Disappointing - and not worth its academy awards

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2005)

Not only judging from the numerous Oscar awards (which I experienced to be sometimes misleading earlier) but also from the emphatic praises of some independent critics, I placed high expectations on this movie: It promised to present an intense, epic story on the a historical background of world war II, a story that centers around a passionate love, touching the viewer with the depth of a tragic romance.
But what a disappointment! The movie is flawed in so many ways. The slow pace that is criticized by a lot of viewers is not part of the problem itself. It would have been appropriate for this kind of story if the script writer and the director had explored the characters and their motivations more deeply and more convincingly. Unfortunately the movie remains on the surface. Moreover,the way that many elements of the plot come in makes them unbelievable, as if they were constructed only to support the overall story line.
The worst of all is - from my point of view - that the movie is unable to present the central romance between Laszlo and Katharine as anything deeper than an affair which is based on simple erotic attraction only. If it were meant in this way, I had no problem with it: Affairs that remain on this level are probably frequent in reality. However this movie tries hard to convince us of more. And it fails miserably.
It looks as if the film makers took some ingredients to produce a romantic atmosphere (diaries, candle lights, sunsets etc.) from an average TV soap, mixed everything together and hoped to come out with a romance in this simple way.
Proceeding in this way, the potential of the story for many highly dramatic moments was thrown away. There is at least one scene that would have made me cry in the context of a true drama. However watching "The English Patient" my mind was mostly dominated by the fact that everything I saw was only acting and a bit too obviously contrived.
If the script had been better, other flaws of the movie were not so important: Although much of the story presents to us people that come together at the end of a war and, during the flashbacks, we are are supposed to see people that have spent many days on an expedition in the sandy desert, everybody looks neat and clean. A convoy of new cars with soldiers in new clothes drives along the road. Badly injured soldiers seem as if they came not from the battle field, but directly from the hairdresser. Artificial light is used too often for the sake of an evenly illuminated, but unnatural picture.
All in all, this movie is much overrated. However, it is not unwatchable or insultingly stupid. In spite of the aforementioned flaws, I enjoyed it still enough to give it 6 out of 10 stars.