Late in 1996, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient seemed to sweep out of nowhere to become the instant Academy Award frontrunner. The film duly won nine awards including Best Picture, providing Miramax Films with its first of several Oscar night dominations (although the film was properly shepherded by the eminent producer Saul Zaentz), vaulting Minghella into the realm of a major prestige director, and saving Hollywood players and veterans from the indignity of giving more awards to scruffy indie film types. The film wasn’t universally beloved, however, inspiring a cynical episode of the TV series Seinfeld in which the movie became the bane of a character’s existence. From today’s perspective, The English Patient seems plainer as one of the true instigators and exemplars of the concept of Oscar bait. One part of it is a movie pitched to appeal to the Academy votership with pleasant memories of sweeping David Lean epics, especially Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), and packed full of grand, classical themes – love, war, loss, the clash of different forms of loyalty, and catharsis in tragedy and release. This old-fashioned appeal came laden with aspects that seemed more contemporary and pseudo-intellectual: a veneer of contemporary literary pretension manifest in post-modern narrative layering, musings on an evolving, decentralised and multicultural world, and a general scepticism about the choices of individuals when forced to play a part in great national and political dramas.

 

 

Minghella himself adapted the screenplay from a prize-winning novel by Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, the novel itself actually a follow-up to an earlier book Ondaatje had written about the melting pot of life in Toronto in the 1930s. Ondaatje’s novel thrust some of his characters into the midst of the churn of World War II, and a narrative built around a particle of a true story. That was the history of the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almásy, an explorer and archaeologist whose great knowledge of the Sahara Desert was put to use by Rommel in espionage efforts during the Nazi campaign to conquer Libya and Egypt against the perpetually bedraggled yet determined Allied resistance. Where Ondaatje offered a very slight distinction between the historical figure of Almásy and his version by slightly changing his name, Minghella changed it back, inflating his role in the war into the stuff of movie myth. Ralph Fiennes, fresh off his attention-welding turn in Schindler’s List (1993) and now thrust into a leading man role, was cast as Almásy, first glimpsed winging his way across the desert in a biplane with an apparently dead woman, only to be shot down by German antiaircraft fire: Almásy, terribly burned, is plucked from the wreckage by some Bedouin and given some traditional medical treatment which saves his life.

 

 

A couple of years later, Almásy is being cared for by Allied medics and carried along with the military advance through Italy. His shrivelled, damaged body is failing, and he claims to be an amnesiac whenever anyone asks about his past. Canadian nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche) decides, whilst grieving the deaths of her officer fiancé and her friend and fellow nurse Jan (Liisa Repo-Martell), to stay behind with Almásy in a suitable locale to wait out his inevitable death, and she takes up residence in an abandoned monastery that’s been bombed about a bit and, she later discovers unnervingly, riddled with booby-traps. There she’s joined by a small gang of companions: Sikh bomb dismantler Kip (Naveen Andrews) and his assistant Hardy (Kevin Whately), detailed to clear out myriad mines and explosives, and another Canadian, ‘Moose’ Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), an intelligence officer sent to seek out and disarm partisans. But he’s really out for revenge on Almásy, a man he holds responsible not just for wreaking havoc on the Allied cause by giving information to the Nazis, but for his own capture and brutal crippling during interrogation: he’s followed the breadcrumb trail to his helpless quarry. Meanwhile, Almásy’s past is explored in flashbacks: his pre-war explorations of the Sahara with a group of fellow explorers belonging to the Royal Geographic Society, including trusty leader Madox (Julian Wadham), and pilot Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth), who joined the expedition with his wife Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas), a woman Alamsy was fated to have a torrid, tragic affair with.

 

 

Minghella had been a young theatre director of promise when he made his feature film debut as writer-director with A Little Like Drowning (1978), a false start he followed by moving into writing and directing for radio and television, working on such ‘80s British TV fixtures as Grange Hill and Inspector Morse. His romantic ghost tale Truly Madly Deeply (1990), made for a TV anthology series, was instead released as a feature and found cultish favour. Minghella’s subsequent success with The English Patient made him a star of the Miramax prestige movie stable, following it up with The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003), and a return to smaller-scale fare with Breaking & Entering (2006) before his sudden death in 2008. Minghella found himself, a little uncomfortably perhaps, as a leading example of a particular kind of British filmmaker, prized for making classy, literate, well-acted movies at once elevated and straightforward in style, and ripe for appreciation in awards seasons, and also a cut above most of that ilk, ambitious and intelligent, but also a little smothered by his own good taste. Something like The Talented Mr. Ripley is admirable in the way it both aims for psychological drama and incision but also awkward in the way it strains so hard to sever itself from its retro noir roots and lounge in plush prestige movie chic instead. The English Patient has also always seemed to me an extremely awkward movie, albeit in ways I found different, even inverted, to when I first watched.

