Destined to be one of the major box office successes of 1997, Minghella's film version of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker co winner certainly captures the mood of the novel. There are the many expected additions and exclusions which separate a film narrative from its source. Reading a screenplay probably reveals more about the techniques of film making than about adaptation. Ondaatje's fragmentary, episodic wartime thriller of displacement and loss thrives on its mystery, whereas the film is essentially a romantic epic focusing on the English patient's doomed love affair with Katharine Clifton. The allusions in the novel yield to the specifics of film making. Read the novel, see the movie and then read the screenplay.
