The English Patient Essay

A Disability Film Analysis on The English Patient Today, more and more people with disabilities are being represented in cinema and are changing the way we think about disabilities. Now, people with disabilities are taking center stage and are redefining the stereotypes of the past. Although the film industry still has a long way to go, it is heading in the right direction and is continuously pushing the boundaries of what people with disabilities are capable of. In this essay, I will analyze Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient, a film about a severely burned and paralyzed man named Almásy, and write about how Almásy’s disabilities were accurately displayed in The English Patient.

The English Patient Synopsis Before The English Patient (1996) was the critically acclaimed, nine-time Oscar-winning film that we know today, it was an immensely popular novel by Michael Ondaatje, a world-renowned poet and novelist (Gelder, 1997, p. 1). The novel was written in 1992 and was inspired by Ondaatje’s obsession with the history of World War II and Herodotus’ Histories (Gelder, 1997, p. 1). It was not long before Ondaatje’s novel achieved worldwide success and was picked up by the soon-to-be Oscar award-winning director, Anthony Minghella, in 1995 (The English Patient: About The Locations, p. 1). The film is set during

In Hana’s eyes, Almásy is a wounded warrior and saint who suffered tremendously throughout the war. In David Caravaggio’s eyes, Almásy is an honor-less traitor with a dark past. Although Almásy’s true identity was shrouded in mystery in both the film and novel, I believe that Almásy was neither depicted in a positive or negative light. I believe that Almásy’s identity was a blank canvas for the audience to decide whether he was a villain or hero. In my eyes, Almásy was a regular, mistake-making man, who made a few bad