Pretty But Politically Distatsteful

Rating: 5/10 (7 August 2006)

This is just Catch-22 with romance and gorgeous scenery. Like Yossarian, Almasy sees the great sacred cow of World War Two as simply an intrusion on his individual happiness and a threat to his personal well being.
When Caravaggio tells Almasy that thousands of people had died because he helped the Germans, Almasy replies "thousands of other people would have died if I hadn't." Whether the deaths were Allied or Axis is morally neutral to him, compared to his need to recover the body of his dead lover. We are meant to sympathize with his romantic loyalty and political indifference.
Almasy is presented as an exile without country or politics, whose only homeland is his pocket Herodotus. (The historical Almasy was actually a Hungarian officer serving in the Luftwaffe and assigned to Rommel's headquarters, but that's just dramatic license.) Katherine is an instinctive Little Englander who longs to leave Egypt for a garden in Dorsetshire; she loves neither her husband nor the imperial project in which he is deeply involved. The romance between Hana and Kip is equally anti-political. She is a French Canadian, he a Sikh, both members of subject peoples serving a British Empire in which they have no stake, and they drop out of the war to make a private space for themselves.
English Patient is the anti-Casablanca. It's perspective is that the problems of two little people are the only thing that amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world, and that the intrusions of history, politics and war are simply a curse. E.M. Forester wrote that if he had to choose between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he'd have the guts to betray his country. The movie says "Amen."