer majesty of the movie, recalling how it opened their eyes to the boundless possibilities of cinema. There\u2019s also much breathless appreciation of the fact that everything in the movie (like\u00a0Summertime\u00a0and\u00a0Kwai) was real, giving the films an immersive quality that\u2019s seldom equaled in the digital age.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe sprawling life and conflicted loyalties of the film\u2019s subject, British Army officer T.E. Lawrence, had long been considered impossible to adapt for the screen. But Bolt and Lean found a key to it that evolved into one of film history\u2019s undisputed milestones. It bagged another seven Oscars, including best picture and a second best director honor for Lean.<\/p>\n

\n\tJoe Wright \u2014 also written off as a lost cause early on because of his dyslexia \u2014 expresses an affinity for Lean while also identifying the ways in which Lean saw himself in Lawrence. \u201cI think the relationship beween pain and pleasure, and the invention of self, the loneliness I think are all things Lean felt and expressed through Lawrence.\u201d It\u2019s a sharp observation that underlines how the movie was simultaneously epic and intimately personal.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnyone interested in the physical side of pre-CG large-scale filmmaking will be fascinated by close-up glimpses of movie magic, like the transformation of the Spanish landscape into snowbound Russia for\u00a0Doctor Zhivago\u00a0or the construction of an entire Irish coastal village for\u00a0Ryan\u2019s Daughter.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe latter film and its brutal reviews feed into an episode that shows Lean at his most vulnerable. He recalls being summoned to a meeting of the National Society of Film Critics at New York\u2019s Algonquin Hotel, where critics like Richard Schickel and Pauline Kael dragged him over the coals for two hours, asking how the man who made\u00a0Brief Encounter\u00a0could produce such garbage. Lean says the experience had an awful effect on him, filling him with shame and a reluctance to direct again.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a counterweight to the headmasterly arrogance of the NSFC, Thompson makes a fair point with a fabulous split-screen montage showing how the radical new wave of independent filmmaking coming out of America in 1970 made\u00a0Ryan\u2019s Daughter\u00a0seem hopelessly antiquated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThroughout this dense and always engrossing survey of Lean\u2019s career in film, Thompson threads the vicissitudes of the director\u2019s personal life, spanning six wives and various other relationships and flings. It\u2019s a sad irony that he mirrored his father\u2019s history by walking out on his first wife, Isabel Lean, and his only son, Peter, with whom he subsequently had minimal involvement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile many of his films were fundamentally about love or its elusiveness \u2014\u00a0Summertime,\u00a0Brief Encounter,\u00a0Doctor Zhivago, Ryan\u2019s Daughter\u00a0\u2014 Lean comes across in archival interviews as a contemplative man whose own belief in love was stymied by the constant certainty of something better around the next corner. There are echoes of his father\u2019s severity in his thoughts on the end of a relationship: \u201cAnything that\u2019s finished is finished. You must just pretend the people aren\u2019t there. Once you\u2019ve made your decision, you\u2019ve got to cut them out of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat ruthless lack of sentiment, strangely, is part of what makes\u00a0Maverick\u00a0so satisfying. With stirring orchestral underscoring from Rael Jones and elegant contributions from Kenneth Branagh<\/a> reading Lean\u2019s letters, Thompson crafts a layered portrait of a man driven to conjure grace and magnificence and soaring emotions in his art but prone to walking through life leaving wreckage behind him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps the defining paradox of visionary British film director David Lean\u2019s life is the discordance between his professional…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[263],"tags":[10404,190863,11519,212009,27217,214770,32887,18,117,19,17,107597,195536,327],"class_list":["post-505507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-cannes-film-festival-reviews","tag-cate-blanchett","tag-david-lean","tag-documentaries","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kenneth-branagh","tag-lawrence-of-arabia","tag-movies"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116647782389341785","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}