I am not typically an Academy Award hater. For one thing, I genuinely like celebrities. I think Roman Polanski's autobiography is one of the best books that I have ever read, and I think that “E! True Hollywood Story” is one of the best TV series on television. I honestly watch the E! Network more than any other channel on TV. I actually liked Titanic and Forrest Gump. I thought that they were interesting movies worth seeing. In 1986, 1988, 1991, 1992 and 1993 I think that it is plausible that the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year actually went to the film that was the best picture of the year. In fact I think that I would stand behind the Academy all the way in naming Silence of the Lambs the best film of 1991. Like Silence of the Lambs, Platoon, Unforgiven and yes, even Schindler's List had a very cinematic grisliness to them. Quentin Tarantino admits in the audio commentary for True Romance that the film Coming Home in a Body Bag, which his alter ego Clarence calls the last movie with balls to win the Academy Award for Best Picture since The Deer Hunter, is really a veiled reference to Oliver Stone's Platoon. Clarence/Tarantino may take the same stance with Silence of the Lambs and Unforgiven. Unforgiven's win over Howard's End may have especially convinced Clarence/Tarantino that Oscar finally got it right. They may even have the same response to the very "important" but very cinematic and flashy Schindler's List.

Too often however, if the Academy doesn't award the Oscar to unwatchable movies from unreadable books, they are sure to give it to the "most important" and most middlebrow film they can. Typically it has to be a period piece and have some sort of epic scope. The Academy likes to award biopics also. If a film fits those criteria and is also popular and critically acclaimed enough it will win the Oscar. In 1998 and 1999, there weren't really any obvious Oscar winners. Forrest Gump, Shakespeare in Love and American Beauty are now considered to be the epitome of mainstream cinema, but they're still pretty odd movies. There isn't anything at all odd about Braveheart or Gladiator.

I don't even think that the Academy particularly likes these sorts of movies. I remember reading Premiere or Entertainment Weekly sometime early in 1996 or late in 1995. They asked several celebrities what their favorite film of 1995 was. A very noticeable portion said that it was The Usual Suspects. Indeed The Usual Suspects won Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, important awards that will legitimize and maybe even further establish its significance in American film history. But they didn't even nominate it for the big one. The 1995 Best Picture nominations were infamously awful. Sense and Sensibility, Il Postino, Babe, Apollo 13 and Braveheart. While I'll admit to being a big fan of the rather inexcusably anachronistic Americorn Apollo 13, you'd think that they would at least throw film lovers more of a bone. But the people who are interested is seeing a film that won the Academy Award would not be interested in seeing The Usual Suspects, even though it was quite possibly a favorite among the Academy. The Academy voters pick the movie that they think that they are supposed to like, and accordingly the movie that people who watch Academy Award-winning films believe fits some preconception of what a work of art should be like.

1996 was not one of the best years for film. Or, let's just say it wasn't one of the best years for the cinema, or movielike movies. After 1995 gave us To Die For, Casino, Showgirls, Leaving Las Vegas, Se7en, Apollo 13, et cetera et cetera, 1996 gave us quieter, much less exhilarating films. At the time it was called the "Year of the Indy." The ratings were very poor, and the following year the Academy was relieved to award the wildly popular period epic Titanic and regain high ratings and possibly even broader demographics. Again, I say relieved because they have this "thing" where they have to award the film that they think they are supposed to like and fits the preconception perpetuated by Academy Award fans of what a work of art is. The English Patient seems to be exactly the sort of film designed exclusively to be nominated for and win Academy Awards. It serves no higher purpose but to win awards. (If much of this review so far has been bitching about the Oscars rewarding "important" films like The English Patient, instead of The English Patient itself, it's because its status as Academy Award winner is ultimately the single identifying attribute of the film.) I can't imagine that people actually take pleasure in it or relate to it, or purchase it on DVD with the desire to view it again and again. Now that it's all over, do we really continue to think about The English Patient? If it didn't win the Academy Award or was never nominated for the Academy Award would we still accept it into our culture? I know that I sound like a pissy tween film fan writing about a film that they clearly hate because it went over their head or provoked a response that they are unable to adequately analyze. If I saw somebody writing this about The Thin Red Line or either of the Solaris films, I think I could shrug them off pretty easily (although, I'll be upfront in admitting that I do not own a copy of Tarkovsky's Solaris and the Soderbergh film will probably be owned before it. And there is a lot that embarrasses me about The Thin Red Line. The backlash has taken me back a bit).

