For a brief period in the mid-90s The English Patient was synonymous with all that was great about international cinema. It had epic scope, a sweeping love story, exotic locations, award-winning international actors. It took home nine Oscars, which still ranks it as one of the biggest Academy Award winners of all time. Then, just as quickly, it it hit a wave of backlash. First Elaine from Seinfeld hated it, and soon everyone, from average Joes to cinephiles, started seeing it as all that was wrong with art movies. It was pretentious, it was overlong, it was overdramatic and boring. But now that fifteen years have passed and it's re-released on Blu-ray and both the hype and the backlash have somewhat faded, which is it? Great or garbage?
It's hard to be objective of course. Chances are if you loved The English Patient you'll continue to love it, and if you hated it there's not much going to change your mind. I think one of the reasons there was so much backlash was that it was billed at the time as a movie for everyone, like Lawrence of Arabia or Ben Hur. Both those movies could be called pretentious and overlong, but there was an objectivity about them that was, for lack of a better term, "universal." The English Patient has none of that. It's full of itself, unabashedly so, and it's only ever going to appeal to those who don't mind so much.
Granted, I was one of the people who didn't mind. Sometime after I saw it I also read the novel (for other reasons), and was surprised at how different it was. Michael Ondaatje's book is more a collection of thoughts on race and identity, set in Italy in the waning months of WW2 where nationality and race and class seem like they shouldn't exist, but do. At the center is Hana (played in the movie by Juliet Binoche), a Canadian nurse, and her romance with a Sikh employed as a sapper for the British army, nicknamed Kip (Naveen Andrews, Lost). The eponymous English patient, Count Laszlo de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), is a badly burned man taken in by Allied medics and eventually cared for by Hana in an abandoned monastery. Amásy is really a Hungarian who pretends to not remember his name or nationality (Hungary was an Axis power.)
Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist, and the book is full of lyricism. Many of his lines and descriptions come out in the movie as dialogue, which gives it strange feel, as if sometimes the characters are speaking realistically and sometimes are channeling some inner poetry. Many people were put off by this, understandably, but I think it highlights how the movie is basically a fantasy. The undulating dunes of North Africa that open the film are magical and mysterious, as is the haunting Hungarian melody played over them, melting into drawing of swimmers on a cave wall in the middle of a desert. It all evokes feelings of otherworldliness, as if this remote cave was touching some strange, sad world full of water.
The bombed-out monastery which is the setting for most of the film is also a magical place, whether it be through the candle-lit romance of Kip and Hana or the confrontation of memories that takes place between the English patient and the Canadian pick-pocket Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe).
If you take the movie as a fantasy the movie becomes about all the ways people fail each other, through betrayal, or preconceptions, neglect, ownership, jealously, love. It's still pretty long, since it tries to portray both the present-day romance of Hana and Kip and the flashback romance of the Almásy and his love Katherine (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of one of his expedition partners. The past-romance gets more time and believability than the present-day one (in the book the opposite was true), which makes you wonder why it's there at all if it's not going to be given full attention.
A lot of the enjoyment of the movie of course rests on whether you enjoy Ralph Fiennes, who brings to Almásy the same brooding and withdrawn masculinity that he puts in all his characters, from Heathcliff to Lord Voldemort. But the lyricism still stands out after all these years, which is surprising given how much people still hate it.
It's certainly not a movie for everyone, but for everyone else it might be time to go back to The English Patient to remember why you enjoyed it. And to tell Elaine from Seinfeld to get out.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Anthony Minghella made relatively few movies before his untimely death in 2008, so it's nice to see and hear so many interviews and commentaries with him on this disc.
There are two audio commentaries, one with just Minghella and the other with Minghella, writer Michael Ondaatje and producer Saul Zaentz. The commentary with Ondaatje and Minghella is particularly interesting, given how strange a transition it was between the book and the movie. There is a featurette on Ondaatje himself and another featurette of interviews on how difficult it was to adapt his unconventional novel into a more typical Hollywood structure. There is a short documentary on the real-life Count Laszlo de Almásy, a geographer and explorer in the 30s.
Even more interviews abound in "Filmaker Conversations," which include more talks with Minghella, Ondaatje, and editor Walter Murch. Academy Award-winning designer Stuart Craig is also profiled, as well as photographer Phil Bray. There are twenty minutes of Minghella discussing deleted scenes (ostrich, anyone?) as well as the usual hour-long Making-of featurette.
It's a treasure trove of extras, worthy of fifteen years of reflection on this rich, poetic movie.
"The English Patient" is on sale January 31, 2012 and is rated . Drama, Romance, War. Directed by Anthony Minghella. Written by Michael Ondaatje, Anthony Minghella. Starring Colin Firth, Juliette Binoche, Jurgen Prochnow, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Ralph Fiennes, Willem Dafoe.
