The english patient review roger ebert biography

Love and doom have always made dramatic bedfellows, but even those who gorge on romantic tragedies like A Farewell to Arms or Vertigo may find their appetite for fatal rapture duly tested by The English Patient.

The english patient review roger ebert biography

For this is a movie in which romance is saturated in catastrophe, like an episode of The Love Boat set aboard the Titanic. Liberally adapted from Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning poetic novel, The English Patient, a brooding, elliptical, mosaically structured love-and-war epic (it runs 2 hours and 39 minutes), shows us the most fervid stirrings of passion being ripped apart by disaster.

Planes are shot out of the sky, a woman is blown to bits by a land mine, and a globe-trotting loner, having found the love of his life (they bond while getting buried in a sandstorm), loses not only that love but his face — he’s burned beyond recognition, turned into a scarred husk of a man who can only dream of what was.

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