Review of The English Patient (1996) by Forrest P — 12 May 2010

I was satisfied by the time The English Patient came to a close, but only just. The last 25% of this picture really grasped me emotionally, but the rest did not.

What The English Patient offered to audiences was some fine performances and breathtaking imagery. Ralph Fiennes gives us another wonderful performance as the lead in this film. He is a terrific actor who knows exactly how to play the material given to him. Juliette Binoche stole the show for me, though. I was more captivated by her performance than any other I saw in the movie.

The movie's biggest problem is that I could not become invested into this story. There's so much mush that's filled into the story. Early on in the picture, for instance, there's a moment when a friend of Binoche's is killed in a land mine. Binoche makes a treck through part of the minefield to recover her friend's bracelet, nearly getting killed in the process. There is a lot of attention given to that scene, but afterwards, that whole scene is never mentioned again. It's not mentioned, and the audience forgets about it.

And there's a lot of that going on this picture. Characters have emotional dilemmas the audience really can't invest in. for instance, the whole issue with Fiennes's affair is nice, but I couldn't help but wonder what the point was. I was waiting for something to happen--some kind of goal or fulfillment to be reached--without knowing what I was waiting for. And when that happens, the story loses the audience as it becomes more concerned with itself rather than connecting to its audience.

As I said before, it wasn't until the last 25% of the movie that I felt connected to this story. Now I knew where it had been going the whole time and why I was taking this journey.

Speaking of taking a journey, I was confused about why Juliette Binoche's character gets so much attention in this film. Nothing she does has any direct corelation to the story (until the very end). She is being told a story by Ralph Fiennes (his story, through the series of flashbacks), but to what purpose? She seems emotionally affected, but it doesn't seem to change her behavior in any way, even to her love interest.

That all being said, I still felt like this film was worth the viewing. The performances are very powerful and the emotional payoff at the end finally made it all worth it.

And the heart of the story was very emotionally involving, once they were able to show us the heart. There were just a few too many subplots getting thrown in, and they were almost all unnecessary.

***Warning: Here There Be Spoilers***.

For example, Willem Dafoe's character tells his own story of how is captured by the enemy and made to talk. Through what I have to say is a very intense scene, a nurse takes a blade and cuts off his thumbs while he screams promises to tell his captors the names they are looking for. It's a great scene, but why do we need it? It doesn't really give us a whole lot about Dafoe's character and it never really felt essential to the story.

***.

My final verdict is that the central story was truly a great story, and every actor on screen proved worth his or her salt. And the director did an astonishingly good job directing this picture. The biggest problem is that the audience gets rifed with too much information and too many scenes that do not benefit the central story that was so captivating. The result is that the audience gets pulled away from this great story instead of sucked into it. The English Patient was a fine film, but only that.

6/10.