Back when Seinfeld was on, the show did episodes with a plotline involving one of the characters having some problems around an eventual Best Picture winner. One of those was for Schindler’s List, and the joke there was about disrespectful behavior during an acclaimed film about the Holocaust. The other was for The English Patient, and the joke there was Elaine Benes couldn’t stand the movie, and yet people kept dragging her to see it. Her job was even on the line at one point. The episode seemed to work off the idea that Elaine had rather boorish taste, being more interested in a made-up movie called Sack Lunch where the only hint on what it was about was a poster showing four people in a very large brown paper bag. No one else seemed interested in seeing it.
These days, I get the impression that The English Patient is not the beloved piece of cinema it may have been in the mid 90s. I know at least one person who actively says Elaine was right about it. But I like to make up my own mind, and it’s leaving HBO Max at the end of the month.
As it is, it didn’t take me long to figure out how much I was going to enjoy this movie. I didn’t like what I was seeing about fifteen minutes into it. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why right away, but I wasn’t liking what I was seeing.
Regardless, grieving French-Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) takes it upon herself in the closing days of World War II to care for a heavily scared amnesiac in an abandoned Italian monastery. The man (Ralph Fiennes) eventually gives out how he was a Hungarian nobleman working for the Royal Geographical Society. During those days, he found love with a woman named Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), herself in a passionless marriage to longtime friend Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth). The Hungarian, eventually revealed to be named Almasy, starts a whirlwind love affair with Katharine, one that will only end tragically because, well, look at him in the scenes wit Hana. Hana herself starts a relationship with a Sikh sapper (Naveen Andrews), and off to the side is the man named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) who lost his thumbs somewhere along the line.
That more or less is the movie, and my problem with it wasn’t necessarily the length. Director Anthony Minghella seems to be going for a David Lean-style romantic epic given the movie’s scope and run time. It comes across as some sort of cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, but it still comes across as a copy, and not a very good one. Minghella can’t quite make the desert as scenic and beautiful as Lean did for Lawrence, and Almasy doesn’t have the poetic soul of Omar Sharif’s Zhivago. The net result is a movie that plays like a copy of a copy, and it can’t do what it’s trying to do.
But the thing that bothered me the most are the actor’s performances. So many of them come across as melodramatic and overwrought. No one seems to be behaving like an actual human being, just someone who feels things very, very deeply and expressively. Why does Almasy’s story affect so many people so deeply? I can’t say that I know. There’s just something about this movie that doesn’t work the way it wants to. The English Patient isn’t the first Best Picture winner I felt didn’t deserve it, and it certainly won’t be the last. If you’re looking for something like it done well, just watch one of David Lean’s epics. They get the job done just fine, and they never feel like they’re dragging their feet. I can’t say the same for The English Patient.
Grade: C
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