 

 

The real Almásy’s fascinating role in the war had been depicted on film before by John Moxey’s Foxhole In Cairo (1961) and a German precursor, Rommel ruft Kairo (1959). It’s hard to conceive of a more tonally and temperamentally different take on similar material than Moxey’s in comparison to Minghella’s, and yet there are shared concerns. Most particularly, a simmering fascination with stymied sexuality and its relationship with what can be called the mythologised version of Englishness, as well as the more immediately, geopolitically resonant kind, in the context of a pivot of worlds, the death of empire and with it the necessity of a particular attitude of marble-frieze self-command. It’s tempting to wonder in today’s more blood-sport environment when it comes to bestowing awards on suitable movies if a film that so blatantly fictionalises and romanticises a Nazi collaborator would gain such approval (Minghella would later make Cold Mountain, a film about a Civil War Confederate that managed to entirely avoid slavery as a topic). One of the keener, if brief, vignettes in The English Patient sees Kip resisting Almasy’s attempts to school him in Kipling by noting the political implications of the English writer’s worldview and its apparent obliviousness to darker realities, like the source of a monument the writer mentions: Kip is posited as a different kind of outsider perspective to Almasy himself who muses ironically on his pretensions to be taken for an Englishman, although Kip himself gains an admiration for the yeoman solidness of Hardy.

 

 

The English Patient perhaps appealed to Minghella in part because of its questioning approach to the peculiarities of national identity and belonging – the director’s grandparents had been Italian immigrants – and the film is queasily defined by a sardonically needling depiction of Almasy’s efforts to save his lover foiled by the stolid ignorance and racism of some British soldiers. Meanwhile the mystery and allure of a lost past are suggested through the explorers’ awed discovery of a cave decorated with primeval paintings recording a time when people swam in the Sahara, a motif echoed later when Kip treats Hana to the marvels of some medieval church murals located in the shadowy, neglected reaches of an old church tower, as testimonies to human genius and longing for expression that transcends time. The flashback romance meanwhile enfolds two spiky, faintly antisocial personalities in a tale that begins as seamy but blooms into something worthy of myth, or at least so Minghella tries to render it. Fiennes’ pre-burning Almasy comes with gaze of steel-melting intensity that seems oblivious to all but grand vistas of earth and history, seeming to affirm his stern, dismissive attitude to Katharine but really hinting of its falsity over a man filled with a pent-up need. Scott-Thomas is a woman as toey and strident as a well-bred mare, rattling Almasy cage but not always acting so well when he does it to her. It’s an interesting pitch for a romantic drama, the woman who claims to love her husband but who Geoffrey later, half-jokingly notes married him at last after years of using him as a shoulder to cry on following other romances, and the self-sufficient exile from two cultures who finds his passion more a pain than pleasure, and finds that agrees with him to some extent.

 

 

The English Patient is doomed however to work against itself, feeling like two or three different movies competing for dominance. The best parts of the movie are more like early David Lean than his later epics, despite the superficial Lawrence of Arabia mimicry, with a focus on a small, frustrated, illicit romance marked by a tension between passion and decorum, repression and eruption, the distorted gravity forming between two strange and awkward personalities when they fall in love. This unfolds between Almasy and Katharine in the pre-war flashbacks, combusting a vividly acted and cut scene in which Almasy drunkenly appears at a party the team are throwing in Cairo, angry at her breaking off the affair and almost letting the cat out of the bag, despite everyone present knowing the kitty’s in the sack on some level anyway. This culminates with Almasy drawing Katharine into a corner in a spasm of hate-love that inverts an earlier, tender interlude. This whole scene demands and gets the kind of performance Fiennes can give, but it also nudges us with the reminder that this isn’t really a classical romantic drama after all, which makes the gestures in that direction later feel false. Minghella deftly depicts the mix of personalities on the trip – including Firth’s charming but overgrown boy, who recounts how he eventually became Katharine’s husband by persuading her, after years crying on his shoulder, to make that arrangement permanent. And yet the characters remain at arm’s length. Firth does a lot with a little, in the little beads of dismay and rage his pupils become when he comprehends his deception.

