The English Patient

TWO MARTINI MINIMUM

Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize-winning The English Patient is delicate, elegant but, in the end, too derivative; its deluxe romantic twaddle and parched obfuscation seem to want to borrow, just for starters, from Wuthering Heights, from Hemingway, from Casablanca, from Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. About a quarter way into it, your thirst activates and what you wouldn’t give for a double of anything handy. This may partly explain those Oscars: producer Saul Zaentz gambled the movie could earn votes as a great cocktail picture. At boozed brunches, lady Academy members get together to soak their panties over Ralph Fiennes, over his aphrodisiac hands and virile fingernails, over his icon airs. Here’s an actor with more smoldering ambiguity than any other in recent years. Had Fiennes played the real Count Almásy as he was—a scoundrel, both politically and sexually—the attraction of carnality would be legit. Instead, and apparent in most of his performances, the actor’s pulling a veil over himself and what seems to happen is he gets smaller and less significant than anyone he’s acting with; he’s become a broodingly vacant matinee idol. (His good fortune is photographer John Seale framing him as a poster boy.) Told via flashback, the adulterous affair between Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas as married Katharine has its moments, the most amusing resulting from one of their liaisons: parting after a hot quickie during which we hear a Xmas carol, Thomas comes across her unaware husband Colin Firth who boobishly tells her how much he loves her and you wonder if he’ll detect the scent of sex. In left profile, Thomas looks like a much lovelier Andrea Mitchell, in full she could be Cameron Diaz’s mother, and those huge protuberances steal a few seconds too many. Blossoming into one of the screen’s true beauties, Juliette Binoche as nurse Hanna is a respite for our sand-clogged eyes, and Willem Dafoe quite adequate as thumbless, morphine-addicted Caravaggio. The English Patient has the look of an epic but not the scale, due to some very deliberate proportioning: production designer Stuart Craig keeps the sets and Seale the locales from overwhelming. (Production designs in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain are controlled, too.) Walter Murch’s editing is in sync with director Minghella; it’s difficult to assess who should get the credit for keeping the zigzagging from driving us to the loony bin. For all its posturing, which has something to do with Almásy’s love of Herodotus, known as the father of history who believed we’re all ruled by fate and chance and nothing, not even human affairs, are stable, and the certainty of the gods punishing arrogance, The English Patient as novel is overliterary and convoluted, unlike Papa, but the movie’s really not much more than A Farewell to Arms as highfalutin soap.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com