The English Patient: A Screenplay

In my opinion, the movie did not do justice to this Booker prize winning novel although Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas were beautifully cast. Author Michael Ondaatie's tale of the rememberance of an adulterous romance juxtaposed with the horrors of WWII loses some of its magic in the transition to film. Sadly, the author's arcane knowledge about the Great Silk Road, the Florentine Madonnas, various desert winds and the great Django Reinhardt have been severely compressed or omitted. Told from the P-O-V of a dying protagonist under the influence of morphine, the story is revealed in numerous flashbacks. The locations alternate between a ruined villa in war torn Italy, glamourous Cairo, Egypt at Christmastime, 1938 and archaeological ruins in the uncharted North African desert. The Oscar nominated screenplay actually begins three-quarters through the book with aristocratic Hungarian explorer Lazlo Almaszy falling aflame from a burning plane into the Saharian desert. His rescue by Beoudins who save his life is both haunting and original. The tragically disfigured Almasy is dubbed the English Patient when he ends up in a British field hospital where he refuses to reveal his identity. A skilled linguist, they think he is one of them, however, he has good reason to conceal his true identity. There the shell-shocked nurse Hana starts caring for him and they end up in a villa where they are slowly joined by a few other characters. There the brilliant, anti-social Count recounts the story of his doomed love affair with Katharine Clifton, a collegue's charming wife. Poor Almasy is a man who "fasted until he found what he wanted" and when he finally finds her, he is obsessed. For the love of Catherine, he ultimately betrays his friends, his country and is forever haunted by their tragic destiny. The screenplay does do an excellent job of making coherent the duel plot lines and numerous flashbacks. It is all here-adultery, homosexuality, necrophilia, drug addiction, treason and murder in a story so compelling and so tragic one actually pities these fictional characters.

If you love movies and writing than the screenplay is an interesting companion to the movie and book. Read along to the movie or figure out what a character really said, you can take this along with you anytime and enjoy the movie all over again. Filled with photos from the film and comments by Minghella, Zaentz, and Ondaatje, this is an excellent addition to your English Patient collection.

This is the first screeenplay i've read and i understood it clearly. In regards to the books content i was in tears by the end and it pushed me to buy the film after i read it. A must for any shelf.

In The English Patient, we have a story that is able to rend the heart and soothe the soul within a single passage. The book spins an intricate web both with its storyline and with the way we piece the characters together; each fragment fitting into its own place until we finally form a complete picture which brings new light to every element we have discovered before. It is that web which captivates the reader, forcing us to complete the whole picture before we are able to put the book down

Adapting novels to screenplays is fraught with perils - the expectations of readers who want to see the movie as they imagined the story when reading the book; trying to condense hundreds of pages of prose to 120 pages of sparsely written screen directions and (one hopes) pithy, memorable dialogue; and not least, dealing with an author resentful of the screenwriter's "messing around" with his or her work. But in "The English Patient", a screenplay by Anthony Minghella, who also directed the film, we have an adaptation brilliant in its execution, one which the author actually praises in a prologue to the published script (Miramax Books). The script is based on Canadian author Michael Onjaatje's novel of the same name. The novel is quite different, an amazing, drug-hazed trip in its own right. When Minghella decided to do the film version, he read the book once, then put it away and began afresh. He's taken the sense of the book, the emotional core of it, and brought that forward, using elements from the novel and inventing a few of his own. Both men have nothing but admiration for each other, and Ondaatje was on the set of "The English Patient" much of the time. For anyone interested in filmmaking, scriptwriting, adaptations, or just a good read, both the novel and the screenplay will not disappoint. -michael cox.