Best Picture: #69
Original Release Date: December 6, 1996
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 42 minutes
Director: Anthony Minghella
Quick Impressions:
My senior year of high school I asked myself in shock and dismay, “Why are Billy Crystal, Tom Cruise, and Lauren Bacall the only people I recognize at the Academy Awards this year?” (In fact, I didn’t just ask myself. I asked everybody. I wouldn’t shut up about it for weeks.) I couldn’t understand how something like that could happen. We went to the movies all the time. We saw movies constantly. We had seen so many movies that year. But I hadn’t seen a single one nominated for Best Picture. (In fact, the only Best Picture nominee that I’d even heard of was Jerry Maguire.)
“This is ridiculous!” I remember complaining to my mother. “I can’t believe I’m actually happy to see Tom Cruise! At least I know him!” (When Lauren Bacall lost Best Supporting Actress to Juliette Binoche, I exploded again. “Look! Even the actress who won doesn’t know why she won!”)
I’m sure as the night wore on, I recognized more actors than the three I named, but I felt profoundly disoriented by that Oscar ceremony. For me, it was a wake-up call. I had been too busy with school. After that, I made a point of seeing every Best Picture nominee before the Oscars. (And these days, I like to see every potential nominee that I can, sometimes challenging since we live in Texas, though in the Austin area you can usually see just about everything eventually.) (Of course, you have to be willing to leave your house, so our pandemic viewing has been much more scattershot.)
We did eventually see most of the night’s big winners back in 1997. We just saw them after the Oscars. I discovered I loved Francis McDormand’s Best Actress winning performance in Fargo. And my mother loved The English Patient. She loved it so much that she dragged us to it multiple times in the theater. She was crazy about that movie. She couldn’t get enough of it. And then, one day, abruptly without warning, she decided she hated it.
So before this viewing, I had seen The English Patient several times in 1997 and then never again.
I have to say, in the twenty-four year interval, I haven’t missed it much. (I am, however, shocked to learn that it’s been almost a quarter of a century since I graduated from high school.) (It feels like an entire century!)
In 1997, I remember thinking that The English Patient made love look like an awful lot of work. First you had to get married. Only then could you truly find romance—once you thought up a way to get rid of your husband, freeing up your time for a tortured relationship with Ralph Fiennes. I much preferred Hana’s storyline (which annoyed me because I was mad that Juliette Binoche won that Oscar and not Lauren Bacall). Hana’s story didn’t paint a very cheery picture of love, either, though. To me, the moral seemed to be, “If you love someone, they’ll die. If they don’t die, they probably didn’t love you that much, but maaaybe you’ll see them again.”
Admittedly, I really wasn’t the biggest fan of The English Patient, but I’m unable to resist going to a movie theater if invited. Plus, my mom liked it so much, and I have this annoying habit of watching people watch movies, my mother specifically. (Even as an adult, I liked showing her all the movies at home that I had already seen in the theater to see how she would react to them.) (She always commented on my maddening tendency to watch people watch movies, but on reflection, I’m not sure I did that to anyone but her.) (I guess I am watching my daughter watch every single Best Picture winner. There’s that.)
I didn’t like The English Patient as much as my mother, but I did think it showcased a pretty great marriage. Colin Firth shows up, whisks you off to an exotic locale, and then says, “Well, bye darling, I’ve got to go fly off in my plane for an unspecified period of time. Have fun exploring!” To me, this sounded exceedingly convenient since I was always stuck at my house with parents and teachers constantly keeping tabs on where I was at all times. That aspect of the movie, I did find romantic. I often daydreamed of a mysterious man flying by in a plane and saying, “Come with me on an adventure. Here’s a million dollars. Now I will leave you alone.” Who could resist a proposal like that? (Just forget the part where he later returns and crashes the airplane, determined to kill us both.)
I also remember feeling very pleased with myself because I decided I understood the entire point of The English Patient. According to teenaged me, this movie is just a variation on Casablanca, except instead of all three characters trying to make the selfless choice, they all make the most selfish choice possible. (That’s why the plane crashes. Nobody gets to fly away.) (After re-watching the film, I no longer think this is exactly true, but at the time, I was sure I was a genius to have thought of it.) There is a lot of Casablanca energy. A character named Laszlo. North Africa during World War II. And a bunch of characters in the main storyline—i.e. the flashback story—whose behavior is quite selfish.
