The English Patient

It’s something of a shame that a film that wins Best Picture and eight other Oscars is probably better known as the butt of a joke in an episode of “Seinfeld” rather than on its own merits.  Sure, there have been some Best Picture winners that won’t be discussed in film classes (anyone remember The Greatest Show on Earth?), but The English Patient seems to have fallen by the wayside a bit, and Jerry, Kramer and company probably had a bit to do with it.  Whether Elaine had a point in that particular episode is a topic for another discussion, though.  I speak only for myself, and I say that I remember The English Patient with great affection.

I pulled out my copy a few nights back and watched it again for the first time in a few years, and I’m glad that its power to move me has not faded with time.  Seeing it again, my memory of the details was refreshed and I’m reminded of how great a film this is.  When I first saw it on its theatrical run, I was more in need of a movie like this than I realized.  At that time, I believed Anthony Minghella to be the second coming of David Lean, and although I admit that saying such a thing was something like gushing on my part, I maintain that this movie had some very Lean-esqe quality to it.  Like Lean’s epics, The English Patient portrays characters in desperate settings and in desperate times, being crushed by events that would change their world. 

Ralph Finnes’ character, the Count Laszlo de Almásy, is one of the more strangely intriguing protagonists I’ve seen in such a film.  He spends a large part of the movie in heavy makeup, as the Count was horribly burned in a plane crash years earlier.  It is the waning days of World War II in Italy.  He is slowly dying, and his memory is all but gone, presumably a result of the injuries that disfigured him, and the Canadian medics who care for him assume him to be English.  As he is being transported northward by truck, land mines force the ambulance to stop, and the Patient is so near death, it is deemed cruel to move him any further.  His nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche’, playing the role for which she stole the Best Supporting Actress Oscar from Lauren Bacall), agrees to remain with him at an abandoned monastery until he dies.  As she cares for him and watches him fade, she finds herself more and more emotionally attached to him.

Poor Hana believes she is cursed, as all who love her seem to die; it seems her patient will only continue the trend.  A Sikh soldier on bomb-disposal detail comes to her rescue, and an attraction forms, but the nature of his duty all but ensures Hana’s misfortune at love will go on.  A maimed Canadian spy (Willem Dafoe) also arrives at the abandoned monastery where Hana is waiting for her Patient to die, seeming to know more about the Patient than Hana or the Patient himself.

We see the Patient’s past intertwined with his present.  As morphine eases his pain, flashes of his memory return as he slowly wastes away.  From the monastery in the countryside to the deserts of North Africa, we flip from Count Almásy’s present to the days before his disfigurement, exploring and mapping ancient caves for the Royal Geographic Society.  He is Hungarian, and into his life step a very English couple, Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton (Colin Firth and Kristin Scott-Thomas).  Who they are and why they are there change as the story progresses, but the growing attraction between Almásy and Katherine is obvious, and the ruin the attraction leads to is as destructive as it is obvious. 

The English Patient is not a feel-good movie.  All of the characters in Almásy’s past and in his present all find themselves helpless before a world at war.  What makes this move special to me is how it puts forth so simple a message, that lust and betrayal and deceit will never come to any good, in so a grand and eloquent fashion.  The Count is a loner with no loyalties to any one or any flag, so he understands his betrayals for what they are only at the end.  Katherine is so weary of living a life for the betterment of her country that she has no qualms about the betrayal she commits for what she perceives as her own happiness.  Hana is the sign that there is hope, as she is so filled with love that, even surrounded by death as she is, she continues to seek one upon who to impart love.

The English Patient is wonderful in methodical nature, ebbing and flowing backwards and forwards across the six-year span bridging the days immediately before and near the conclusion of World War II in Europe.  The imagery is just as lovely and powerful as the performances of the entire cast.  Minghella, who also wrote the screenplay, never confuses us as to where we are in place and time, or why events in one place and time are so relevant to characters in another.  This movie is grand, epic filmmaking at its best, truly deserving of the title Best Picture that year, and worthy of a much greater legacy than Elaine Benes’ disdain in “Seinfeld” reruns.

Larry Smoak
February 12, 2004

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