Welcome to another edition of the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! Still plugging away at some older films I missed when they were new...
Today's subject is The English Patient, an epic romantic war drama that pulled in a staggering twelve Oscar nominations and walked away with nine awards, including Best Picture. This was a film I resented at the time due to the fact that it beat out Fargo (a film I still consider basically perfect), but you can't form an intelligent opinion of a movie without seeing it, now can you?
The English Patient was written and directed by Anthony Minghella (based on the 1992 novel), and stars Ralph Fiennes, Kristen Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche, and Willem Dafoe. The story concerns both the lead-up to and aftermath of a plane crash, more precisely a biplane shot down by the Germans during World War II. Of the plane's two passengers only one (Fiennes) survives, with severe burns all over his body. He is taken to an Italian monastery and cared for by a French-Canadian nurse, who coaxes out of him some details of who he is and why he was in that plane. Over the course of the film's 160-plus minutes we learn that although he speaks with an English accent, he is actually a Hungarian map-maker named Lazslo Almasy, stationed in North Africa in the late 1930s. Almasy fell in love with another man's wife and the two had an affair, which the husband eventually discovered. As this backstory is being recounted a wounded Canadian intelligence agent named Caravaggio arrives on the scene, showing great interest in Almasy and suspecting him of being the reason for Caravaggio's capture and torture at the hands of the Germans. Meanwhile the nurse begins to fall in love with a Sikh bomb squad engineer stationed in the area.
This is one of those old-school David Lean-style epics, large in scope and full of big on-location cinematography (specifically Italy and Tunisia, where I think they made use of some of the same locations as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark). The performances are all very strong, particularly Fiennes and Thomas as the illicit couple who have an intense chemistry together. The storytelling is methodically paced and the slow doling out of information mostly kept my engagement. But I did find the film a bit tedious and perhaps self-important at times, as though it cared much more deeply about these characters than it gave the audience reason to. I wasn't moved to much emotion by the star-crossed lovers and the Fiennes character either isn't sympathetic enough to identify with or sinister enough for the third-act reveals to land as they should. I'm not quite sure which.
The film tries all at once to be a war epic, a romance and a mystery and I think maybe it would've worked better as one or two of those things. I didn't find myself all that attached to the nurse character or the bomb tech, thus the focus on their budding romance felt like it could've been left out. I think a smaller and leaner scope would've served the film better.
But overall it's certainly a well-made and well-acted film with an unconventional story progression. It is, however, no Fargo. Not by a longshot.
I give The English Patient *** out of ****.
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