(Of course, I’m pretty self-focused this week myself as I’m rushing to proofread the formatted version of my latest novel as quickly as possible. It makes me feel pretty self-absorbed when I tell people, “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I’m extremely busy reading my own novel.” I remember the horror of my friend (now a nun) when she listened carefully to the Jennifer Lopez song “Play” in college and realized, “Wait a minute! Is she telling the DJ to play her own song?” I’m not sure the lyrics must be interpreted that way, but she was sure. Remembering her bemused outrage, I worry I’m exhibiting a similar level of narcissism when I spend every waking moment reading my own novel! But I don’t want to publish it with a bunch of formatting errors! And I also don’t want to leave the company who did the formatting indefinitely awaiting my response.)
The Good:
After re-watching, I half suspect that The English Patient may be the worst Best Picture winner of the 1990s, or anyway, the weakest. While we were watching, I found myself getting incredibly excited for Titanic (another film I hadn’t seen since the late 90s. That was telling to me because I was not someone who went wildly crazy over Titanic at the time.)
I’ve never read the novel The English Patient, but sometimes I wonder if I would like it better than the film since it did win the Booker prize, and the movie does contain some lovely, melodic turns of phrase. I remember writing, “The heart is an organ of fire” in the diary I kept at the time. (I scattered quotations and doodles on the pages and then wrote the text around them. This one was particularly fun to illustrate with colored pencils.)
The line I find somewhat more meaningful is Hana’s, “Then I tell myself, ‘He spends all day searching. In the night, he wants to be found.’”
“I like that line,” I told my daughter. “I think it’s romantic.”
“I think it’s stupid,” she replied. She’s not big on movie romances in general, and (big surprise) she didn’t like this one either.
Actually The English Patient contains two key romances, but it’s the one at the center of the story my daughter hated the most. Surprisingly, the story’s structure itself is what I find most interesting. (Actually, is that surprising? That seems to be happening a lot lately. Maybe I’m just interested in narrative structure.) In the frame story, we get one romance, involving two sympathetic characters. It’s hard not to like Hana (Juliette Binoche) and Kip (Naveen Andrews). She’s a nurse during WWII who devotes herself to helping others, even though everyone she loves (her fiancé, her friend) dies horribly. He’s a soldier who also devotes his life to helping others by risking his life finding and deactivating mines. (Eventually someone he loves dies, too, his colleague and friend. It’s World War II. A lot of people are dying.) These two have a reasonably compelling romance. In fact, everyone in the frame story is far more sympathetic than those in the main story (including “the English patient” himself for some odd reason). There’s no reason to root against any of them. (The shadiest one is Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), a thief with no thumbs who may be looking for revenge, but even he turns out to be sympathetic.)
The thing is, the frame story on its own would not make a satisfying movie. It’s kind of boring. (It shouldn’t be. One person nurses heavily wounded soldiers during the war. Another defuses mines. Those are not boring jobs.) Still what draws us in far more is the backstory of the mysterious patient Hana is caring for. He’s a heavily-scarred burn victim who claims to have amnesia and needs a comfortable place to die. His presence is a complete riddle, and that’s why we watch. An air of mystery surrounds him, and that makes him romantic. We know he must have a story, so we long to hear it. We want to learn the secrets of his past.
At least for me, though, when those secrets are revealed, they turn out to be pretty hollow. Yes, he does have an unusual (and dramatic) story, but overall, Hana and Kip have lives that are more interesting and more productive. I think the titular English patient is more compelling the less we know about him. Once he’s told his entire story, learning about his past no longer seems particularly alluring. It’s compelling only because it’s mysterious. (Of course, it’s mysterious. The narrator is a taciturn amnesiac!)
But I do like the way the cinematography highlights the story structure. The film won nine Oscars, including Best Cinematography, and I think that one’s deserved. (I’m not saying the others aren’t. The score by Gabriel Yared is also fantastic (sometimes). It’s just that I find many elements of the film kind of underwhelming. My daughter complained about the cinematography, too. She didn’t find the desert captivating. To be fair, though, I think she was comparing it to Lawrence of Arabia. Most films would not measure up to that standard.)
