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Look Closer...
Howdy folks, John here. Regular readers will know that awhile back, Hollyfeld and I attempted to predict the Academy Awards nominations for 2001. We placed a little wager on the outcome, with the loser having to watch and review The English Patient. Since I'm writing this article, you can figure out who lost. So let's get right to the carnage, shall we?
Mysteriously, The English Patient was a major hit at awards shows. The Academy Awards, for instance, handed out Oscars for Supporting Actress, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Director, Editing, Score, Sound and Picture. That's nine statues. Nine. That's a staggering total for a film nearly three hours long that adds new meaning to the word dull. Watching this picture could be equated to the Chinese Water Torture. But let's set aside the insults for a moment to actually get the details out of the way.
The film opens on a biplane flying over a desert. It is eventually spotted by German troops and shot down. Locals find the wreckage and its sole survivor (Ralph Fiennes), a man horribly burned beyond recognition. Eventually he is taken to a medical unit where he is cared for and assumed to be English, simply because of the plane he was found in. The man himself has no idea as his memory is gone. He is cared for by a French Canadian nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche). The man is placed on a hospital train for transport home. Already near death, he doesn't handle travel well and Hana convinces her superiors to let her tend to him in an abandoned monastery. Here the two stay for some time, as the man begins slowly to remember. They are eventually joined by Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), an intelligence agent from the same neighborhood as Hana. He is suspiciously interested in the burned man. Finally, joining the little group is Kip, an Indian soldier who specializes in diffusing bombs.
The movie flashes back and forth in time incessantly. Hana reads to the burned man from his only possession, a copy of Herodotus. This jogs his memory and we slowly learn the story of how Count Laszlo de Almasy came to be in this position. He is a Hungarian nobleman, one who spends his idle time (which is to say, all of it) wandering the desert with an expedition seeking to map the Sahara. His world is thrown off stride when the expedition is joined by Geoffrey (Colin Firth) and Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). He is quickly smitten with her and eventually she returns the sentiment. They begin a long affair that has much to do with his current condition.
The film's convoluted time structure is designed to keep feeding us the story of Almasy in little tidbits, presumably to keep the audience wanting more. Personally though, I found this pointless. It took little imagination to observe his arrogant manner and plot a course to his extra crispy present condition. Oh sure, there are a couple extra twists thrown in at the last second to add some depth to the story but hardly surprising in the overall scheme of things.
Critics have gone on and on over this film's extraordinary romance. I think Miramax might have been pumping crack into the air systems during press screenings. This movie was about as romantic as a fat hairy-backed guy slouched on the sofa in tattered underwear with a bag of Cheetos watching rugby. The reason for this is simple. Almasy is a miserable shit. He is stiff, arrogant, pretentious and egotistical beyond imagination. I spent the majority of the film attempting to divine what attracted Katharine to him. Finally I came to the conclusion that she was attracted to him simply because the screenplay said so. I seriously can't think of any other reason for it. Generally in films, the success of a romance is found in the chemistry between the actors. Not only did I find there to be no chemistry but the sheer unpleasantness of Almasy made it impossible to believe that anyone could fall for him. Take for example a scene where Katharine is helping out at a Christmas party. Almasy hides at the fringe of the event, calling her over, begging her to leave and spend time with him. She says she can't and he tells her to fake illness. "Swoon. I'll catch you," he says. She wanders off into the middle of the crowd, swoons and has to be helped out by some old women. Apparently the good Count has a less than literal interpretation of his own words. When eventually someone smacks him upside the head with the butt of a rifle, I felt like cheering. This should have happened earlier and often.
The failure of the romance is simply a symptom of the film's greatest flaw. It's dull. Dull beyond belief. This is the sort of film that has me checking my watch incessantly and holding it to my ear to make sure it's actually still working because surely time cannot really be moving this slowly. This is a film snob's movie. Nothing happens. We flash back in time and people talk about their feelings. Then we flash forward and talk more about feelings. Then we flash back and talk about different feelings. And then flash forward again.... You get the idea. It goes on and on and for great stretches of time and nothing of interest actually happens. The time structure is supposedly keeping us in the dark on the action, when in fact that there is no action. When we reach the end, it turns out that what the convoluted structure has been hiding is that Almasy is actually even more despicable then we previously thought. Personally I didn't need to hang out for nearly three hours for that little nugget of information.
Lightly sprinkled through the tale of Almasy is a growing romance between Hana and Kip. This might have been interesting if it hadn't been treated as an after thought. Hana is a likable enough soul, ignoring of course her belief that she's cursed, causing everyone she loves to be killed. This raises questions as to just how brightly her bulb is glowing. She is in a war after all. People have a tendency to die with great regularity in war. I also have to question how it is that she can essentially abandon her unit with little complaint from her superior officers. How often do nurses get dropped off to take a few days to watch a patient die?
The budding romance between Hana and Kip could have easily formed a more engaging core to the movie. Kip however gets shoved aside pretty hard by the screenplay, reducing him to just being a good looking officer that catches Hana's eye. Not too hard really, when her options are the Colonel's secret recipe and the thumbless wonder. I haven't really touched on Caravaggio in this review but that likely stems from confusion as to what part he plays here. Sure, when it comes to the structure of the film he serves to drive Almasy's returning memory but beyond that his presence adds nothing to the film. Dafoe is basically wasted. He works hard at it, particularly when his character is losing fingers, but ultimately it means nothing.
So let's recap, shall we? The central figure in the film is thoroughly without merit. The romance is tepid and hard to even believe. The pace of the film is glacial. The action is nearly absent. It was a film that failed on almost every level to engage me. I will say this though, the photography is excellent. The look of the movie is gorgeous. But unfortunately, great cinematography is not reason enough to recommend a film, particularly when all other elements are substandard. I can only conclude that Miramax and director Anthony Minghella pulled a fast one on audiences that should be required study for future marketing students.
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