‘Maverick — The Epic Adventures of David Lean’ Review: How the Director of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Expressed His Turbulent Life in His Grand Visions
Barnaby Thompson's enthralling documentary lionizes a director who was one of the inventors of modern movies. But his personal life was a mess.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
@OwenGleiberman See All
One of the fascinating dimensions of the movies made in the studio-system era is how the perceptions of those movies — and, in a strange way, the movies themselves — change over time. I went into “Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean” eager to see a documentary about a director I thought of as the quintessence of lavishly impeccable middle-of-the-road Hollywood classicism. And it’s not like that perception is wrong.
But “Maverick,” which is full of singular stories, stunning film clips, and extraordinary insights from a panoply of filmmakers (Francis Ford Coppola and Alfonso Cuarón to Paul Greengrass and Celine Song, Wes Anderson and Nia DaCosta to Denis Villeneuve and Brady Corbet), is a movie that boxes open your cinematic mind about who David Lean was and what he achieved. Yes, he was a classicist (Pauline Kael once complained that even if Lean were depicting a film’s hero in blood up to his elbow, it would all be framed with exacting good taste). But “Maverick,” narrated by Cate Blanchett and directed with a fine blend of ardor and intelligence by Barnaby Thompson, shows you that Lean was also a radical filmmaker, perhaps the key inventor (along with Hitchcock) of modern Hollywood cinema. His images may have been exquisitely orchestrated (and in “Lawrence of Arabia,” they were awesome verging on overwhelming), but what gave life to those images was the spirit beneath them, which was romantic and unruly. Because that’s who David Lean was.
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