Books, Arts & Manners: The Hungarian Patient

SOME movies enjoy instant canonization. Well before they open, the word is out: “This is one you mustn’t miss”; and, next thing you know, the reviews are rapturous, too. So the usually wholesomely skeptical Anthony Lane of The New Torker proclaimed The English Patient a near-masterpiece which he had already seen twice. Having missed the critics’ screenings, I went on a weekday to an early afternoon showing at a movie theater and practically couldn’t get a seat. All that without a big star in the cast.

This is, in its way, encouraging. We have here, after all, a film based on a highly literary novel by Michael Ondaatje—so literary, in fact, that many found it unreadable. (I didn’t even try to read it.) Anthony Minghella, the scenarist-director, apparently had to do a lot of inventing to tie the many strands into a coherent 160-minute movie, and more or less managed it, although coherence does not preclude oversaturation. The film feels like an interminable Chinese banquet, with more and more unfamiliar courses in unsettling order served up to the befuddlement of a Western palate and queasiness of a Western stomach.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

SOME movies enjoy instant canonization. Well before they open, the word is out: “This is one you mustn’t miss”; and, next thing you know, the reviews are rapturous, too. So the usually wholesomely skeptical Anthony Lane of The New Torker proclaimed The English Patient a near-masterpiece which he had already seen twice. Having missed the critics’ screenings, I went on a weekday to an early afternoon showing at a movie theater and practically couldn’t get a seat. All that without a big star in the cast.

This is, in its way, encouraging. We have here, after all, a film based on a highly literary novel by Michael Ondaatje—so literary, in fact, that many found it unreadable. (I didn’t even try to read it.) Anthony Minghella, the scenarist-director, apparently had to do a lot of inventing to tie the many strands into a coherent 160-minute movie, and more or less managed it, although coherence does not preclude oversaturation. The film feels like an interminable Chinese banquet, with more and more unfamiliar courses in unsettling order served up to the befuddlement of a Western palate and queasiness of a Western stomach.