Date: Fri 13-Dec-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: DONNAM

Illustration: C

Location: A14

Quick Words:

Patient-Fiennes-Playing-Dafoe

Full Text:

(rev "The English Patient" for Now Playing, 12/13/96)

Now Playing-

`Patient' Worthy Of Comparisons

By Trey Paul Alexander III

When a New York movie critic recently likened a new film to Casablanca ,

calling it "close to a masterpiece," my curiosity was duly piqued. Casablanca

is one of my all-time favorite films and is regarded by many as one of the

best offerings in the history of cinema. Comparing a modern film to Casablanca

is tantamount to over-enthusiastic hyperbole, but nonetheless serves to grab

one's attention. The motion picture of which the reviewer wrote was The

English Patient , which has become one of the best reviewed movies of 1996, is

currently playing at the Bethel Cinema.

Based on a 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje, The English

Patient boasts a healthy running time (nearly 2‹ hours) and a complex

narrative set in the 1930s and `40s. The title character is desert

explorer/cartographer Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes), who has fallen victim to a

horrible plane crash that has left him a charred, barely living husk of a man.

His memory is as scarred as his body, but while in the care of a Canadian

nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), during the waning moments of World War II in

Tuscany, he begins to recall his life (relayed in flashbacks) and a torrid

affair with an elegant, married British aristocrat, Katherine Clifton (Kristin

Scott Thomas).

The English Patient , directed by Anthony Minghella (who also wrote the

screenplay), is a sweeping, engrossingly told film that has the aim, and

ultimately the stature, of an epic. There are several story arcs taking place

throughout the movie, each involving a damaged soul striving to find peace

from ghosts in the past. Loner Almasy reminisces about his lost love; Hana

fears that everyone she cares for somehow gets snatched by the jaws of death;

and a mysterious stranger (Willem Dafoe) claims to have known Almasy and

raises suspicion that the dying Hungarian may have been more than just a

simple pilot.

Though Minghella's film is a workout for the attention span (the non-linear

narrative contains more plot in five minutes than Twister does in its

entirety), audience concentration is enhanced by the deft work of The English

Patient 's cast, particularly Scott Thomas, who only appears in the flashback

sequences. Seen all-too-briefly in Mission: Impossible (as one of Cruise's

cohorts who is bumped off early in the movie) and as a familiar face from Four

Weddings and a Funeral (as the friend who pines, but to no avail, for Hugh

Grant), the English actress finally gets her chance to shine and boy is she

radiant! A USA Today article hailed her as "a `90s Greta Garbo," and though

that is an unfair comparison, it does detail the extent of her screen presence

in this film.

Though The English Patient is well-executed and affecting (there were many

sobs and sniffles during the screening I attended), I would be remiss if I

didn't touch upon a key aspect which keeps it from becoming Casablanca redux,

if you will. There are several, albeit fairly brief, sequences that are too

explicit for my tastes, but my main gripe with the film is its motif of

forbidden love. No matter how dreamily or swooningly played it is still

infidelity. The Bridges of Madison County comes to mind, and although the two

movies are quite different in style and content, they are thematically

similar. They both draw pathos and sorrow from moviegoers as we are to weep

for these doomed lovers, caught in the throes of a romance that cannot last.

Of course it cannot last - the woman (in both The Bridges of Madison County

and The English Patient ) is married! I know I may sound like a wet blanket to

some, but that's just the way I feel about these kinds of plots.

The English Patient is rated R. It contains profanity, sexual situations and

nudity.