The English Patient

#94 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

I promise I’m not trying to be trendy with this. I just find this film immensely boring. Elaine Benes trying to catch popcorn in her mouth while everyone else cries in the theater? Yeah, that’s me. I’ve seen it once before, in a college class nearly twenty years ago. It was a film and literature class, actually my very first class at Virginia Tech, taught by the one professor I ended up having the most throughout my college experience, a very amenable British man, and he loved this thing. He love the book. He wanted all of his books to be like Michael Ondanje’s source novel. I cannot, for the life of me, remember my reaction to the film at that time, but I definitely didn’t love it. This time, though? I have a very potent reaction. It’s negative.

This is the triumph of Harvey Weinstein’s efforts to acutely politicize the process around the Academy voting for its annual awards. There are obvious positive traits to be had, for sure, but so much of the film simply does not work that it’s amazing that The English Patient could beat something like Fargo or even Secrets & Lies. It’s a largely uninteresting romance that drags for roughly two hours before its revealed that the male character is a complete and utter monster of moral equivalence, which is fascinating since the Academy had just awarded Schindler’s List with the Best Picture Oscar after having depicted how evil the Nazis really were, which also starred Ralph Fiennes.

The titular English patient is the Hungarian Almasy (Fiennes), an invalid burn victim being taken care of in an Italian medical hospital with Hana (Juliette Binoche) as his main nurse. When circumstances convince Hana to keep the patient in an abandoned monastery in the countryside while the rest of the medical column moves northwards in the final months of the war in Europe against the Axis Powers. It is in this monastery that Almasy reveals his history in Africa as a member of a cartographer’s club out to map the deserts of Africa for the English crown with his partner Madox (Julian Wadham). When Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth) and his wife Katharine (Kristen Scott Thomas) arrive as the newest members of the club, the quiet, reserved, sarcastic, believing in nothing Almasy is given something to believe in: love.

Sorry if I throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Here’s the thing about this film: I think it’s one of those trashy romances that gets hyped up with high production values and a reserved tone that never actually divorces it from its trashy core of infidelity and base appeal. Of course, that’s a fine line to ride when something like The Godfather comes from a trashy novel or Jaws comes from something similar, but The English Patient is viewed as a work of literature, but it’s still a Harlequin Romance told with some poetry.

Anyway, my central problem with the film is that the romance itself is kind of awful. Almasy and Katharine are a terrible couple from a romantic, dramatic point of view. It’s obvious from the start that he wants her. Her husband is an all around good man. Why does she want him? Because he’s younger and better looking than Geoffrey? Because he’s more exciting? Well, the story, told mostly in flashback, is largely from Almasy’s point of view, so I guess there may be a reason we don’t get an explanation other than her marriage is safe (though it can’t be dull since he takes her around the world on his adventures, right?). It’s largely told in meaningful looks where Fiennes actually doesn’t do much (that will change), and things of import about their attraction are supposed to be communicated, all leading up to the night they have to spend in a car in a sandstorm where they connect. This escalates until, with Geoffrey gone on a secret mission for the English crown, they end up finally making love where Almasy reveals something of the monster within by pushing her away which, of course, doesn’t work, and they continue their affair.

You see…I just don’t care. It’s more than the fact that Katharine is cuckolding a decent man, it’s that both characters are largely…boring. Their romance is dull. It simply doesn’t connect because neither seemed to be particularly unhappy beforehand.

The other side of the story is the stuff in the monastery, and it’s much more competently done. I don’t love the little romance that bubbles up between Hana and the Indian bomb defusal expert Kip (Naveen Andrews), but it’s the sort of romantic storytelling that kind of works. Extract it from the film and show it as its own story, and I’d give it two and a half out of four stars. It’s fine. Nothing great, but that scene in the church with Kip lifting Hana up to see the pictures by flare is really something nice. It’s also almost two hours into an interminable love story about two awful, uninteresting people set hundreds of miles away on another continent.

And then the moral equivalence starts, and it’s mind-bogglingly disconnected from reality, the work of a cosmopolitan who would rule the world in peace as long as everyone thought the same way he did. You see, Geoffrey crashes his plane with Katharine in it in a fit of rage and despair because he discovers the affair deep in the desert. Geoffrey dies. Almasy saves Katharine, but her ankle is broken, and he cannot transport her. So, he leaves her in a cave with the promise of returning, going off to the British after days of walking in the desert who arrest him because the war with Germany has started, he has a foreign sounding name, and he demands their car. He gets away, sells out completely to the Germans because the English made him their enemy, and he gets back to Katharine to discover that she’s already dead. I don’t know how much time passed over all of this (it’s unclear, but it could actually be weeks), but with Katharine alone in a cave with some water, a broken ankle, and potential venomous snakes around or simple infection from, you know, her broken, untreated ankle, she was probably dead within a couple of days. And he says to Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), the mysterious figure out to find him and kill him because he gave all of these maps to the Germans that he’d been making (though how he got them is a bit unclear since he escaped without them from the British) that it didn’t matter which side lost thousands of lives since it’s all the same. Remember, this is four years after the Academy awarded Schindler’s List Best Picture.

It goes from boring to outright stupid in its simplistic philosophy about how we’d all have peace without borders, a fetishization of the natural world that’s actually outright childish. (Borders are just lines on maps? Say that to every river, coast, or mountain range that’s, you know, a border.) And the movie just lets it slide because no one involved thought that Englishmen fighting Nazis were more worthy of life than Nazis was a bad idea.

This movie is, really, pure trash. It’s dressed up really nicely, though. It’s filmed impeccably by Anthony Minghella and his DP John Seale, but it’s all in service to a story that goes from boring to childishly misguided about the world as justification for a doomed exercise.

Is this worse than Cimarron? It’s close…but this does look better and the Hana and Kip subplot is nice.

Rating: 1/4