The English Patient

I don't have a particular attachment to The English Patient.  Before tonight, I'd never even watched this one.  I will admit, though, that this film has always held a sort of allure, mostly my own curiosity about all the fuss.

I've heard plenty of opinions ranging from the eye-rolling accusations of a snore-fest to the melty-gooey, smiley, "Ooh, I love The English Patient."  This film won 9 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, in 1997.  But I've heard just as many people knock this one as a real slog.

Probably two years ago, maybe three, I found the above edition in the used section at Half Price Books.  I don't typically "blind-buy" DVDs unless I have some reasonable assurance that I'll like the film.  I typically only do this with award winners and Criterion releases, or with the occasional blockbuster that I miss in theaters.

This isn't a foolproof rationale; I've blind-bought a few clunkers over the years.

For this film, I didn't feel assured of much of anything, what with the love-or-hate opinions and reviews I'd heard and seen over the years.  I knew the purchase would be a gamble. For some reason, possibly because I knew my wife liked the film, I brought this one home anyway.

I rarely buy DVDs these days, especially since buying my PS3 and switching almost exclusively to collecting Blu-Ray discs instead.  The Blu-Ray thing has given me plenty to wring my hands about, especially when I look downstairs and see 500 DVDs, most of which are in pristine condition and only watched a few times, if at all.

I still look around for good films to add to the collection, but only used DVDs, and only films ahead of this blog in the alphabet, and typically just Criterion or some other special limited version.  Maybe I'll grab the odd out-of-print title, or something that hasn't come to Blu-Ray yet, or whatever else I simply can't resist.

That all sounds like I'm still buying a shitload of DVDs.  Really, though, aside from the latest Criterion Eclipse Kurosawa set, I haven't bought squat on DVD lately.

Some days I feel like my collection is complete.  Fancy that!  I often talk myself out of buying DVDs when I'm in a store.  The technology is fading away.  I don't need all of this.  Another DVD means another blog entry.  By the time I get through the collection once in alphabetical order, DVDs probably will be gone and my collection will only have modest worth to me.  I often think of just ripping the whole collection to a hard drive and selling them off while they still have some value.

But that would mess up this blog, and we can't have that, right?

As far as sweeping epics set in the desert go, I much prefer Lawrence of Arabia, but my wife prefers The English Patient instead.  That's not hard to figure.  She confesses she prefers the romance of the latter to the endless shifting sand and battle scenes of the former.  She compares The English Patient to Atonement, and she's not far off — both are intensely personal dramas set against a world war.

(Side Note: I hated Atonement, but not because of the romance.  I just felt as if the narrative of the story had been yanked from under me, and that if the whole film was told from the perspective of a dishonest narrator, then how are we to believe anything in the film?  The whole picture was just bullshit.)

Now that I've seen The English Patient, I understand some of the fuss.  This really is good filmmaking, and the editing is some of the best I've ever seen, with literally dozens of time shifts in the narrative.  The cinematography is stellar, the acting is top notch...I could go on and on.  The problem, for me, is I have trouble giving a shit about these people, most of whom do despicable things to each other in the name of selfish desires.  I can't feel sorry for total shitbags.

The scene when Naveen Andrews' character, Sayid Kip, is defusing the bomb, was the only point in the film that I felt myself invested in a character.  He'd just spent a night with Juliette Binoche's character, Hana, and then he found himself trying to defuse a bomb while jubilant Allied troops drove tanks through the area, shaking the ground and giving Kip the willies while trying to cut the right wire.  I found myself attached to both characters in a meaningful way, but as for Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas' characters, I just felt empty.

For a film called The English Patient, and for a story so rooted in the flashbacks of that same character, I find myself doubting whether he is the protagonist.  A protagonist, generally speaking, maintains the moral high ground.  If that's our definition, one could make the case that Hana is the heroine rather than anybody else.  Aside from the ending, she maintains a moral center throughout, and even in the end, she's riding away, smiling, better for the experience of having known Fiennes' character.

(I've not read anything about this film, so if I sound like I'm just arriving to the Hana-is-the-protagonist party, my apologies.)

I neither loved nor hated this film, but I did find The English Patient interesting.  I had trouble caring, but I wasn't bored.  The story turns me off a little, but technically this film is astonishing.  

The English Patient easily ranks as the late Anthony Minghella's finest film; certainly, this is the one that garnered the most acclaim, with 12 Academy Award nominations and 9 wins.  Cold Mountain "only" garnered 7 nominations and one win, which is fine because Cold Mountain isn't that great.

Of the rest of Minghella's work, I've only seen The Talented Mr. Ripley (dungheap) and Breaking and Entering (only slightly less of a dungheap).  Minghella's death at 54 in 2008 certainly was tragic, but I have a hard time holding him up among the best directors of our time on the basis of one good film that really doesn't stir me that much.

Roger Ebert writes that this film stands up to repeat viewings, though.  For that reason, I'll hang on to this one.  Maybe there'll be a winter day that will call for an epic in the desert, and maybe my copy of Lawrence of Arabia won't be enough to pass the time or entertain the wife.  Maybe The English Patient will be just the ticket, and maybe after repeated viewings, I'll get all the fuss.