I like the film’s use of visual symbolism. The story is about a cartographer, and the whole movie is a map. The opening sequence shows us sand dunes that my daughter initially mistook for a human body. Count Laszlo Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) is obsessed with a particular spot at the base of the throat of Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). There’s an indentation there. When they’re in the market together, he buys her a thimble, and she choses to wear it covering that spot. Just before they begin their affair, they discover a cave together, and near the end of Katharine’s life, he returns her to the cave. The film is obsessed with this idea of a depression, a sunken spot in the sand, a recess. And when Almásy tells his story to Caravaggio, Hana watches and listens attentively from the floor above him. She looks down through an opening formed by broken floor slats in the center of the screen to where he rests in his bed below. Visually and narratively, the story winds itself around this indentation in the center. The hole in the floor leads us back through the sand dunes, the cave, the thimble, the indentation below Katharine’s throat. There’s a terrible recess in the center of the story, an emptiness. And we have to be led through layers and layers until we find the heart of the story. And until Hana moves all the way down through the layers of that tightly focused story, until she makes it to the empty center, she can’t look outward again and move on with her life. For most of the movie, Katharine is waiting for us in that cave. Until Almásy has looked all the way into the past, he can’t move on to the next life. And until he moves on, Hana can’t move on with her life, either. She isn’t ready. He’s trapped in a tightening purgatorial spiral, and she’s similarly imprisoned by her grief and despair. (In some ways it’s like the real treasure is the epiphany that you no longer have to stare at the map, obsessively searching for the treasure!)
The performances in the film are good (though they don’t seem that special to me. Three of them are Oscar nominated (which I find somewhat astonishing). (That sounds more insulting than I intended. It’s just that usually when so many actors from a film are nominated, the characters are more memorable.)
Ralph Fiennes is a good actor, but I find his character so frustrating and worry I’m not appreciating his performance because of that frustration. (Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca has the same effect on me.) “I could tell you what I’m thinking and feeling, but…I won’t. I don’t like talking, you see.” Okay, but aren’t you the narrator? “I don’t remember who I am. I have amnesia.” Okay. I find it so challenging when people refuse to communicate. Then again, as Geoffrey, the wronged husband, Colin Firth gets on my nerves even more. (“I love you so much that I’m going to crash this plane and kill everyone!” Surely there’s a better choice than that! Why not sit down with your wife and have a painful conversation? Better yet, sit down with Almásy and have a conversation. That’s bound to be painful! He hates conversations! That’s a far better punishment than trying to crash a plane on top of him.)
I can appreciate that Fiennes does have a challenging role (especially because of the frame story). And I can also appreciate that Almásy is a taciturn cartographer. So rather than narrate most of the story, he remembers it as a series of compelling images, rich in symbolism. That works as a narrative device. I just don’t find him a particularly compelling character. If I were out wandering around, exploring caves in the desert, I would have an affair with someone else.
In fact, I would probably have an affair with Kristin Scott Thomas. I do see her appeal. Katharine is one of the more interesting characters in the film. We see her through Almásy’s eyes. (Most of the time, he doesn’t narrate. He simply recollects.) (At least, I assume he’s recollecting. I’m not entirely sure why we see scenes featuring Colin Firth that he didn’t witness. Maybe some of these sequences in the past are simply flashbacks, viewed by the audience alone.) The English Patient does manage to make Katharine look pretty alluring. And because we’re seeing what Almásy finds fascinating about her, we begin to understand him as a character, too. (I don’t know that it’s healthy to define yourself entirely through someone else, but I guess by the end of the movie, he’s given up all pretense of being healthy.) He’s used to finding interesting features in the desert, and this time in the desert, he finds Katharine, so he explores her, and he tries to keep a record of her. That’s what he does. He makes maps. He doesn’t believe in ownership. When he finds something, it belongs to him for a time. That’s why he feels he has a right to explore Katharine (just like he has a right to explore the cave). That’s also why he doesn’t mind giving maps to the Germans. We discover Almásy through the map he makes of Katharine and his relationship with her.
On this watch, I couldn’t help noticing how miserable Katharine is at almost every moment of this film. Her affair with Almásy never seems to make her happy. Almost right from the start, it makes her desperately unhappy, and she only seems to get more and more miserable as it continues. I like the way Scott Thomas plays the character. At first, she appears to be sort of happy, but gradually (as we get closer) we see that she’s actually been unhappy from a distance. The more and more intimate Almásy’s relationship with her becomes, the closer and closer he gets to her, the more accurately he depicts her emotional topography. Turns out there are a lot more valleys than peaks. She is not a happy woman. Scott Thomas reveals this unhappiness gradually, with great subtlety, always showing us just a tiny bit more at a time. Overall, I find her work stronger than Binoche’s Oscar-winning performance (because the character seems more difficult to portray). Hana is easily the more sympathetic character, though.
