I hadn’t seen The English Patient since it came out in 1996, but I do remember feeling underwhelmed by it at the time, with the exception that Ralph Fiennes gave an exceptional performance as Count Laszlo de Almasy, the film’s main character and protagonist. Almasy was a brooding, seemingly unhappy man in his youth and a wounded and tormented man on his deathbed. I kind of had the same feeling after watching it this weekend. This is a fine film, but far from a perfect one. Along with Feinnes there are some extraordinary actors in it like Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, Willem Defoe, and Juliette Binoche, who incidentally won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her work in this film, and indeed all of the actors in this film were at the top of their respective games. The English Patient harkens back to Lawrence of Arabia with its stunning desert cinematography in a way that we see how small the people are in a great big pre-World War II world that is on the verge of exploding.

But for me the story of this film is very disjointed due to the manner in which it was told, and it’s difficult, especially in the first half of the film, to really engage in the story or with the characters in a meaningful way. The meat of the story is told primarily through flashbacks as the dying Almasy relates his story to his nurse Hana (Binoche) as well as David Caravaggio (Dafoe), who believes that Almasy is responsible for his interrogation and torture at the hands of the Nazis. Meanwhile, there is the parallel story of Hana dealing with the deaths of those close to her in the waning days of the war as she cares for Almasy in an abandoned Italian villa and tries to ease his passing as much as possible. Meanwhile, she falls in love with Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh munitions expert who makes his living disarming bombs and land mines.

The film was based on a novel and adapting novels into screenplays is always tricky, especially if the source material follows a different story structure than the traditional 3-act structure of filmmaking. However the biggest challenge in adapting a novel in to a film is, knowing what to leave in and what to take out. It’s a rare and particularly short novel that allows for a straight and complete adaptation. For the vast majority of novels, they would be made into films of seven or eight hours if the entire story were to be told, so much of the material needs to be condensed or even omitted in order to get it to an acceptable screen time, and The English Patient is even pushing the boundaries of that, coming in at two hours and forty minutes.

For example, as great as Defoe’s performance is, his character wasn’t terribly necessary to the story that they were trying to tell. Yes, the consequence of Almasy’s actions led to his torture and mutilation, and he shows up at the villa looking for revenge, and instead finds redemption. There is also a point where his prodding eventually gets Almasy to recall what happened to Katherine and why he’s in his present situation, but it wasn’t necessary for Caravaggio to be the one to do that. In fact, in watching the film this past weekend, I kept asking myself what the purpose of Caravaggio’s character was in the narrative. Did he want to get revenge on Almasy by killing him? If so, why didn’t he? He certainly had ample opportunity to do so. Did he want to know why Almasy gave that information to the Germans? If so, to what end? It seems to me that there are a lot of loose ends to Caravaggio’s character that either needed to be sewn up, or they should have tried to make the movie without his storyline because it just feels tacked on as it is, and not an integral component of the narrative.

The love story between Almasy and Katherine Clifton (Thomas) is obviously the storyline that drives the action of the film. Almasy has already been in the North African desert for some time working with others for the Royal Geographical Society to try and design reliable maps for the area, when Katherine arrives with her husband Geoffrey (Firth). Almasy is at first resentful over these intruders, feeling they’ll get in the way more than anything, but he is infatuated with Katherine almost from the first moment that he sees her. She tries to repress her own attraction to Almasy, but that only intensifies the passion once they finally do consummate their feelings for each other. This is clearly a story about forbidden love and the lengths to which one will go to attain that love and to preserve it as well.

That is one thing that writer/director Anthony Minghella very well. He drove home the thematic element of what people will do for love as well as what sometimes has to be sacrificed for love. In the parallel story involving Hana’s caring for the badly burned and dying Almasy, Hana believes that everyone whom she loves dies. She’s afraid to love anyone because of that until she finds Kip and he survives a near-death experience on the last day of the war. She achieves that redemption, and that allows her to end Almasy’s suffering at his request, despite the sadness that it causes her.