But The English Patient is awfully mediocre, and to the extent that it has any lingering effect it's certainly a primitive and weak one. As my wife said, in disappointment at losing three hours of her life: "It's not that I hate it, it's that there is nothing good about it." Exactly. In a way a film that can nauseate and outrage at least will have that going for it. The English Patient definitely doesn't get the blood boiling like Patch Adams does. Liking Patch Adams is a deal-breaker for me, creating a deep passionate anger that ordinarily only affects people in the areas of politics and religion. I'm like Fred Phelps at a Gay Pride parade. I want to bust some skulls. I almost feel like if you enjoy Patch Adams you better be prepared to die for it because I'm prepared to kill for it. Yeah, I don't much like the person that I am when I'm in "Patch Adams" mode, so I try and keep it under control. I can't even adequately describe why I hate Patch Adams other than it's ugly, misogynistic, immoral, impartial, but you know, none of those reasons feel good enough. Racists and homophobes can't really describe their fervor; they just feel it very deeply. Some nerve, for some reason, has been struck. But you know at least Patch Adams has the capacity to transform me into a bigoted, violent psychopath. I can at least give it some credit for provoking that kind of response.

The English Patient is, well, just dead air. An emperor without its clothes is just sort of pathetic. Preferable to Patch Adams but pathetic all the same. I'm usually better at defending than criticizing, I think that even when I say something bad about the movie I'm still giving it a lot more credit than any of its defenders. I remember a conversation where I was criticizing Spike Jonze's "Sabotage" video for some reason, but mentioned that Jonze has a slacker aesthetic and the parodying of a cop show exhibits a universe without design; i.e his absurdist feature film Being John Malkovich and the atrocious choreography of "Praise You.” I think that I said that the "Sabotage" video was too shallow or obvious, or lacked the existential liberation of "Praise You" and some of his other works. Fans of the video were attacking me for not realizing that it was a parody of the '70s cop show “Starsky and Hutch.” I think that they meant that its status as a parody was the end all to understanding what was going on. Anyway, typically I'm the prince of apologia. However, I honestly do not believe that The English Patient is good for me or that its inability to really stimulate is a trade-off for something more. If it is good for me, all the same, watching it is akin to eating shredded wheat without the milk. A line, again, I would expect the hypothetical tween to crack against Solaris,, but here there you go.

This review is already half-over, so anyway, about The English Patient: You cannot buy into the relationship between Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas. I mean, you can't interpret anything in their relationship as possessing any sort of ideal that the film is attempting to uphold as virtuous. Accordingly, you can't find anything in their relationship to be particularly romantic. In one of the first shots of the film, we are given an aerial view of sand dunes. We don't recognize them as just sand dunes of course. While we cognitively recognize that they are sand dunes, the sequence is so strange that it begins to take a surreal quality. Literally, a Surreal quality. We begin thinking Dali and that very funny hallucination sequence in Michael Lehmann's 40 Days and 40 Nights. The dunes are a woman's flesh. It's equating land with a body. There's more of this. Ralph Fiennes is a geographer for the British before World War II, and early in the film he is looking for a mountain that he was told looks like "a woman's back." Fiennes says that he hates "ownership." Later after he sleeps with Kristin Scott Thomas, he points to a pit on her neck and tells her that this is his. She reminds him that he said that he hates ownership. He sort of shrugs at this. It seems that he has learned the joys of ownership. The Thomas character is married and so her affair with Fiennes is adulterous. It's necessary that she be married, so that Fiennes can understand the joys of owning another man's property. After she dumps him because she can't go on with this, he angrily makes a scene where he derides British colonialism. His use of her is a colonialist activity, as we have established woman as property and woman as land. I think his outburst is (in part at the very least) against what he perceives as a hypocrisy at the implied immorality of his act. Everybody is doing it, so why can't he?

