THE ENGLISH PATIENT [1996]
A RETRO REVIEW BY: RICHARD MATICH I was in the local puplic library near my home. The librarian [an older woman] and I were disscusing the films we had liked in 1996. I said that this movie, The English Patient, was both beutiful, epic, and told in a very different way than the standard "flicks" sold by the greedy studios. She said that she thought it to be a bore. A Bore?! I, to this day, can't believe that a woman would not find this great and romantic story at least half as compelling as a man like me [a hardnosed critic] would. Director Anthony Minghella took what was a very long and "difficult" novel and made sense of it for the screen. It is wrapped in lush tan hues with grand desert and skyscapes by cinematographer John Seale. If thats not enough, veteran sound and film editor Walter Murch [Apocolypse Now, American Graffiti, and The GodFather Part II] took to chopping the complex story into a "non-linear" format. He and his team then did the hard job of making every little noise clean and clear instead of just trying to split audience's ear drums the way some movie sound is done these days. Decible levels in movie houses have risen sharply [some would say dangerously] in recent years. Ralph Fiennes plays a pilot who is shot down and badly burned. He is then cared for by a nurse played by Juliette Binoche. Her life is in turmoil because she keeps losing to early death every person she has loved dearly. Miss Binoche makes an audience care for her gentle nurse while she makes her nurse the most giving person in almost all of film history. That brings the audience a very complex and pleasing performance. She stays behind from her convoy of medical team and patients to care for this English patient. This mystery man, who keeps bringing up his own past haunted by tragic loss. Kristen Scott Thomas has the role of the woman that ignites a passionate, tored affair with this Englishman before his burns. Thomas has a screen presence harkening back to the old studio glamour days of the 30's and 40's, when the studios wanted women to be "overly stunning" so as to sell a picture to house wives, secretaries, etc. She does not quite have the power to keep viewers under her spell the way Garbo or Crawford did in their heyday, yet she is still very close. The film has you wanting to know more secrets right up to the now famous tragic end. Ladies grab your Kleenex, because The English Patient might just leave you in tears. Unless you happen to work at the library! "Promiss me you'll come back for me.-Thomas. "I promiss. I'll come back for you. I promiss. I'll never leave you."- The English Patient.
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