Screen Scene
SCREEN SCENE by John Carlos Cantú
RATING KEY
[star] Acting [flower] Cinematography [point] Direction [scissors] Editing [pen] Narrative [tape] Sound [cross] Special Effects
When a symbol appears following a title, it implies that the corresponding category is a strength of the movie.
---------------
THE ENGLISH PATIENT
[1996. Directed by Anthony Minghella. Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristen Scott Thomas. Miramax Films. 162mins.]
[star, flower, point, pen]
The good news is that The English Patient is as close to David Lean's fiImmaking as anyone's crafted through this last decade. The bad news is that it's also closer to Ryan's Daughter than Brief Encounter.
Ace cinematographer John Seale has masterfully captured the arid beauty of Tunisia's imposing desert. And editor Walter Murch has crafted an intriguing movie from an impossibly complicated premise. But Anthony Minghella's screenplay breathes a bit too much of Michael Ondaatje's dense 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel.
For all the story's interpersonal friction, there's an emotional void in The English Patient that doesn't persuasively connect its characters together. Chalk it up to British reserve -- or blame Minghella himself -- yet somewhat like the benighted flight that serves as the film's emblematic bookends: The English Patient crashes a bit prematurely.
World War II French-Canadian nurse Hana's (Juliette Binoche) exhaustion with life causes her to abandon her unit so that she may sit out a nameless English aviator's painful death. She moves her patient to an abandoned Tuscan monastery and awaits his last breath. The film interpolates this tale -- plus the nurse's short affair with Kip (Naveen Andrews), a Sikh demolition expert, and the arrival of a mysterious fellow Canadian, Caravaggio (Willem Defoe) - with the eventual death of her amnesiac patient.
The dying man's story, a Hungarian Count named Ladislaus de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), revolves around his life between 1939 and 1944. Almásy has stranded himself in North Africa to avoid the messy emotional entrapments the world tends to present to lesser men and women. But flying into his life from out of nowhere comes vivacious British socialite, Katharine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas). Her map-maker husband, Geoffrey (Colin Firth), has led her to the end of the world in [an] airplane on his idea of a honeymoon.
A quirk of fate leaves Almásy and Katherine stranded in the desert after an expedition accident. After they are rescued, they find more interest in each other than in mere cartography. Geoffrey's resulting inability to come to terms with his jealousy propels the film to its inevitable climax.
The English Patient unfolds back and forth -- from Northern Africa in 1939 to Tuscany in 1944 -- leisurely telling Hana's and Almásy's love stories. It's far too much material for one film to bear and the screenplay's elliptic nature only telegraphs its major points.
Hence the comparison with David Lean. At his best, Lean rapidly developed character while simultaneously working on an extraordinarily broad cinematic canvas. Minghella, on the other hand, is swamped with competing strategic and tactical narrative details: Almásy is unremittingly churlish; Hana is emotionally underdeveloped; and Caravaggio is quite nearly superfluous. This leaves the Clifton's dual disappointments as the film's most compelling story.
What's enthralling about The English Patient is Minghella's cobbling of a film out of a supposed unworkable plot. What he sacrifices in depth is compensated for in relentless narrative. He manages to hold his audience's attention despite the fact that he has to (by logical necessity) deflate what little suspense there is to be found in the story.
The English Patient is as artful a motion picture as we're going to see released this year. Nearly unrelievedly angst-ridden, the film manages a dollop of optimism despite its aching world-weariness. It may seem a bit labored after all the effort, but by inferring that life can be salvaged by the simple act of caring, this flawed masterwork weaves a peculiarly effective magic despite its sundry obscurities.
-----------------------
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR
[1996. Directed by Torn Shadyac. Cast: Eddie Murphy, Jada Pinkett, Larry Miller. Universal/MCA Home video. 95 mins.]
[star, point, pen, cross]
Eddie Murphy's back ... and he's back in a very big way.
Indeed, Torn Shadyac's The Nutty Professor proves three crucial facts about comedy in the 1990s: first, he's as much to blame for Ace Ventura Pet Detective as Jim Carrey; second, Murphy's at complete ease swiping Jerry Lewis' greatest all-time hit; and third, black humor has come a long, long way since Alfred Hitchcock and Step'n Fetchit.
It seems only yesterday - -well, it was only yesterday -- that Murphy's career was choking on the morass of Harlem Nights, The Distinguished Gentleman and A Vampire in Brooklyn. These aren 't particularly bad films, but none of them have the soulful flair of his earlier 48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop, or Coming to America.
Let's face it, America's funniest man of the 1980s has been gagging for some time on the fumes of his ego. As such, The Nutty Professor is a good road map illustrating Murphy's frustrations through this time. The film is mean-spirited, misogynist, and downright misanthropic at times. But it's also unfailingly funny.
The Nutty Professor is everything we should warn our children about. No one -- no race, no sex, no weight, no economic class, not even romance -- comes out with dignity intact. Murphy's on a single-minded comedic mission in this movie and heaven save anyone who gets in his path.
But perhaps this is overstating the case a bit.
No. On second thought, The Nutty Professor is easily the most unfunny hilarious film of 1996. And this is, paradoxically, why the film is a success.
In Jerry Lewis' hands, chemist Julius Kelp is a well-meaning schlemiel whose all-thumbs scientific experiments turn him into is ex-nightclub partner, Dean Martin. After he drinks the secret love juice he's developed, Kelp's counter ego, Buddy Love, is a smarmy smoothie of scholarly misdirection.
By contrast, Murphy 's Sherman Klump isn't a squirrel in the least. Rather, he's a 400-pound bundie of tenured disappolntment. And when he transmogrifies himself into his latent alter ego, he's not a vaguely over-the-hill crooner. This Buddy is a gangster of love.
That Murphy would parody himself as viciously as Lewis parodied Martin says a lot about both films ... and both comedians. For it takes a stretch of concentration to remember there was once a time when sophomoric humor wasn't meant as a direct insult to its audience. This was the distinction between vaudeville's camp and burlesque's shtick. Lewis always walked an unsteady line between these two styles of comedy, but he nearly always avoided dreck.
Murphy has no such qualms. He needs a laugh the way Klump needs a diet: in the worst way possible. The wonder is that a sort of softhearted comedy does indeed emerge from The Nutty Professor's overheated malignant jest.
Most of the credit must go to Shadyac. Amazingly, he keeps Murphy firmly in hand. There are touches of gentle humor that another director might have dropped in the editing room. Instead, Shadyac's uncanny ability to diffuse Murphy 's acidic humor with an unlikely romance keeps the story running -- and his leading man likable -- despite himself at times.
Still, Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy. And he's in command from the first frame of this film to the last image. Playing a half-dozen characters might tire out most comedians, but the best (Alee Guinness, Peter Sellers, and, of course, Lewis himself) have always thrived in projects where multiple roles are de rigueur.
Just try to remember it's a movie when the mashed potatoes are being passed around the dinner table. The Nutty Professor is at its best (and simultaneous worst) when it tries to play itself out as real life.