The Sunday Times (London)
January 26, 1997, Sunday
Romancing the prose
Stephen Amidon
The English Patient is in the best of health – a model of how to turn a difficult poetic novel into a screen success. STEPHEN AMIDON on a magical act of transformation.If what has happened in the past few months in America is anything to go by, this year’s hot movie will undoubtedly be Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient. An undisputed financial and critical success in America, the film, which last week garnered a Golden Globe award for best dramatic picture, as well as a best director nomination for Minghella in the Director’s Guild of America Awards, seems set to pick up a barge-load of Oscar nominations. It has everything that members of both the public and the Academy love – historical sweep, picturesque settings, a mysterious stranger, wartime romance and a breakthrough performance by a beautiful actress, Kristin Scott Thomas. Based on a Booker prizewinning novel by Michael Ondaatje, it also bears the imprimatur of High Art, so important in an era when Henry James and Jane Austen seem to require their own production companies.
Hot films usually start trends. Bonnie and Clyde kicked off an orgy of stylish screen violence; Star Wars sent movie-makers into a giddy adolescent orbit. A Room with a View launched a cotillion of repressed Englishwomen in search of romantic release, while Pulp Fiction will ultimately be responsible for an entire penitentiary full of hip-talking, shade-wearing killers. Whenever a film unexpectedly manages to perform that strange box-office alchemy that transforms a few thousand feet of celluloid into a warehouse full of gold, you can be sure that dozens of third-division Midases will soon be trying to mint passable copies.It would be no surprise, then, if a small army of producers were already doing deals in an effort to recreate Minghella’s magic, trawling the local bookshop for critically acclaimed, obscurely written novels that can be turned over to up-and-coming auteurs. But it will also be of no surprise if these efforts never see the light of the cinema screen.
For all its undoubted virtues, The English Patient hardly provides a ready formula for success. It tells the story of Hana (Juliette Binoche), a war-weary Canadian nurse who holes up in a ruined Tuscan villa in 1945 to look after a badly burned “English” pilot, who, in fact, turns out to be the Hungarian explorer Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes). As he recuperates, the story of his adulterous liaison with the beautiful Katherine Clifton (Scott Thomas) in pre-war Cairo gradually comes to light, aided by the arrival of a thumbless thief named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe) and Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh bomb-disposal expert who quickly falls for Hana. In other words, The English Patient is utterly unique, a glorious one-off that defies nearly every category it seems to incorporate and lays a minefield for potential imitators.
The main reason Minghella’s film cannot be used as a template for future films is that most of its virtues are those of bygone eras. Watching it, you sense that it could have been made just as effectively in 1962, with David Lean directing and Peter O’Toole, Julie Christie, Anouk Aimee and Omar Sharif in the lead roles. It is not the story’s historical setting, but rather its style and tone that make it seem to be an inspired throwback. Minghella, whose Truly, Madly, Deeply felt cramped and theatrical, has taken a page right out of Lean’s stylebook to make a sprawling epic complete with imperial overtones, venturesome noblemen and a doomed love affair.
This injection of celluloid nostalgia explains the film’s ability to burst out of the art-house ghetto to which it might reasonably have been confined. Middle-class, middle-aged, Midwestern Americans have flocked to see it, partly because it harks back to the age of Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, a time when flawed yet admirable characters made majestic acts of self-sacrifice against the backdrop of magnif icently forbidding terrains. This may also explain the often hysterical praise heaped upon the movie by American critics, who over the past 20 years have seen a sharp degradation of cinema occur on their watch. “A stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “As all great films must, it transports us to another time and place…a tour de force so haunting that other films can’t exorcise the memory of its radiant cast, exquisite craftsmanship or complex system of metaphors,” swooned Rita Kempley in the Washington Post. To encounter unexpectedly the sort of film that one’s forebears would have expected to see once a season must be a bittersweet experience indeed.
