THE ENGLISH PATIENT
A film review by John Bauer
Copyright 1997 John Bauer
*** (out of 4)
Accepting his Oscar as producer of this year's Best Picture winner, Saul Zaentz remarked that his cup runneth over. One could almost say the same about his much-prized film. Rarely is the screen so overflowing with potent imagery, symbolism, ideas and metaphors, complex and literate storytelling, all possessed of an intelligence that invites -- even demands -- constant scrutiny, an acuity of perception and observation that must somehow yield the truth. In short, the antithesis of all things Hollywood. Yet this surfeit of signals is made to serve a rather pale and thinly realized love story whose emotional impact is as dry as a desert wind.
Ralph Fiennes is the title character, an amnesiac burn victim whose gradual return to memory, and particularly the memory of love, is the ostensible focus of the film. But despite the use of numerous flashbacks to help put the pieces of this personal puzzle together, we never learn enough about the man to feel much empathy for him. His emotional life before the story begins is an essential clue that remains withheld. The same can easily be said for every other character in the film, of which there are too many.
Juliette Binoche's nurse comes as close as this film gets to an emotional heart. At least we learn early on that she is scarred by the deaths of those close to her, and so we understand why she is eager to escape the company of her comrades in order to seek refuge in the convalescence of a mysterious, disfigured, dying stranger. Even this information is imparted so quickly and in such cursory fashion, however, that it verges on the comical.
With so many characters enjoying so little screen time, the film's 160 minutes can be taxing. Yet there is something so captivating about the sensibility behind the camera that I couldn't help but feel that greatness was in the air. Hints of it were everywhere -- in a man who hates ownership but wants desperately to possess his lover; in ancient cave paintings of swimmers copied casually by a modern-day swimmer in the Sahara; in the way the shifting sands of time obliterate everything more completely than a world war. There is enough latent meaning to supply college film students with paper topics for years. But ultimately the emotional truths writer-director Anthony Minghella was grasping for were never revealed.
In the end, I was left with the impression that I had witnessed quite an oxymoron: a haunting bore. Bore is perhaps too strong a word. But after drinking in the rich production values, the cup remains only slightly over half-full.
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