Haunted Pasts.

Rating: 7/10 (18 February 2013)

Ralph Fiennes is the English patient. It's World War II and he's been burned to one of those scarred, blue-white human simulacra who is slowly dying. His nurse, Juliette Binoche, keeps him pumped up with morphine in a half-ruined abbey.
Willem Dafoe is a dope addict who holds Fiennes responsible for his torture by the Germans, particularly by a villainous German officer in a fine performance by Jurgen Prochnow. Prochnow's use of torture offends even his own men, who deferentially bring up the Geneva Conventions, never having had the advice of the White House Office of Legal Counsel. Aside from providing the opportunity for a terrible torture scene, it was never really clear to me what Dafoe's mission in the movie was.
Fiennes, immobilized in bed, has carried with him a copy of Herodotus, "the Father of History". For Fiennes, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. Between Dafoe's quiet interrogations and the mementos Fiennes carried within the tattered pages of Herodotus, the English patient is haunted by past sins, some worthier than others, and finally, with minimal gestures, persuades Binoche to put him to sleep.
That's the fictional present in war-blasted Italy. Meanwhile, Fiennes is narcotized to the extent that his chthonic memories are turned into flashbacks -- of friendships he's betrayed, of his love for the lost Lenore, of his minor indiscretions and major screw ups, and of the futility of every effort he's made, except for a few momentary passions.
Fiennes has been through a lot in the years between 1939 and 1945 and you get to see much of it. The Tunisian desert is a magnificent landscape -- not so much flat and shimmering with heat, as in "Lawrence of Arabia" but criss-crossed by ridges and pillars of a rich rust. The performances are smooth and convincing.
The first time I saw the movie, I almost nodded off a few times. Fiennes' haunted past got to me. My own past has enough ghosts. But, wisely, the script has enough tautly done suspense and action sequences that it keeps even lowbrows like myself awake. One of the scenes, of an old-fashioned biplane plowing into the earth accidentally, comes and goes in a few seconds but is excellently shot. Overall, though, the movie might have profited from more such scenes, since it's still pretty sluggish.