I will also say that the film’s storytelling really picks up and becomes far more effective in the second half of the film than it had been in the first half. That leads to the film having a very strong and emotionally powerful ending, and I think that may have helped this film in the minds of some Oscar voters, and as I’ve written before, a strong ending can really elevate the perceived quality of a film. That’s the great conundrum for me in evaluating and thinking about The English Patient. I like the film, but didn’t love it. However, I did like the characters very much, and that is what makes the ending of this film so absolutely heartbreaking. I wasn’t prepared to be as emotionally impacted as I was at the end, but the performances of Feinnes and Binoche brought that emotion out.

It’s interesting to me that Minghella seemingly attempted to create tension throughout the film, whether it was with the threatening appearance of Caravaggio, or the fear of Almasy and Katherine being discovered in their affair, or even with Kit being killed doing his duty. None of those aspects of the film reach the level of tension that Minghella was going for, but the sequence in which Almasy is trying to get back to Katherine as she lies wounded in the cave after Geoffrey tried to kill them all by crashing his plane into them, is the sequence of the film in which there is the most tension. It’s almost like a film within a film, and that more so than the love scenes between them, is where you see what Almasy will put himself through for Katherine’s love. Then when he doesn’t get to her in time, and we watch him lie next to her body in the cave and ultimately carry her outside as he wails in anguish, combined with Hana “reading him to sleep” after she’s given him the fatal dose of morphine by reading the last words that Katherine wrote to him, all create this cathartic moment in the climax of the film that is just emotionally overwhelming. Ultimately this film is a slow boil that finally builds up to its emotional peak, and even thought the vast majority of the film is less than remarkable, it has perhaps one of the most satisfying endings of any film that I can remember.

Did the Academy get it right?

I don’t think that they got it wrong, but I do have a feeling that if the Academy had a do-over for 1996, they may have given the award to Fargo. The Cohen Brothers were already a well-known commodity in Hollywood, but this film of a kidnapping-for-hire gone horribly wrong solidified them has two of the top filmmakers in the business. It helped make dark, macabre humor mainstream, and was one of the most influential and most quoted movies of the decade. I don’t know if it’s a better movie than The English Patient (apples and oranges again), but it certainly has had more staying power within pop culture as well as the vernacular. So has Jerry Maguire , another oft-quoted film from that year that made a star of Cuba Gooding, Jr. (Show me the money!), and his acceptance speech for winning Best Supporting Actor is one of the great moments in the history of the ceremony. Secrets and Lies was a British film about a black woman who was adopted and traces her family roots to discover that her birth mother is white. It’s a fascinating character-driven piece that I highly recommend and am glad received the recognition of a nomination, but it’s a much smaller film than those others, and not on the same scale of your typical Oscar winner. Shine was the final nominee of the year, and is about the life of piano prodigy David Helfgott. It, too is a wonderful film, and Geoffrey Rush’s performance of the talented and troubled genius won him the Oscar for Best Actor.

This is actually where I take issue with the Academy for this particular year. I don’t want to take anything away from Geoffrey Rush. His performance in Shine was superb, and it fit with the Oscar’s trend at that time to award Best Actor to artists who were portraying characters with varying mental issues, whether it was Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot or Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, the Academy generally played special notice to those types of roles. Geoffrey Rush did a marvelous job of playing David Helfgot in his days after his nervous breakdown and channeled Helfgot’s frenetic and disorganized thinking perfectly. However Rush was only in half of the film. The other half of the film had younger actors playing the role as we watch Helfgot grow up in Australia. On the other hand, Ralph Feinnes absolutely carries The English Patient. It’s a two hour and forty minute film, and he’s in almost every scene. Without the caliber of Feinnes’ performance this film does not win Best Picture. He played the role of Count Laszlo de Almasy with a brooding intensity that prevented you from being able to look away from it. And yet, he made that character so likable that your heart bleeds for him just as his heart is broken. We as the audience feel his emotions, and that’s what any good actor is supposed to accomplish. That’s why for me, Ralph Feinnes not winning Best Actor for 1996 is one of the biggest mistakes in Oscar history.