7.1 | / 10 |
Users | 4.6 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.4 |
At the close of WWII, a young nurse tends to a badly-burned plane crash victim. His past is shown in flashbacks, revealing a tragic love affair.
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen AndrewsDrama | 100% |
Period | 53% |
Romance | 46% |
War | 37% |
Melodrama | 31% |
Epic | 24% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English, English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 5.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
There’s a famous Seinfeld episode where Elaine, the snarky, boorish, politically incorrect character portrayed
with such relish by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, finds herself increasingly at odds with seemingly everyone around her when
she professes her dislike—well, let’s be honest, her outright hatred—of the film The English Patient.
Elaine’s seething disregard for the titular character’s horrible fate in life, culminating in her angry catcall of “hurry up and
die already” might strike some (as it does most in the episode) as the height of an unfeeling lack of empathy. For those
who have slogged through one historical epic too many, it probably hits closer to its intended home of hilarity. Anthony
Minghella both wrote and directed the film version of The English Patient, adapting the well regarded novel by
Michael Ondaatje, and as I mentioned in my review of Minghella’s film version of Cold Mountain, he brought a
certain David Lean-esque approach to the novel’s gargantuan historical sweep and intimate character study. There’s
one salient difference between Minghella’s The English Patient and at least three of Lean’s best known
historical epics, namely Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter and A Passage to India.
Lean
had the ability to frame huge, indeed epochal, historic events in very personal terms. In Lawrence of Arabia, it
was of course a biographical piece on T.E. Lawrence, but it also was intimately wrapped up with the nascent ideas of
nationalism of various Arab peoples which would go on to define major sociopolitical movements of the later twentieth
century. Doctor Zhivago and Ryan’s Daughter may have been “mere” love stories at their core, but they
played out against (or indeed within) earth shattering events like the Bolshevik Revolution and the long simmering
“troubles” between Ireland and England. Only A Passage to India might seem to be at least somewhat outside
the bounds of this “history – personal story” dialectic, though it of course has the subtext of British colonialism and
class structure at its core. For that very reason, it might be considered the closest cousin to Minghella’s The English
Patient, for while Minghella’s film has several huge historical events playing out in the background, including World
War II, the film is much more about its characters than any great movements they find themselves reacting to. While of
course none of the main characters in the film can be completely divorced from their setting, the fact that supposedly
well known (and some frankly not so well known) historical events are somewhat tangential to the film’s storyline might
lead curmudgeons like Seinfeld’s Elaine to be repeatedly checking their collective watches, wondering when that
damned patient will in fact finally hurry up and die.
The English Patient is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate-Miramax with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. This is a largely trouble free presentation, with an overall great looking print, though I would rate the results to be just slightly less formidable than others in this recent wave of Miramax catalog releases, more in tune with the image quality I described in Minghella's other big epic out this week, Cold Mountain. The differences between what I would term the first tier and the second tier levels of image quality are quite slight, but noticeable. As with Cold Mountain, The English Patient shows significantly more grain than releases like Frida or Shakespeare in Love. In fact, The English Patient probably shows the most grain of any of these four releases, grain which spikes rather dramatically in many of the desert scenes (look at the sky in some of the desert screencaps included in this review for some good examples). The image is very sharp otherwise, with well modulated colors and some really gorgeous reproductions of the amber lit hues with infuse a lot of the film. Some of the darker elements do suffer from very minor crush and, again as with Cold Mountain, there some negligible ringing in a few scenes.
The English Patient's gloriously detailed sound design is presented via a beautifully rendered DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that kicks into excellent immersion before the credits sequence even gets under way. The gentle tinkle of chimes and the thud of footsteps are cleanly presented, with the footsteps clearly in the left channel, and then we're off on a whirlwind journey that offers everything from awesome explosive LFE to gentler dialogue sequences. There are a number of hugely disparate segues in terms of the sound design here. The rattle of gunfire might immediately wash into the clink of glasses a peddler carries strung from bars on his shoulders, and the DTS track offers all of this with sterling fidelity and really impressive dynamic range. The film is full of fantastic panning effects and an above average use of discrete channelization even in dialogue sequences. The English Patient may not in fact be the stuff of summer blockbuster aural assault, but it comes awfully close some of the time, and it is presented here in an incredibly nuanced way.
The English Patient is one of the most emotionally fraught epics of all time, one which blends the huge historical sweep of the works of filmmakers like David Lean with a more psychological, "kitchen sink drama" look at a number of troubled characters. Minghella managed something of a miracle adapting Ondaatje's book, one which is really more of an assemblage of ideas, journal entries and recreations of historical fact (the Count was in fact a real person, though one who did not meet quite the ignominious end The English Patient does), and the film manages not just to hold together incredibly well, but to do so in a very untraditional narrative way. Sumptuously beautiful and impeccably shot and designed, this Blu- ray looks great and sounds stellar, and comes jam packed with excellent supplementary material. Highly recommended.
80th Anniversary Edition
1942
1943
1985
2008
2007
La vita è bella
1997
2016
45th Anniversary Edition
1965
1951
70th Anniversary Edition
1939
2011
2003
1942
1939
1946
2001
1966
1931
Masterpiece Classic
2012
25th Anniversary Edition
1987