The trouble with nostalgia is that it tends to have a short shelf life. While The English Patient is certainly good enough to merit all of its audience figures and much of its praise, anyone who sets out to mimic it will probably find their effort doomed to failure. As with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, a very different film that none the less allowed audience members to revisit forgotten cinematic territories, the chord Minghella sounds will never ring as sweetly as the first time it is plucked. A good homage can easily delight; an imitation of a homage will necessarily ring hollow.
The other reason The English Patient is a glorious one-off is the relationship between the film-maker and the book he adapted. In an era in which just about every 19th-century novel and contemporary potboiler on the shelf is being snatched up by source-hungry producers, it would seem that Minghella’s bold decision to adapt a painstakingly poetic, structurally fragmented and highly learned text will further expand Hollywood’s current spell of bibliophilia. You have to wonder if Graham Swift’s Last Orders or Richard Ford’s Independence Day will be next to get a Pounds 20m spruce-up. On closer examination, the relationship between film-maker and novel is so unique that anyone attempting to re-create it will land themselves in difficult terrain.
Minghella’s 1996 film differs from the 1992 novel in so many ways that at times it beggars the description “based upon”. The book is a complex prism of themes, settings and characters that struck many as not only unfilmable but, in the words of Anthony Lane, The New Yorker’s film critic, “so finely written that I found it, to all intents and purposes, unreadable”. Ask 10 different film-makers to create a version of the book and they would have come up with 10 very different movies. Or, rather, they would have come up with one: Minghella’s. The other nine would have passed. Minghella’s decision to tackle it stemmed from some deeply personal urge rather than any obvious qualities in the book itself.
Again and again, he abandons key ideas of Ondaatje’s text as he struggles to create his own narrative. For instance, the book’s central relationship between the Sikh sapper, Kip, and the Canadian nurse, Hana, is thrust into the background to make room for the screen romance between Almasy and Clifton, which in the novel is described in terms often so poetic as to make no sense. Entire strains of the book’s narrative – a subplot involving the bomb-defusing crew led by Lord Suffolk, the injured Almasy’s trek through the desert with Bedouins, Kip’s realisation of western evil after hearing of the bombing of Hiroshima – have been excised by the director.
Other scenes, meanwhile, have been recast or moved to different settings. The historical Almasy’s deep complicity with the Nazis is fudged in the film much more than in the book. Most tellingly, the opening sections of the novel and the film are radically different – where the book starts in the still, ecclesiastical hush of the decrepit villa, the film announces its epical intentions by commencing with a cross-desert dash through German ack-ack in a biplane. Throughout the film’s near three hours, Minghella proves himself to be about as faithful to Ondaatje’s text as Clifton is to her woebegone husband.
What the director has done, rather, is to create a film that is a variation on a series of themes, characters and settings to be found in Ondaatje’s novel. “The prose is oblique, mosaic-like,” Minghella has said. “It doesn’t automatically offer a narrative route.” In response to this he has, quite simply, defied the whole current notion of screen adaptation.
Transformers of Grishamesque pulp need merely reconfigure the “prose” and “dialogue” of these books into a screen-written format, while adaptors of the 19th-century novels currently being dressed up for the screen must primarily be adept at condensation. Both are constrained by the fact that the stories they are converting are embedded in the public imagination. Any significant changes will meet with howls of protest, as Brian De Palma discovered when he rejigged Tom Wolfe’s instantly canonical The Bonfire of the Vanities to make room for Bruce Willis and a happy ending. Tales of Hollywood moguls trying to fiddle with the core of Shakespeare tragedies or Hemingway novels may make for good gossip, but in the end famous texts win out.
By choosing a source whose plot was unknown and yet bore the stamp of celebrated art, Minghella gave himself room to re-imagine the story. What is more remarkable is that he has done it with the author’s consent. “The novel was my version of the story,” Ondaatje has said, “so the script has to be something new. It’s not my story any more. It’s Anthony’s version on a grand scale.”
As with everything else about this rule-defying movie, Minghella’s ability to transform a difficult novel into a coherent, gripping and populist film defies cinematic logic and jinxes potential imitators. Indeed, the only thing that can be said for sure about The English Patient is that anyone keen on making a film like it will probably find themselves, like the lady and the count, plunging into a big, expensive and lonely desert.