Best Scene:
Two scenes from the film always stick in my mind. One is the scene in which Katharine slips away to be with Almásy, making an excuse that she’s been overcome by the heat. Another (which happens near the same time in the film) is the moment when Almásy tells her about his obsession with a particular place on her body and claims it for himself. (This is somewhat contradictory behavior since he has said previously that he doesn’t believe in ownership.) I’d call this the strongest part of the movie simply because it’s what stuck with me for twenty-four years.
Two other scenes jump out at me now. One is the terrible moment of foreshadowing in the desert when Katharine and Almásy endure a sandstorm together. Then they somehow forget all about their friends—who are currently buried alive. (Just slipped their mind, I guess!) It’s fortunate that these friends are inside a car (just one of the movie’s many compelling recesses). Despite his carelessness, Almásy is able to come to their rescue in time. Things won’t work out so well later on.
The other scene I find immensely compelling is when Katharine tells everyone a story from Herodotus, which seems to suggest that adultery might lead to an extremely happy ending (for everyone but the wronged husband). Katharine tells this one story, and then she writes a few sentences in Almásy’s book. Yet somehow she manages to be one of the most compelling narrators in the film.
Best Action Sequence:
Even my daughter likes Hana and Kip’s date in the church. I remember watching as a teenager thinking, “I would love to go on a date like that. That would make me feel like Indiana Jones.”
Also captivating, of course, is the moment when Geoffrey Clifton crashes the plane.
The scene featuring Kip having some trouble defusing a bomb is also pretty suspenseful (and probably a turning point in Hana’s life). She seems to benefit psychologically from the outcome of this scene, and then the later moment of tragedy with Hardy (Kevin Whately). It helps her to see that death isn’t just stalking the people she loves. Everyone just keeps dying all the time at random because of the situation. She isn’t cursed. She’s just living through World War II.
Best Scene Visually:
Three moments stick out to me, the opening sequence when we see the undulating sand dunes that look almost like the curves of a human body, the much later scene when Almásy carries the injured Katharine along a ledge to a cave, and a shot we see more than once, Hana looking down through the missing floor slats at the patient in his bed in the room below. The movie also makes interesting use of windows.
My daughter, I should note, was decidedly unimpressed by the cinematography. (She complained that it looked like the 90s just pretending to be the 30s and 40s. Many times she compared it unfavorably to Lawrence of Arabia. She did not like the way the desert looked. Not even the stark shot of Almsáy carrying Katharine to the cave impressed her.
(Part of this surely was because she was annoyed with Katharine. “Why did you hate me?” Katharine asked, prompting my daughter to observe disdainfully, “This is a very casual conversation after you’ve left your husband for dead in a plane in the desert!”
A moment later when Katharine declared, “I’ve always loved you,” my daughter suggested, “Throw her off the cliff!”
I told her, “You’re merciless!”
She scoffed, “She’s still in white! Wasn’t she in blue when she was on the plane?”
I joked, “But those were her flying clothes! She likes to make an entrance in white. She had to change to be rescued.”)
That’s another thing I should probably mention, something my daughter called out many times. Katharine almost always dresses in white. (I don’t know if this is symbolism or simply practical in the relentless desert sun.)
The Negatives:
“I don’t like the visuals in that movie,” complains my daughter from the couch where she is allegedly doing her homework. “All you see is a bunch of waves all the time! If you want a beautiful desert movie, you need to watch Lawrence of Arabia. This movie wastes the desert. They go all the way out to…wherever they are…”
“I think the desert sequences are filmed in Tunisia,” I supplied.
“Isn’t that Tatooine?” she realized.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure that’s why the movie kept making me want to watch The Phantom Menace.” (I see him carrying Katharine along those cliffs and think, “Watch out for Sand People! Shouldn’t there be some pod racing coming up? Don’t fall in the Sarlacc pit!”)
I agree with her that The English Patient does not look as breathtaking as Lawrence of Arabia. (What does?) But I do enjoy the rich visual symbolism and the shot composition overall. She and I will have to agree to disagree about the cinematography. (Admittedly, there are moments when the score upstages the cinematography. But there’s plenty to love about John Seale’s cinematography as far as I’m concerned.)
