‘The English Patient’ Is Best Kind Of Romance
“The English Patient” is an epic. That’s Movie Critic Code for “long.”
It begins with a stunning shot of a biplane flying over zaftig, almost humanly curved sand dunes. It’s Tunisia, the country to which the title character (Ralph Fiennes) keeps returning in his dreams.
A dying World War II pilot who was burned badly in a crash, he flashes back to his one, great love (Kristin Scott Thomas), while a selfless nurse (Juliette Binoche) cares for him and a drifter (Willem Dafoe) wonders why the patient can’t - or won’t - remember who he is. It seems the English patient is not English, and that he has many other secrets.
If there’s any book that seems unlikely to make it to the movies, it’s “The English Patient.” Set almost entirely in the patient’s fevered brain, it has precious little plot or character development. But, in transferring it to the screen, writer/director Anthony Minghella (“Truly, Madly, Deeply”) takes the time-honored book-to-movie route: He concentrates on the romance.
Thomas delivers with a sexy, direct performance. Fiennes’ spareness is a good match for her, expressing the pain beneath the patient’s immobile mask of a face. The movie is a bit too chilly and remote and - well, British - but Fiennes breaks through that reserve in the movie’s wrenching finale, when we find out what was happening in that biplane over the desert.
“The English Patient” asks a lot of unanswerables, but it has a thrilling scene in which an explosives expert named Kip tries to defuse a bomb that literally has his name on it, and the sequence in which Kip and the nurse come together is the most vividly imagined romantic scene of the year.
In many ways, this is an old-fashioned movie in the “Casablanca”/”For Whom the Bell Tolls” vein, but it’s never sentimental and the actors never push the emotions. A film about how war messes up the lives of good men and women, it’s the best kind of romance - one that leaves room for the audience to feel something, too.
xxxx “THE ENGLISH PATIENT” Location: Newport Cinemas Credits: Directed by Anthony Minghella, starring Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe Running time: 2:42 Rating: R
OTHER VIEWS Here is what other critics say about “The English Patient:” Jeff Millar/Houston Chronicle: “The English Patient” is the real thing: a sweeping, intense romance driven by a passion so elemental that vast geopolitical events are like gnats before it. Kenneth Turan/Los Angeles Times: “The English Patient” captivates as only the grandest and most consuming passions can. The heart is an organ of fire indeed. Duane Byrge/The Hollywood Reporter’ A sweeping and breathtakingly vivid distillation of a complex novel of love and war, Miramax’s “The English Patient” is a sublime and complex masterwork.