This past Christmas, my aunt brought several boxes of videos along with
her to the traditional family gathering. Having switched over to DVDs,
she was running out of space, so all those movies she'd taped over the
years were fair game for the rest of us. We took her up on her offer,
snagging 50 or so tapes. Among the movies was The English Patient,
about which I'd heard glowing reviews, particularly during a college
class I took on colonial literature. Going into the film, I was
intrigued; coming out, I was confused, and after a great deal of
puzzling, I'm still not sure just what to make of it.
The English Patient opens near the end of World War II when a French nurse named Hana (Juliette Binoche) takes a severely burned man (Ralph Fiennes)
under her wing, letting her comrades leave her behind so she can care
for him in what she assumes are his last days. He doesn't seem likely to
recover from his injuries, yet there is life and spirit in him still.
He has a story to tell.
So he tells it, in bits and pieces,
and we watch his tragic tale unfold in flashbacks that show him as the
handsome young Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almasy, who comes under the
spell of a beautiful woman named Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), who
is married to Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth).
The Cliftons work with the Count on some of his archaeological
expeditions, and initially Katharine and Laszlo don't get along so well,
but their passionate sniping leads to passionate other things, and when
Geoffrey finds out, life gets a whole lot harder for both of them.
Throw into the mix Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who shows up one day
shortly after Hana takes on the role of hospice nurse. We don't really
know why he's there, but he obviously has a deep personal connection to
the man lying helplessly in the bed with bandages all over him, eerily
prefiguring the faceless Voldemort, whom Fiennes portrayed in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Late in the film, we see first-hand what happened to Caravaggio to make
him so bitter, and it's probably the most grotesque sequence in a film
with its fair share of violent moments. It's one of those scenes that I
would retreat to the kitchen for if I watched the movie again, my hands
clenched over my ears to block out Dafoe's blood-curdling screams.
Creating a quartet in the present day is bomb disarmer Kip (Naveen
Andrews), a Sikh with whom Hana becomes smitten. Polite and quiet, he
treats Hana with respect, though her regard for him seems much stronger
than his for her, at least initially. I've seen most of the members of
this cast in other roles but was especially excited to see Andrews,
since my only familiarity with him was from LOST, which, like Lord of the Rings,
provided me with a long list of actors to watch out for in other
projects. I enjoyed his role here, which was a bit less complicated than
the others since there wasn't so much back story to deal with.
Oddly, three of the actors in this film - Fiennes, Dafoe and Jurgen
Prochnow - have played Jesus. (Now, if only Henry Ian Cusick had made it
into the movie somehow, we could've had someone who both played Jesus
and stars on LOST...) I assume this is mere coincidence
(especially since Fiennes' portrayal came four years after this movie),
though the film certainly explores religious themes such as redemption
and sacrifice. That said, I wouldn't consider any of the characters a
Christ figure. In fact, while Hana and Kip are likable enough, I don't
find Laszlo, Katharine, Caravaggio or Geoffrey all that sympathetic. We
watch all of them endure great suffering, and we feel sorry for them,
but... I don't know. The movie stretches on for nearly three hours, and
the minutes tick by ever so slowly. By the time it ended, I was just
glad it was over, and I can't say it had much of an emotional impact on
me. The ending left me feeling cold, and none of the gradually unveiled
secrets of the past made much of an impression on me.
I think
this is the sort of movie that's best watched twice if one wants to get a
proper appreciation for everything that's happening. Unfortunately, I
doubt I'll be delving into the movie further; my list of movies to see
continues to grow, and I just don't have time to re-watch films I didn't
like much to begin with. It takes a very patient viewer to embrace The English Patient.
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