The English Patient (1996) - Anthony Minghella

Continuing to make my way through the 1990s Best Picture Winners (has anyone ever heard of Unforgiven?…. NOOO it’s a Western!!), I thought I would see this one while it’s still on Netflix.

The English Patient is simultaneously a love story set in the vast, unexplored continent of Africa during the years before World War II and a story of loss in the Italian countryside in 1944 up until the end of the war.

And yes I do use those descriptors of Africa ironically.

The movie opens on a plane being shot down in the desert, where one survivor is horribly burned but alive. Then, we are in Italy, where a Canadian nurse, Hana (Juliette Binoche), after experiencing the death of two loved ones, decides to stay behind and take care of a man who is disfigured from burns and does not remember his name. They settle in a bombed monastery in the countryside.

This is only gif of Juliette Binoche I could find from this movie! That’s her meeting David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), who was a Canadian Intelligence Corps operative (thank you Wikipedia).

Meanwhile! Back in Africa in the late 1930s, the Royal Geographic Society is tasked with mapping out parts of Libya. There’s Geoffrey and Katherine Clifton, played by Colin Firth and Kristin Scott Thomas. And there’s Count László de Almásy, played by Ralph Fiennes. The Count and Katherine soon have an affair.

Drama! I wasn’t expecting the “I’m a socially awkward and actually pretty rude white man, but you’re going to fall in love with me anyway,” but surprise! It’s here. They pretty much hate each other the first moment they meet. The Count is self-righteous, pretentious, and annoying.

Meanwhile, Hana is taking care of this man who is slowly remembering his life before his accident, with the help of Caravaggio’s suspicions that he is a traitor and a spy. Also we meet Hana’s love interest, Kip (Naveen Andrews), a bomb diffuser!

Besides the 2 hour and 42 minute run time, I think that I liked The English Patient. It definitely didn’t have an impact on me, but it wasn’t intolerable to watch, like it was for some people in the 90s.

I cared way more about whatever Juliette Binoche was doing than about the stuff going on in the desert, which I guess is why she won an Oscar and Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas lost.

The English Patient did go on to win 9 of its 12 Oscar nominations though, including Best Picture, which is insane, and also the same number of Oscar wins as Gone with the Wind, a movie that is 1 hour and 26 minutes longer than this one!

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) - Stanley Kubrick

“A bored couple’s confessions open up a world of sexual obsession and debauchery. Be careful what you wish for.”Netflix. What? How did you make this movie sound like a Vince Vaughn movie and a DCOM at the same time…

I’ve seen 6 of Stanley Kubrick’s films. 2001 Space Odyssey was the first. The Shining is my favorite. A Clockwork Orange is the one I understand the least. Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket are in the middle somewhere. This one I would rank on the more accessible side… that is if I even understood what it was about.

Pretty much my only knowledge of Eyes Wide Shut was that it was crazy rich people being crazy, at least that was the understanding I got from a short Happy Endings reference in Season 3 Episode 23.

Nailed it. In the film, Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is married to Alice, played by Cruise’s real life second wife, Nicole Kidman.

The first night of the film, the couple goes to a fancy Christmas party for fancy people, and both are tempted to be unfaithful. The second night, they smoke weed together and go into some deep talk about their relationship. Bill puts his foot in his mouth like 40 times, mansplaining the world to her.

In what I took as an act of revenge for oversimplifying female sexuality as well as putting her on a pedestal, Alice reveals a dark secret about their past.

Her story is the catalyst for Bill to go on a crazy adventure. There seems to be some mix of “I love my wife how could she do this to me” and “I’m gonna show her” at play. The whole movie is asking the viewer to question dualities in love and sex, as Alice makes very clear that she can have strong feelings of love for Bill as well as a carnal desire to cheat in the same moment. The long, slow scenes give some great drama to the weird crazy spiral of Bill’s night.

I don’t want to give away the fun details, but Bill’s desperation for some new experience, or some way to get revenge on his wife, leads him to a place he never could have dreamed existed.

I feel like I must be a little desensitized to batshit crazy sex scenes, but I definitely nodded along with this part in a “yeah this is exactly what I assume rich people are doing with their time” sort of way.

Bill gets in big trouble for not belonging to the society of sex-crazed 1 percenters. But his curiosity about the party does not go away, which gets him into even more trouble.

Look out for flamboyant Alan Cumming hotel concierge.

I think what’s really interesting is that while the focus of the movie is the weird, mysterious party, it is essentially a story about Bill and Alice’s relationship and what drives them to either distance themselves or come closer together. A confession by Alice triggers this rift, and Bill has to go searching for some kind of understanding of how to face the future of their relationship. I took it as his erotic adventures are sort of his journey towards forgiving his wife, but obviously it’s also a lot more complex than that. The Christmas setting also works to add an off-putting tone to the film, things are happy and jolly but they are also foreboding. There are a lot of references to rainbows as well, and the pull to finding what is at the “end of the rainbow.”

The film was censored in the United States (as it is on my self-proclaimed family friendly blog), and led to a sort of disappointing box office run. With a successful international reception, however, it is Kubrick’s highest grossing film, at $162 million.

Kubrick passed away four days after showing the final cut to Warner Bros, and there has been some controversy as to whether he was proud of the film or not, with most parties, including his daughter, stating that he was very happy with the finished product. Also some people believe the film is based on true events and those elite people depicted in the film offed him… dun dun dun.

It feels different than Kubrick’s other films, but I believe it has that same calculated cinematography, intricate symbolism, and suspenseful pacing that remind us what a great filmmaker Kubrick has always been.