Fools for Love

Ondaatje's vision of nationalism sabotaging human bonds makes it into the movie, albeit in more deft, balanced, and understated ways (not that Minghella hits on any resonant ploy to resolve Hana and Kip's romance; it ends in midair.) The International Sand Club -- the men who gather with Almasy to chart the Egyptian-Libyan desert and explore vanished worlds -- forms a utopian vision of international cooperation; twentieth-century warrior states coveting the club's maps is achingly ironic. But when Almasy and his friends wind up on opposite ends of an epochal world crisis, it's too easy for a novelist or filmmaker to blame the big bad forces of nationalism without exposing the explorers' own arrogant complacency and naivete. It should be jarring -- no, harrowing -- for us to root for anyone who satisfies personal vows and desires no matter the public consequences, to the extent of killing Allies or cooperating with Nazis. Yet the movie, like the book, ultimately dispels chaos and guilt in a fervid romanticism. It's a whitewash job done with sperm. In a penetrating review, book critic Craig Seligman -- the only one I know to call Ondaatje on his melodramatic psychology and moral-political confusion -- concluded in the New Republic: "Is he saying it all evens out? Tell it to the Jews and the Gypsies and the homosexuals. Is he saying that war is hideous? Oh. Or is he making grand gestures? Ondaatje hasn't written a novel at all, he has written a storybook, and his characters are storybook characters. That is the beauty of The English Patient, and that is where it fails." (Perhaps Ondaatje will respond to this analysis when he reads at the Miami Book Fair International this Sunday, November 24.)

So Ondaatje is lucky in his adapter because Minghella is a storybook moviemaker -- indeed, he wrote all the episodes of the Emmy Award-winning Jim Henson's the Storyteller. One medieval fable (as collected in a later book version) began with a Samuel Johnson quote appropriate for The English Patient ("Life protracted is protracted woe") and ended with a vision of its hero wandering "as we all do, between Heaven and Hell," always falling an inch short of Paradise because he succeeded in scaring Death. He does his dance of death-in-life "just before sleep, or at places where sand meets sea, land meets sky." The magic hour is Minghella's metier, whether it marks the twilight of a life or a day; no one is better at the limbo rock. There's an expressive otherworldliness to the fleeting shots of the Bedouins tending to Almasy; they cover his face with a mask of plaited palms that makes him seem a primordial tribesman and fractures his view of the universe. At least Almasy knows that he reached Paradise, in the arms of Katharine. And as Katharine, Kristin Scott Thomas fills the screen with her brainy sensuality -- after stealing Angels and Insects just a few months ago in the role of a supposed plain Jane.

The film's editor Walter Murch must have collaborated closely with Minghella on the movie's graceful, intuitive transitions between past and present. Along with cinematographer (and camera operator) John Seale, a virtuoso of vistas and filigree, they create a marvelous rag-and-bottle shop of the mind with the story's tactile elements: tinkling morphine cylinders and a Bedouin healer's clanking glass jars, a bracelet worn by one of Hana's dead friends, and a thimble Katharine transforms into a necklace. Murch has written that one of the tasks of an editor is extending the rhythms of a good actor "into territory not covered by the actor himself." So his primary contribution may have been the exquisite showcase Minghella provides for Thomas. From the moment Katharine steps down from her plane into the desert, Thomas evinces a barely contained vitality that puts everyone around her on a joyous red alert. Even Fiennes's glowering Almasy perks up in her presence. It's futile for him to use his courtly distance as a shield against sexual attraction, so his aristocratic dourness takes on a comic edge. When they're thrown together during a sandstorm, and Almasy, unable to resist flirtation, recites a litany of fabled winds, his change is gratifying in an old-Hollywood way -- the woman next to me sighed and asked, "Why is he so cute all of a sudden?" Well, it's partly because of Thomas, who brings a complete carnal consciousness to the erotic scenes, which are full of torment as well as rapture. Thomas makes you believe that Katharine can hold two clashing ideas in her head and two men in her heart; when she's bathing with Almasy and includes her husband in a list of things she loves, the feeling is tender and rueful.