The English Patient Film Compared with the Novel

The English Patient Film Compared with the Novel

The Novel:

The English Patient is a fantastic novel and is one of the few truly

great novels written in the last century. The author, Sri Lankan

Michael Ondaatje, switches wonderfully between several scenes: the

desert, the Villa San Girolamo in Tuscany, Italy, Dorset in England

and Cairo. Each one of these perfectly crafted scenes is brought into

being in an exciting and thought provoking way. The book is centred on

four main characters: Hana, a Canadian nurse who has taken it upon

herself to be separated from the other medical staff and remains

behind in a mine-laden villa to tend to just one patient, the English

patient; Kip, a Sikh who was, "a young man of the strangest profession

his century had invented, a sapper, a military engineer who detected

and disarmed bombs."; Caravaggio, whose background we are less

familiar with. He is also Canadian and is friends with Hana's father;

andthe English Patient, who is not actually English, but Hungarian. He

was a great explorer in the desert between 1932 and 1939. He worked

for the Germans in the war and is very badly burned when his plane

gets shot down. He then is transported to the villa where he is nursed

intently by Hana. The book sees their voyage through the difficult

time that is the months following the end of the Second World War in

Europe and, more specifically, the Villa San Girolamo.

The film:

For Minghella, the task of making this brilliant novel into a

successful film was a very difficult one. However, when the film was

made it received nine Oscars and was acclaimed as a fantastic film by

almost everyone who saw ...

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...ggle for life. However, in the film, there is an aspect of

euthanasia. He says that he doesn't want to live anymore, so he

persuades Hana to give him an overdose of morphine, and it is this

that kills him.

Another thing that I didn't like was the idea of Almàsy being shot

down at the beginning which is why he ends up so badly burnt. However,

in the novel he is not shot down, and I think there is no need to add

this to the film.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, the negative points about this film, in comparison to

the book far outweigh the positive points. Although the film itself

received nine Oscars, I still feel that it does not o complete justice

to the book. However, as a film, it was very good and I enjoyed

watching it a lot, but, as a film set out to do justice to the novel,

it did not do a wonderful job.