The Oscar Project #69: The English Patient (1996)

by Chris Marshall:

I spent so much time dreading The English Patient that it became something like a superstitious object. For whatever reason, I had it in my head that it was the worst movie ever made, maybe even worse than The Great Ziegfeld. I guess that had a lot to do with its tone and subject matter, as well as being perhaps the clearest example of Oscar bait in many years. Whatever the reason, I always viewed this film as the last real roadblock of The Oscar Project.

Then I watched it, and strangely enough, it wasn’t as horrible as I had feared. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I liked it, but it was nowhere near the worst Best Picture winner I’ve seen on this journey. The most obvious comparison that came to mind while watching it was Out of Africa. I could recognize why it’s considered a “good movie,” but at the same time, it was the type of film that often fails to capture my interest.

I’ve had a long-running joke with my former (and future) roommate Justin, in which I claim that nobody has ever actually seen The English Patient, and it won the Oscar because all the voters assumed it was probably good but didn’t want to take the time to sit through it. This is a slight exaggeration, of course, but I’d venture a guess that it is probably the least seen Best Picture winner of the last 25 years.

Since records starting being kept in 1982, The English Patient, Amadeus, and The Hurt Locker are the only Best Picture winners never to be in the top five weekend box office earners, which buoys my argument a little bit. On the other hand, it was the second highest grossing movie ever not to reach the top five, so I guess that means somebody saw it. I just can’t figure out who all those people were.

When I started to write this, I realized that it would be harder than I thought to summarize the plot. This surprised me because it seemed like so little happened in so much time. Basically, Ralph Fiennes is badly burned, Juliet Binoche is the nurse who is caring for him, Willem Dafoe barges in with no thumbs left on his hands, and Sayid from Lost defuses bombs around the monastery where all this is taking place. Meanwhile, Fiennes is having lots of flashbacks about the time he had an affair with Colin Firth’s wife. I assume all these characters had names, but I’d never be able to come up with any of them without looking them up.

Naveen Andrews, flashbacks... This is just a Lost prequel.

It’s worth mentioning that, even though the movie takes place during World War II, it’s not a war movie in any real sense. Yes, some of the characters do have wartime roles, but The English Patient is way too classy to give us any cool action scenes, unless you think a car accident is a cool action scene. But even then, none of the cars blow up, which is disappointing.

I’ve finally arrived at a point in history when I can remember, at least vaguely, these Oscar ceremonies. I wasn’t really big into art films when I was 11, but I was at least culturally aware enough to know that The English Patient had virtually swept the Oscars. Next year, in which Titanic wins virtually every award that exists, would mark the first time I watched the ceremony. Things like that make it dawn on me how far I’ve come. When Wings won the first Best Picture award in 1927, the Great Depression hadn’t even started yet. The events of The English Patient were still more than a decade away. The mind boggles.

Also, there are now only five Oscar Project movies left that I have never seen before. After I watch Crash nine films down the road, I will have seen every movie to have won Best Picture at least once. The dream will have come true.