The English Patient

"The English Patient" is still a masterpiece of anti-imperialism. First hailed, later mocked, the Oscar-winning epic deserves credit for subverting its own genre. Thirty years ago, “The English Patient” stepped into the limelight to resounding applause only to get pelted by a volley of rotten tomatoes. After its release on Nov. 15, 1996, it clinched the Oscar for Best Picture along with a raft of other tributes, but then its reputation cratered when “Seinfeld,” the titan of ’90s TV, gleefully savaged its high-brow pomposity. In the ensuing years, the takedown overshadowed the film itself. Irrevocably disgraced as a pretentious, bloated, meandering piece of Oscar bait, it now reliably shows up on lists of the greatest travesties in Academy Awards history. Cinephiles still grouse that a knockoff of Hollywood’s Golden Age scored Best Picture over the Coen Brothers’ spellbinding collision of folksiness and depravity in “Fargo.” It became fashionable to dance on the charred remains of “The English Patient,” I suspect, because it was seen to represent the death rattle of overblown period dramas and grandiloquent Hollywood epics known for their soaring scores, ravishing landscapes, and histrionic tragedies. By this telling, “The English Patient” was a symbol of tattered greatness along the lines of Norma Desmond, the has-been in “Sunset Boulevard.” The problem, in retrospect, was that the taunts ended up obscuring the film’s remarkable originality. Here was an epic film — a genre with a storied history of celebrating the strength and majesty of empire — that launched an unprecedented indictment of European imperialism and colonialist apologetics. “The English Patient” is the epic that slew empire. To really see the trailblazing distinctiveness of “The English Patient,” it’s worth first remembering that epics had for nearly a century served as pro-imperial propaganda. Their bellicose celebrations of empire ennobled “benevolent” violence and painted natives as noble savages, blood-thirsty primitives, or childlike simpletons. Take “Lawrence of Arabia.” The 1962 David Lean classic hammered home the notion that Arabs in the Ottoman Empire hadn’t earned the right to self-governance. As Lawrence puts it to Sherif Ali: “So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people — greedy, barbarous, and cruel, as you are.” An echo of the same insidious message played out two decades later in a lesser film “Out of Africa.” Here, Meryl Streep’s Karen Blixen gets aggrandized as a white savior protecting “her” Kikuyu natives, even as her lover, Robert Redford’s Finch Hatton, mystically opines that the native Maasai aren’t capable of imagining the future and therefore die in captivity because they cannot foresee the possibility of freedom. The upshot is that whether brutal or cherubic, indigenous children need their European guardians. The Deer Hunter” took a slightly bolder different tack, retelling the colossal failure of French and US imperialism in Indochina as a violent rebellion of sadistic Vietcong who infect salt-of-the-earth American mill workers with nihilistic barbarism. Their frenzied game of Russian roulette, played out in a pit of filth, rats, and mosquitos, signals their descent into animalistic depravity. 1982′s Best Picture winner, “Gandhi,” was, in a different way, complicit in the same tired narrative. Instead of dramatizing the story **** uprising against colonialists, Richard Attenborough’s Anglocentric biopic zoomed in with a fawning gaze on Gandhi and otherwise crowded the set with Englishmen. Worse still, it deflected blame for the large-scale violence that resulted from the Partition of India away from the British Empire and onto rival Hindu and Muslim factions, nostalgically validating the bygone colonial peacekeepers. But this subtle imperial mythmaking was far outdone that same decade by Indiana Jones. In “Raiders of the Lost Ark” he saved the planet by plundering antiquities from the Third World, and then in the prequel he dined on chilled monkey brains and indulged in (literally) heart-wrenching human sacrifices in the underground bowels of India, before the British occupiers heroically swooped in to gun down the evil native blood cult. If it’s true, as historian Daniel Immerwahr claims in “How to Hide an Empire,” that US imperialism during the ’80s was forced to resort to stealth interventions in Latin America, then it’s worth noting that epics like “Indiana Jones” were still churning out spectacles with brazen, wholesale slaughter. This cursory sketch provides some sense of the massive imperial baggage hanging around the genre’s neck into the 1990s. But “The English Patient” didn’t just avoid repeating tropes about empire. It made the crimes of empire its central preoccupation. Anthony Minghella’s adaption of Michael Ondaatje’s novel explores how belligerent nationalism in the lead-up to World War II unleashed violence and death.

The fine movie, with excellent actors. The magnificent history which is beautifully given Ralph Fiennes acting. Excellent course of screenwriters, end of history, only beginning. The movie about true love in which deytsvitelno you believes despite a wild desert, war and separations.