The Patient English
Nostalgia, either for old-fashioned movie romance or for Michael Ondaatje's writing, has obscured the real tragedy of The English Patient: that it took an arresting, original story and created from it a film bound by the cinematic cliches of empire.
As with any film adaptation of a novel, particularly one so praised as Mr Ondaatje's, director Anthony Minghella's vision for The English Patient has been judged first by the standards of the book. Mr Minghella's fans say he fashioned a passionate film from a difficult, elliptical book, while Mr Ondaatje's purist readers fault the director for ignoring Hana and Kip to focus on the more glamorous Katharine and Almasy. Both camps, however, ignore a much more useful comparison. A look at the two other Oscar-winning films of empire, A Passage to India and Out of Africa, reveals The English Patient's deeper flaws as well as its intriguing possibilities.