Fiennes' and Thomas' romance is juxtaposed with a romance between his nurse and an Indian Sikh bomb expert. The latter romance gives the film an uplift that we don't get with the former. For one, they kill off Thomas, but they don't kill off the bomb expert. At the end of the film, they just part ways. Second, the very presence of a second love story among secondary characters, a fairly successful and happy one, implies that the film does not have faith with its primary love story. That it doesn't see it as particularly virtuous. As the underlying reason for the attraction is sort of wacky, and I think rather blatantly one-sided and misogynistic, that makes sense. Even so, we are given a scene where the bomb expert takes off his turban to wash his hair, which is long and beautiful. MaryAnn Johanson records this scene as an "unforgettable movie moment." Somewhat buried in here is a seed of racism. It mythologizes the Indian. Under every turban is a sexy Indian man. In memorializing a colleague, the bomb expert remarks that he never asked about "Kama Sutra," indicating that the friend was beyond racial stereotypes. You wonder at that point if those thoughts were under the reach of the nurse. I'm really unable to come up with any other explanation for their relationship.

At least though, she wants to enjoy the Indian and not possess him, a sexual perspective that seems more feminine and in a distinct way more erotic. Because the secondary romance is portrayed in such a positive light, the film seems to come off as an anti-possession tract. Everyone that the nurse has a relationship with ends up dying, but I think that the film is indicating that she shouldn't see this as losing them, as loss indicates possession. Love should be about the experience and the memory. That's why Fiennes dies a miserable hunk of crispy flesh. The film is curious in that it takes place before and after the war, and so we don't see a whole lot of actual war. On the level of serious film criticism, I know that this is all because it's about the effect that the war has on the psyche of these characters. In my gut though, I know that this ain't The Deer Hunter or Born on the Fourth of July. The film really doesn't have anything particularly substantial to say about World War II. World War II is simply where the film is set. The attraction of a World War II film is that it is able to introduce exotic locations and exotic races to its characters. And of course it's World War II, and aside from dying and atrocity, there was such a sense of oneness, such a sense that there was a threat that we had to work together to fight, such a sense that everybody had a job and a sense of purpose, that we sort of want to perpetuate the war. And so this all has a primitive sort of effect as escapism. And of course, World War II makes it an important film that we can make believe is art.

Ultimately, it all feels sort of shallow though. While that central relationship has quite impure origins and a melancholy conclusion (I forgot to mention the significant plot development of Fiennes selling out the Allies to the Germans so that he can go to save his lover), the film wants to exploit this relationship for the exotic locations and sex scenes. It doesn't seem to have the courage to say "This affair is bad," even though that seems to be the only really thematically coherent judgement to make. The fact that this section has been misread by several (not particuarlly sophisticated) viewers as being romantic seems to be proof of that. Even if we accept the film’s theme, that love should not be thought in terms of possession, it’s an awfully goofy movie. It’s difficult to read into that sand symbolism without chuckling a little. And if the latter relationship is sweeter, there really isn’t a lot going on in it. Their attachment and need for each other is too weak to be substantially meaty enough to take interest.

The English Patient isn't really much more than a girly fingerfuck fantasy, as these are the sorts of thoughts and ideas that you would expect from a girly fingerfuck fantasy. That would be almost all right if it were just a good girly fingerfuck fantasy. Perhaps the most appropriate legacy that The English Patient has left us is that famous episode of “Seinfeld,” where Elaine hates the film and her boss forces her to go to Africa so she can become inspired. She complains to a waitress at Monk's diner, "And the sex! Give me something that I can use!" That's about the right way to see The English Patient and the right conclusion to draw. The waitress' response: "Well, I liked it!" That's nearly the limit of its virtues.

In the interest of honest film criticism, there are two terrific sequences in the film. A scene where some German interrogators cut off a thief's thumbs has a wince-worthy kind of power, and a scene following a sand storm where Fiennes and Thomas dig up a buried car with people inside has a certain Herzog-like quality in that you realize that to get this incredible image they actually would have to bury the car with people in it. The filmmaker's treat is so casual that you half hope that they will provide you with more of where that came from. They don't. These scenes are paper cups of water in a very arid desert.