The English Patient

1996

Juliette Binoche film clip (collages below)

Kristin Scott Thomas film clip (collages below)

Scoop's notes: Looking back on it, it seems incredible to many people that The English Patient was once honored with nine Oscars, including best picture and best director. As our essay on the worst Oscar winners indicates, its IMDb score doesn't make it the lowest-rated film ever to win Best Picture, but it isn't far off, and its rating continues to decline, so it may yet capture that dubious honor. I haven't researched this point, but it may be the only Oscar winner which is no longer rated in the top 20 for its year on IMDb. (It is tied for 21st). When stand-up comics in the late 90s played to younger audiences, "English Patient" was a common punch-line for "overrated" or "some complete crap the old geezers and chicks like for reasons indeterminate," and that's a strong pillar upon which to build a reputation as a pretender.

It doesn't really deserve to be a symbol of an overrated movie. It seems to me that the film has gone in time from being overrated to underrated. It's quite good in its way, a solid old-fashioned film, romantic and beautifully photographed. It was a retro film which targeted a specific niche audience of women and older people, and that's an audience which was under-served in the Age of Tarantino (and now, for that matter). Maybe that's not the kind of film that should have been winning "Best Picture" in the later 90s, but to be completely honest, the 1996 films were not especially outstanding, and The English Patient was actually a legitimate candidate for Best Picture. The other nominees were Shine, Secrets and Lies, Fargo and Jerry Maguire. The top unnominated films were Trainspotting, Sling Blade, Larry Flynt, and Breaking the Waves. I don't feel that English Patient was out of its league in that company. I would not have voted for it, but I can understand that people did so with the certainty of their convictions.

Although not a smash hit, The English Patient was a solid performer at the box office because it was a strong entry in the "date picture" market. Frankly, I have a feeling that those dates broke up more couples than they brought together. Seinfeld's show pinned down the reason. This film represents polarization - people love it as the greatest romance they have seen in 40 years, or they hate it as a tedious, high-falutin', sap-fest. Seinfeld gave a little twist to the argument when he and his writers made the male, not the female, love the film, exclaiming aloud, "Now I know what love is". In contrast to that character (the affected Mr Peterman), the down-to-earth Elaine was so bored that she couldn't seem to pay attention to the film for more than a few minutes before needing something from the snack bar. Jerry Seinfeld may have twisted the gender roles in his interpretation, but he got the details exactly right. The people who hate this movie are shocked to find out that it won nine Oscars, equally shocked to find that the film has passionate defenders, and contemptuous of the taste and intelligence of the people who praise it so effusively. The people who love it hurl equal amounts of obloquy at its detractors, arguing that all the "cons" must be from little kids, or people too stupid to understand the multi-layered and non-sequential plot.  Neither are right, of course. They are not even saying whether it is good or bad. They are simply saying it is really their kind of movie, or it is really not. In the case of weepy love tragedies, people love them or despise them.

I did find one element of the movie rather irritating. Neither the author nor the characters in the film seem to know which side Hungary was on in WW2. Hungary was a fascist dictatorship which was sympathetic to Nazi Germany from the beginning, and was eventually a member of the Axis. The other characters in the story don't seem to realize this, even though it would actually have been very important to them at the time. The real Almasy, for example, tried to work with the British, but was turned down because he was suspected from the start of being a Nazi spy, as just about any Hungarian would have been. The British were correct in their judgment. The real Laszlo de Almasy collaborated willingly with the Axis powers in North Africa. The real Almasy, according to Laszlo Pathy, Hungarian consul general in Alexandria (writing in his journal), wanted to use a desert museum as a front for Nazi espionage. The goal of that spying: the occupation of Egypt. And that was back in the mid 1930's. When the project was scotched in 1936, Almasy blamed Pathy and put his name on a list of arrests to be made when Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel occupied the country. Almasy was subsequently awarded an Iron Cross by Rommel.

Of course, all that doesn't really have much bearing on our evaluation of the movie, which does not pretend to be based closely on the real Almasy, but it is irksome because the entire historical context is completely misleading and misstated. My point is not that the real Almasy was a Nazi sympathizer, but that the characters in the story should have and would have assumed that the fictional Almasy was a German supporter because of his nationality (as people did in reality).  No Hungarian would have been trusted by the Allies. He had to be either an enemy or a traitor, and neither of those options would have encouraged the British to bond with him.

By the way, apropos of nothing, the real Almasy was also a homosexual, and his wartime lover was a German officer! Students, would it work as well as a gay love story between Nazis? Discuss.

Why did the author feel the need to take a real person from history and change every important detail of his existence?  I wonder why the author didn't just make up a fictional name and make the character Dutch or Norwegian, people that actually worked closely with the British.

'Tis a mystery.