Between Reviews: Sadly, Belatedly, Gratefully
SADLY, BELATEDLY, GRATEFULLY
MAR 30, 2008 - OBITUARIES FOR ANTHONY MINGHELLA – the British writer-director best known for taming Michael Ondaatje’s turbulent flights of prose-poetry into the epic-scale, audience-friendly romance that is The English Patient – have cautiously tiptoed around the question of his legacy. The dilemma appears to be this: Minghella has left behind barely a handful of films for us to make a no-brainer call on his induction into the pantheon of director-greats, and yet, isn’t The English Patient enough to tell us he was one of a kind – a sensitive, romantic, intelligent, uncompromising, modern-day craftsman who actually bothered to read, and who proved that languorously-paced cinematic adaptations of books that had to be chewed and digested still had an audience? It may be too early to say – and as always, history may prove the best judge; Douglas Sirk, that other creator of lush melodramas, had to wait almost two decades before gaining a modicum of critical respect – but I don’t think there is any doubt that Minghella was, at the very least, a director whose next film was always of interest. Flawed or perfect, magnificent or misbegotten, they were obvious labours of love you looked forward to. If nothing else, the untimely end of that anticipation is a major loss.
As you could sense from the titles of his best-known films – all adjectives and adverbs; the patient was English, the mountain was cold, Mr. Ripley was talented (or to go by the full title, he was mysterious, yearning, secretive, sad, lonely, troubled, confused, loving, musical, gifted, intelligent, beautiful, tender, sensitive, haunted, passionate and, finally, talented), and the couple in his first film loved one another truly, madly, deeply – Minghella wore his heart on a well-embroidered sleeve, and that unabashed romanticism was his signature. He rescued romance from the gutters of cheesy, happily-ever-after rom-coms – about the only kind of films that celebrate love anymore – and elevated it to a plane that was almost spiritual. Love, in his most representative films, wasn’t something that could just be fallen into; it had to be fought for. In Cold Mountain, Ada and Inman exchange but a brief kiss before he goes off to war, but it’s during their long period apart that they become soulmates, the foggy memory of their respective faces a burning beacon of hope at the end of a bleak tunnel of hardship and sorrow. And in The English Patient, Almásy and Katharine navigate everything from mistrust to discomfort to contempt to jealousy to tentative companionship before realising that these earlier feelings are simply facets of what they truly feel for each other – which is, of course, a love so mad and passionate, you’d laugh it right off the screen if you weren’t so caught up in its gale force.
These films are better known, better regarded – but there’s a case to be made that Minghella’s most tender, most beautiful expressions of romance are contained in his first feature, Truly Madly Deeply, which is about pianist-cum-translator Nina learning to carry on after the death of her cellist-boyfriend Jamie. As the opening credits roll, Jamie is playing his cello to the accompaniment of Nina’s piano. We see him, but we only hear her. After a point, his image freezes – stilled by time, by death – and becomes a photograph on the wall, as the sounds of his instrument are replaced by her humming over her piano-playing. We now see her, only her. Minghella establishes, without a word, that their duet, so to speak, has now become a solo. Nina’s being has become so entwined with Jamie’s, she resigns herself to the rest of her life being one, long, masochistic wallow in his memories – until he returns from the dead (in the tradition of Spencer Tracy in A Guy Named Joe and Richard Dreyfuss in Always) and helps her let go. The surprising aspect of this film is that it shows Minghella had a distinctly offbeat sense of humour, which he seldom displayed again (though, to be fair, the material he chose for his subsequent films hardly lent itself to levity). In one hilarious bit, Jamie invites his friends from the afterlife to Nina’s home, so they can watch videos, and one of them wonders, “Five Easy Pieces or Fitzcarraldo?” Being dead, clearly, doesn’t give you the answers to life’s problems.
But for all its whimsy, Truly Madly Deeply is a romance at heart – a scaled-down romance by Minghella’s later standards, but nonetheless a heartfelt exploration of the ways we love. In a beautiful scene, the man who’s ridding Nina’s apartments of rats says to her, “You’re a lovely girl. I was telling my wife about you.” Nina is startled because she thought his wife had died. “1978,” he confirms – but that pesky triviality hasn’t prevented him from still talking to her. And during a session with her therapist, Nina remembers Jamie as never saying anything profound or earth-shattering. “He doesn’t say, ‘God thinks this,’ or [doesn’t talk] about the planet or… It’s all, ‘Go to bed, brush your teeth,’ or [about] the way I’m brushing my teeth.” (Nina brushed sideways, while Jamie was convinced that the way to oral hygiene was up-down-up-down.) This accumulation of small details that makes up people isn’t something you find in the garden-variety romance, which is more likely to be built around archetypes (Rich Boy, Career-Minded Girl, and so on), and looking back, it’s not difficult to see that Minghella, even in his first feature, was testing the waters for an ensuing, career-long obsession with the nitty-gritty of obsession – a bewitching siren call that, till his death, he responded to truly, madly and deeply.
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Great write up, Mr.B. Some haunting images from The English Patient (the undulating waves of sand on a breathtaking desert vista that opens the film is but one) are still residual images residing in my cornea:-)
But you missed out mentioning his last movie, Breaking And Entering, a scaled down back to basics approach after the epics of Patient and Cold Mountain. Any thoughts?
