I watched this movie today in 2.5 sittings. It's really tough for me to stay locked in for over two hours with movies and this one at 2h43m is way too much to take down in one shot. Needless to say this movie seems to need every one of these minutes to develop the impressive number of story-lines and then to neatly tie up the lose ends. No complaints from me about the movie being boring or anything, quite to the contrary, I'd say it was intelligently crafted.
There's a few things I'd like to touch on in this post: the narrative structure, Willem Defeo, the patient, and Juliette Binoche. First, the movie works in a series of flashbacks. Near the beginning a plane gets shot down and the pilot gets badly burned. Once he and his nurse are left by an abandoned roadside monastery the flashbacks of the patient's life become more and more prominent as he is bed-ridden and for all intents and purposes, faceless. So it goes like this: flashback, scene of the monastery, flashback, scene at the monastery, etc. Sometimes the flashbacks are prompted by what happens in the monastery between the characters and sometimes they are just continuations of the previous flashback. To be clear, I love how this technique works in this movie and in storytelling as a whole. It is one of my favorite ways to tell a story. A number of times I found myself reminded of the movie Amadeus which also employs a dying man telling his story through flashbacks. I guess I just wanted to mention that I noticed the technique too much. I was sort of distracted by it. I love the movie but I don't want to be overly focused on storytelling techniques as I was here. Perhaps this was due mostly to the visually shocking face (or lack thereof) of the patient (more to come on this).
I think that the most important and most interesting character in this movie was the one played by Willem Defoe "David Caravaggio." Defoe is a naturally creepy dude and his role in this film requires for him to be two-faced. He has ulterior motives in showing up at the monastery, he is not just a kind neighbor bringing eggs. I think his questionalble moral compass becomes clear when he steals the morphine while Juliette makes an omelet. Anyways, Defeo is what sets the wheels of the plot in motion towards the final reslution. He know who the english patient is and he believes that the patient is merely faking his loss of memory due to shame, anger, trauma in his past. Caravaggio pushes and pushes asking more and more pointed questions such as "what do you call the first wedding anniversary" a question we find from one of his flashbacks is something the patient would know if he were who Caravaggio thinks he is. A little confusing but still. Defoe kills this role and even though we find out he's found himself to the monastery to seek revenge and kill the patient, it seems that the patient injects some humanity into the character. Defoe turns in one of the best acting performances I've seen in a supporting role due to his balancing ever so delicately the two sides of his character and all that boils below the surface.
This is just an observation but when the camera focused on the patient a number of times, it was pretty sobering. It kind of jolted me and pulled me away from the story. It made it feel a little too real. Perhaps the director felt the same since he put a disclaimer right before the credits that he made up most of the story. When we were being brought back from a flashback it increased the sense for the technique when the patient was taking up most of the screen. Just a thought.
Finally, Juliette Binoche won an oscar for the performance in this movie as a supporting actress. I think she was amazing. I liked the simplicity to her character. I also liked her romance with Kip that she just allows to die out. I don't know why I liked it but it seemed right. Kip added a lot of nice moments to the movie, particularly the bomb in the piano scene. I think the scene where he is pulling her around in the church was awesome but totally cheesy. I'm actually very surprised that that scene is not parodied all of the time in the On the Waterfront kiss on the sand and waves nature.
So there it is. Some thoughts. A total masterpiece of a movie and one that fits the classic Oscar stereotype, a super long drama.
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