Even with intelligent directing, a failed conversion

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2004)

After having read a novel focused so completely on imagery and sensory detail, my first reaction might also be to desperately desire to see it in a performance worthy of reality. But it is folly to believe that the written version of 'The English Patient' can ever conceivably be adapted to film, that its characters can ever be personified, or that its emotional tension can ever be imitated.
Anthony Minghella and the film's production crew do a sufficient and even commendable job piecing together the skeletal necessities of the extramarital romance between Almasy and Katharine, and I was almost extremely impressed that all the novel's most poignant emotional moments and scenes defining the most important aspects of each character were included in this film adaptation; however, the literary work is so well written that it would be impossible to have a movie without them. Even the medicine man in the desert encased in his jacket of glass bottles and ground peacock bone makes his necessary appearance, further proving that this film was produced solely for a bibliophile's wish to share the daydreams in his head.
'The English Patient' in book form is a study in the mind's capacity to appreciate the physical world around it; the mind of the film-going audience member can't participate in this study, as subtle emotional intensity and incredible imagery are force-fed to the audience and shackled to an immobile plot line. Chronological sense and order is created out of a confused amalgamation of anecdotes and memories trapped inside the dying mind of the English patient, and causes some otherwise good acting performances to go to waste.
The worst tragedy of the creation of the film is the omission of much of the relationship between the Sikh and Hana, the young Canadian nurse in need of some humanity other than the grim realities of war. The relationship does not begin with much fanfare, and ends with even less, the Sikh riding off with a neutral smile. The film glosses over the Sikh's history as a sapper and leaves out any mention of the dropping of the atomic bomb, an event that further separates the Western from the Eastern world and causes Kip, the Sikh, to ride off and leave everything Western, his disarming equipment and his affection for Hana, behind in Italy.
Minghella directs his actors with flair and intelligence, but in the end, the film is really a bland, more structural version of Michael Ondaatje's book.