david lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

having never seen it before this weekend's presentation at the Tennessee Theatre (i had been holding out for the big screen), Lawrence Of Arabia was an interesting surprise to me. i'd expected an epic, and an epic it certainly is, the sort that Hollywood has forgotten how to make - it's not just the size of the canvas but also the level of detail you place on it, and Lawrence draws fine, patient lines where today's outsize spectacles throw broad, lazy strokes. yet it's not these lines that really matter in the film, but what's between them: a careful (though occasionally oblique, and frustrating) character study well-merited by a figure of such mystique. it would have been enough for the film to wrestle with itself over whether T.E. Lawrence (played with a distinct otherworldliness by Peter O'Toole) is a noble warrior or a patronizing, narcissistic creature of dangerous folly, but Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt smartly pester the audience with a further question only they can answer: does it matter that he's both?