The English Patient

On E List of Movie Reviews

(For optimum viewing, adjust the zoom level of your browser to 125%.)

The English Patient (1996)

Rate: 4
Viewed: 3/04, 8/23

EPatient
8/23: There are some Best Picture Winners I would quickly dismiss after seeing them during initial release, and The English Patient is one of them.

The love story made no impression on me; it's just an ordinary movie that runs far too long. Juliette Binoche won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, but quite frankly, she's the single worst thing about it. She wanting to make the whole thing to be all about her character is damn ridiculous. It's like Casablanca that's trapped inside a Julia Roberts movie, and all I can see is Julia going, "Look at me! Look at me! Am I pretty?" Everything related to her is superfluous.

I have to say Ralph Fiennes did a good job. It's too bad about what happened with Juliette Binoche. She took too much attention away from the main story. Had it been cut out entirely, The English Patient would've been a better and, most likely, shorter movie, but either way, it's no Best Picture material. Kristin Scott Thomas is okay but is nothing special. The characters are a bunch of rich white people wearing L.L.Bean outfits; it's therefore hard for me to relate to.

Back to the story, it's not romantic when adultery is involved and Colin Firth's character is never shown to be a bad chap. Hence, why am I required to look the other way? As scarce as resources and personnel were in the late stage of WWII, there's no way approval would be granted for Almásy to have his own nurse and a stack of morphine bottles and be left alone in some Italian monastery.

All in all, because of The English Patient and the other silly choices made the next few years, the Academy Awards went kaput and had never recovered since then.