 

 

Then there’s the very 1990s, end-of-history parable of the monastery denizens waiting out the war’s end, sitting about talking things out to an understanding and having the odd, good purgative cry, tensions in perspective and experience as embodied by the characters never quite combusting, and an emphasis on the concept of storytelling taking precedence over and above the actual, effectual deed of telling a story. Aggravatingly, the vengeful Caravaggio, whose name evokes the red-soaked sprawls of Renaissance Art (and also reaffirms we’re in a realm of the arty stuff, thank you, peasant) is easily appeased by getting a little closure and listening to Almásy’s story in a way that feels like a cop-out. The romance between Kip and Hana is appealing but scantly handled, illustrated through interludes of visual gimmickry that aim for the movingly lyrical but only feel like bourgeois tourism ploys, or stuff fit for somebody’s Instagram feed. Like Hana following a trail of candles to a meeting with Kip in the monastery like they’re staying in a high-end romantic hideaway, and, more elaborately in the interlude when Kip hoists Hana into the shadowy heights of the church tower to see the paintings, a scene that reaches for ecstatic wonder but feels too calculated, again like something out of a commercial rather than something oneiric and haunting – with Gabriel Yared’s Oscar-winning but treacly score going all the while.

 

 

The closest the film ever really gets to being gripping comes in a bit of elementary suspense-mongering, when Kip tries to disarm a bomb under a bridge whilst some carousing soldiers roll over the bridge in tanks, threatening to set off the explosive – with the ironic punchline that the soldiers are celebrating the war’s end, cutting off Kip’s fury mid-stream. A couple of tangential veerings to Caravaggio’s earlier experiences sit at an awkward remove from the rest of the structure, although the depiction of Caravaggio’s experience including his gruesome mutilation by Nazis (with Jurgen Prochnow in a brief but vivid turn as the harried interrogator who chooses intimate violence to expedite proceedings) is a scene nasty and frantic enough to almost feel like it belongs to a different, more urgent movie. Too often, and despite the gloss of John Seale’s photography Minghella’s direction looks too much like a ‘90s BBC telemovie, with little in the way of well-composed and complex milieu scenes, and the desert scenes see the characters milling rather than consorting with their environs. Like a lot of mid-1990s films the visual palette strikes me as too soft and gauzy: the opening and closing vistas of the desert dunes under Almasy’s plane go for the dreamlike and sublime but look buffed by the art department, perhaps the by-product of some special effects.

 

 

The narrative structuring, the dips in and out of flashback and the weaving of the two main tales, gives the film an impression of superficial complexity (and required a lot of work from editor Walter Murch), but really the two story strands each conspire to break up the potential intensity of both portions. In particular, this foils the necessary accruing of tension defining the triangular romance in the 1930s scenes. It doesn’t help that the movie is sloppy in some specifics that make the story close to incoherent for anyone paying attention. The depiction of the crash is delayed for a long time as the wartime storyline plays out, with the meaning of events, and also the timeline, rendered abrupt and garbled. This also has an impact on the story that seems to stem from Minghella’s efforts to force what takes years in the book into a more dramatic timespan: the crash is supposed to occur when the explorers are pulling out of the desert ahead of the outbreak of war. Almasy’s frantic efforts to save Katharine are couched in a more sympathetic race against time rather than the more drawn-out, fixated business in the book. Almásy’s supposed to be dying of ever-decreasing lung function, and yet there’s no sense of his deterioration or suffering, and the makeup Fiennes is swathed in looks false and rubbery. To Minghella’s credit, he does his best to get into the evocation of sexual obsession at the heart of their story, with Almasy’s pining musing on the name of the dip between Katharine’s collarbones, a place he stakes claim to like one of the oases the team dip into during their wanderings, locus of all erotic wonder and promise. Even if the flashes of nudity from Scott-Thomas feel ever so carefully arranged.

 

 

There’s something terminally smug about The English Patient, about the way it summarises the artistic horizons and placidity of its moment. A movie that’s about war, treachery, mutilation, regret, and tragedy just shouldn’t feel so damn cosy, so cumulatively Love. Laugh. Live. in its moral prescriptions, so social media tourist snapshot-like in its gloebtrotting aesthetics. Later, Minghella goes for images of Almasy carrying the mortally wounded Katharine swathed in parachute silk that reach for a kind romanticism closer to the dreamy, swooning stuff of Marlene Dietrich vehicles made by Josef von Sternberg or Richard Boleslawski, but it feels odd compared to the rest of the movie, with its focus on foiled and damaged people, the by-products of war and rage. This sort of thing, as well as the lyrical guff in the Hana-Kip scenes, more importantly reveals how the movie never truly finds a way of wresting its rooted metaphors out of the zone of litterateur classiness and imposing real cinema upon them. In short, The English Patient feels older than some of the movies it’s aping. It’s a consistently interesting film that is worth revisiting, but it also falls far, far short of the classic stature so many were in a rush to grant it back when.