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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