KayKay: Breaking And Entering was one of those films not dull enough to dismiss yet with not enough in it to make compulsive viewing. I don’t Minghella is equipped to do these “class-issues” kind of films. That Juliet Binoche character came off as a bit of a joke.
The GRCA has an official “Minghella Patch”. Its given to you after you finish your 12-steps and its to help you wean yourself off hopeless romanticism. “The Talented Mr.Ripley” is truly one of my favorite movies of all time. Tom Ripley’s hollowness of chaacter seemed eerily similar to Peter Sellers’, if “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” is to be believed.
brangan: This writeup couldn’t be more timely for me…I just got done reading “The Conversations” — a book I started exactly a week before Minghella passed away, it seems. I don’t know what kind of a time warp I’ve been existing in that I was blissfully unaware of this heart-breaking news until I read this just now…Minghella seems to have slipped silently by between my readings of “That Touch…That Director’s Touch” and “Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Pages” … and how poignant/ironical is that? I have so much to say, yet words betray me right now. I’ll check back in later…
Deepauk M: You’re this seriously funny guy that I seem to have jinxed myself into following around (unintentionally, of course, in a “ships crossing in the night” sorta way) ever since my “brilliant” theory about GRCA being an offshoot of HRA hit these pages.
And you so absolutely had to rain on my “Minghella made me fall in love with love all over again” parade by your “Minghella Patch” nonsense. 
There ain’t no such thing, ok? Ripley or no Ripley, there’s absolutely no cure for hopeless romanticism (prefixed with “hopeless” for a reason, don’t you think?). I must quickly warn other HRA members against such “fake” patches…Ever watched “The English Patient”?
brangan: “..isn’t The English Patient enough to tell us he was one of a kind – a sensitive, romantic, intelligent, uncompromising, modern-day craftsman who actually bothered to read, and who proved that languorously-paced cinematic adaptations of books that had to be chewed and digested still had an audience?” The answer to your rhetorical question is a resounding, if premature, yes!
When pristine memories of the movie-romance whose “gale force” I was caught up in ‘99 (my first and only viewing of The English Patient thus far) were first dredged up eight years later by your reference to “Vascular Sizood” on the Sarika post, little did I realize how portentous such raking up of buried-yet-simmering-beneath-the-surface memories would prove. It’s consistently led me down this path of stumblings…upon many other Ondaatje works, the most recent of which is “The Conversations,” which in your own words is “flat-out the best book on film (not just editing) [you've] read.”
In the book, Minghella describes Murch (editor of his best movies including The English Patient) thus: The brilliant, baffling, brittle, loyal, tender, curmudgeonly, impenetrable, wise, wonderful, cheerful, stern, obsessive, loving, abrupt, professorial, encyclopedic, patient, impatient, and essential Mr. Murch.”
Thank you for a similarly fitting tribute-in-adjectives for a man who, by projecting his love for the language onto the big screen, showed us the language of love.
And brangan, if you had to intuitively pick just one scene from The English Patient that exactly fits these brilliant closing lines of yours from this other book-to-movie epic, which one would it be? The unabashed swell of emotion here, the sheer movie-movieness of this moment, finally, is film’s revenge on the novel.
brangan: I promise I’ll stop my Minghella rave here with this quote from the man himself (courtesy AP). Looks like The English Patient is not just my personal favorite among the barely a handful of films he’s left behind:
“I feel more naked and more exposed by this piece of work than anything I’ve ever been involved with.
Too many modern films let the audience be passive, as if they were saying, “We’re going to rock you and thrill you. We’ll do everything for you.”
This film goes absolutely against that grain. It says, “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to make some connections. There are some puzzles here. The story will constantly rethread itself and it will be elliptical, but there are enormous rewards in that.”" And boy, there were!
@Sagarika: I’ve never been described by an oxymoron before. Without the oxy maybe, so thanks. Regarding the English Patient - I have seen parts of the movie. But I have forced myself to put it away for later so that I can watch it completely in one setting. Hopefully I’ll get to it before I end up like Fiennes in the movie.
@Brangan - Interesting addendum to your “their own corner of the sandbox” article. “When we know that someone is risking vast sums of money we think it is bad manners to brandish our artistic temperaments.” - This is Mackendrick quoted from his collected lectures at CalARTS. Interesting huh!
Deepauk M: Thanks for reminding me of the Sellers film. That final walking-on-water shot made my hair stand on end.
Sagarika: One scene? That might be the one where Katharine and Almasy spend this soul-binding night in the storm in the desert, finally acknowledging what has so far simmered under the surface, and then in the morning, they’re brought back to reality by the honking of the horn. The other jeep buried under the sand, the shovelling, the fetching of water, the rescue of the locals — what a way to be brought back to earth after a night in the heavens.
Just a thgt here,
do you revisit your dvds before you do a writeup like this? or is it all from memory?
DPac: I revisited Truly Madly Deeply, but the rest is from memory (and therefore possibly slightly different in the film from what I remember).
thank gawd!:-)