My main problem with the film is that in the end, it simply leaves me cold. There are so many people telling stories in this movie, so many narrators living through so many extraordinary events. Yet we get to the end, and it’s all kind of…I don’t know…anticlimactic? In some ways, I think that’s kind of the point. The story gets its power from its slow reveal, not from its actual content. It’s kind of a narrative strip tease. The presentation is what we find so alluring. My daughter laments from the couch, “It’s too sad.” But I think it’s not sad enough. I think Hana is hanging out in that monastery looking for meaning, and I don’t think Almásy ultimately has very much to offer her. (In fairness, he tells her that himself multiple times.)
I don’t understand why Almsáy leaves Katharine in the cave. I’m also confused about why he was stranded out in the middle of the desert in the first place. I assume Clifton was supposed to pick him up in the plane. (That’s probably a detail my daughter and I missed when we were joking about the dialogue.) But why can’t he use a bit of the wrecked plane to make a sled and pull Katharine with him across the desert? (He can cover her body so that she doesn’t get horribly burned.) This seems like a much better idea to me. So much can go wrong when you leave someone alone in a cave for multiple days. Frankly, if I had a broken ankle, a broken wrist, and some broken ribs, I would see if that ankle would bear weight or scheme up ways to cobble together some kind of crutch. I realize a four day walk across the desert is arduous. But when your injuries consist of a few broken bones, you should not be setting yourself up to die alone in a cave. There has got to be a more practical way to proceed.
“I promise, I’ll come back for you,” he says to her. “I promise, I’ll never leave you.”
“That’s contradictory,” my daughter said.
I told her, “Just wait till we get to Titanic.”
Almásy seems so confused about what he’s responsible for, and that just annoys me. He insists he wasn’t working with the Germans. (But he was because he gave them a bunch of maps.) He says that maybe he did kill the Cliftons. (But he didn’t. Geoffrey decided to crash a plane on him. No one made that decision but Geoffrey.) Almásy just frustrates me, and don’t get me started on Geoffrey! He explains that in the past, he’s been Katharine’s friend, a shoulder to cry on during her many romances. Then he finally convinced her to marry him. Should it be that big a surprise, then, that she’s not actually in love with him? Might there not be a better solution than killing everyone? If you insist on murder, why not kill just Almásy? That would be so easy. In fact, Geoffrey could probably accuse Almásy of being a German spy and get him right out of the picture. Or does Geoffrey think that story from Herodotus is his wife’s standard for the men in her life? If you love me, kill for me? I think it’s weird behavior from him, and I wish we got a little more from his point of view. (I understand that a broken heart can lead to acts of violence, but this is so rash and extreme from a man who has a fairly distinguished career and seemingly a lot to live for even if his marriage does fall apart.) I also find it a bit strange that he drags his wife out into the middle of the desert in a foreign country and then just leaves her alone with a bunch of random men. I understand that he’s doing important work. And I’ll admit that if my husband left me alone in the desert with a bunch of random men, I would be very unlikely to have an affair with any of them. But I still think behaving that way is setting your marriage up to fail when you haven’t even been married a year yet!)
The other character who puzzles me is Caravaggio. I like Willem Dafoe in the role, and I like the character. Honestly I find him so interesting that I found myself thinking, “Maybe this story should have been about Caravaggio.” I do find it fascinating that a character named Caravaggio sheds light on some of the shadier parts of the story. (I think of chiaroscuro, and all of the shaded contours in the images that Almásy remembers.) So many characters in this film have lived unusually eventful lives. Why is it Almásy’s story we focus on?
Overall:
I said The English Patient might be the weakest Best Picture winner of the 1990s, but that might have been too harsh. Really, the only thing I don’t like about it is the terrible feeling of emptiness it leaves me with. The whole thing is just so anticlimactic. And although the beginning of the story tantalizes us with hints of exotic, mysterious romance, in the end, the love story we get turns out to be not that romantic because once the affair begins, Katharine is always miserable. Surely love doesn’t have to make you miserable, does it? This movie is atmospheric and draws a compelling map. I’m just not sure that map leads anywhere I want to go. The performances are pretty good, though. (As I said, I actually like Scott Thomas a bit better than the Oscar winning Binoche, though Hana is by far the more sympathetic character.) At moments, the score is magnificent, and although this film is no Lawrence of Arabia, the cinematography is sometimes quite compelling, too.