A highly romantic, layered, dramatic, beautiful experience...sometimes in excess?

Rating: 8/10 (11 February 2010)

The English Patient (1996)
This pulls out every high drama romance issue known to men and women in love, and with great sophistication and beauty. It is set in that most dramatic of times, World War II, and in the most gorgeous of places, North Africa dripping in sand and sun, and Italy in the provinces outside of Florence. The leads are sophisticated and beautiful, too, so if you don't fall in love with the scenery, and don't get sucked in by the layered and heart wrenching plot, you'll come to love at least some of the characters, played by actors of substance, with intensity.
So what could go wrong? Some will say nothing. It did win seven (seven!) Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (for the richly talented Anthony Minghella). Yet both times I saw it I was not quite absorbed. I don't think it is too long, especially, though it is long. Instead I think it is too perfect, which of course is double talk, to say that the flaw of a movie is that it is too perfect. But you can see, maybe, how a movie is just so poised and fluid and cinematically calculated it starts to feel "knowing" or somehow aware of its own perfection. Likewise with the plot, screenwritten by Minghella from a novel by Michael Ondaatje, is almost too packed with the worst and best kinds of scenes--abandoned lovers, lovers seeing lovers cheat on them, identities lost, memories told by candlelight, promises made and kept, or not kept, against the most grandiose odds and explosive circumstances. It's amazing stuff, and it begs for honesty, for some cracks in the glass.
Too much Tiffany and blood, not enough hesitation and error. Those things make for a different kind of perfection.
But then again, this is like finding the flaws in a Hitchcock film. They abound, and they might be interesting, but don't forget the whole, the parts that work, and work you over, and leave you breathless and crying if you let them. The English Patient rises above itself many times. Juliette Binoche is easily the most compelling character in her honesty, and Colin Firth gives a small but charmed performance. Ralph Fiennes is meant to have two different sides to his character (or three, if you include the bed-ridden version), and when he is sparkling and feisty he is alive on the screen. As a brooding, serious man he approaches wooden at times, though some women might disagree. The least known of the four or five main actors, Kristen Scott Thomas, is meant to be exactly what she is--an adventurous and gifted person who everyone likes but who is, at heart, making the most of being away from England, and this unromanticized presence is key. Finally there is Willem Dafoe, who plays that slightly exaggerated, quirky, creepy guy he can do so well.
And this of course, just brushes against the iceberg. Like The Talented Mr. Ripley (by the same director), this is a mammoth undertaking, hugely engrossing, but unlike Ripley, this one is at times ironically cold, playing with so many flashbacks its construction starts to intrude. But the movie is still worth seeing for what it pulls off best: high romance, great drama, and another version of true love on the screen.