With any remembrance, the tendency is to focus on all of the positive things about the person in question. Of course, I didn't actually know Anthony Minghella in any particular way aside from his movies. But even that was a rocky affair, with highs and lows, and I feel that any serious discourse on his passing should take the bad with the good. And Anthony Minghella was a lot of both, to me.
A minor SPOILER ALERT for each film discussed below.
TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (1990)
(The DVD cover for Truly, Madly, Deeply - surely one of the worst DVD covers of all time. Try and guess what the hell is happening to Juliet Stevenson up there. Is she laughing? Did she just see a rat in her kitchen? Did she just spot Justin Timberlake? Damned if I know...)I first met Anthony Minghella when I found a VHS copy of Truly, Madly, Deeply at the 99 cent store in Pasadena. I had heard of the film previously via my copy of "The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made," an indispensable volume that, though immediately dated (like all "Best of" books truly are), has never steered me wrong in over ten years. So, seeing little harm in spending 99 of my mother's cents I convinced her to purchase me the British weepy in question. My mother didn't bat an eye at my choice, as she knew me very well.
Though at the time relatively unfamiliar with the concept of genuine loss, I was nevertheless struck by the film's quiet, peaceful examination of the subject. Anthony Minghella walked me through the stages of grieving along with his protagonist, played by an immensely likable and plausibly attractive actress named Juliet Stevenson. The man she loved has just passed away, you see, but she can't move on. To cope, she imagines that he still looks out for her in all the little ways that the truly, madly, deeply in love do. He reminds her to brush her teeth the right way, and walk safely in the streets at night.
It's a tender dementia, both understandable and forgivable, but one day she finds out that she wasn't really crazy after all. He's waiting for her at her apartment, the same as always, and they resume their relationship. It's not as if nothing has happened. He tells her a bit about the afterlife, though always remaining vague, and occasionally has his living-impaired friends over to watch videos. The problem is that he can't ever seem to leave the apartment, and no one else ever discovers that he's back.
There's an reasonable interpretation that the entire thing is in Nina's head, but being fanciful as a rule I prefer to think otherwise. Nina discovers by continuing her relationship that perhaps she was wearing rose-colored glasses since his passing. Their love, while genuine and sweet, was not perfect and perhaps was not meant to last in the first place. By living as if he were still alive, she manages to move on with her life and eventually meet someone new... someone who perhaps isn't better, but at least equally sweet and perfect for her new outlook on life.
Her lover is played by Alan Rickman, in one of the few roles where he doesn't play either a villain or someone who at least acts as such. As far as I'm concerned, it's the greatest role the actor ever had. He is at turns charming and carelessly flawed, and to see his character for even the briefest of periods is to understand Nina's affection. To know see him over longer periods, however, we begin to understand him as an individual - as needy and imperfect as even the finest among us.
The film is understated to the point of being almost plain, but the effect is one of the most believable worlds captured in cinema from the last 30 years. It is, by far, my favorite Anthony Minghella film.
MR. WONDERFUL (1993)
(Matt Dillon in a movie I actually hate far more than Mr. Wonderful. That's damning with faint praise, though...)But then, Minghella followed it with this. Trite Hollywood romantic mish-mash of the highest (read: lowest) order. Matt Dillon can't get a loan on a business because his alimony payments are bleeding him dry, so he tries to get his ex-wife married, and stat. It's one of those concepts that sounds cute on paper, but even the most casual of examinations reveals it to be a hollow premise for a film, and ultimately a rather mean-spirited one that depends on a protagonist trying to control a former loved one's life in a comparatively disgusting way. I haven't seen this movie since it came out, and frankly it left such a bad taste in my mouth - not just because of the plot, but because of the overall blase demeanor of the filmmaking as a whole - that I have no desire to ever see it again. Strike 1.
THE ENGLISH PATIENT (1996)
(The only scene anyone actually remembers from The English Patient, and that's only because of the parody from the Academy Awards.)And I'll never understand this film's popularity. Actually, "popularity" should be viewed as a relative term here, because despite a surprise Oscar sweep, it never made much money or found too significant an audience. But this film always manages to polarize those viewers who do make the effort to watch it. Some are enraptured by it, but everyone else hates its ever-loving guts.
I'm in the latter camp, incidentally. There's quality work to be found here in individual scenes and performances, but none of them - none of them - are in any way involved with the A-plot, in which an army nurse cares for a wounded man with no name and a mysterious past. Of course, we discover his past throughout the course of the film, only to discover at the end (MAJOR SPOILER) that he left his one true love to die in a cave. Sure, he tried to get back there, at the cost of betraying his own country, but yeah, that's what we're left with.
Ouch, right? That would be a truly tragic ending if we felt a sense of urgency as he struggled to get back to her, but we don't. It's pretty unemotional stuff at that point. In fact, despite a few overly choreographed love scenes we never really feel the connection between these two people at the heart of The English Patient, resulting in a fairly painful experience made occasionally tolerable by supporting players Naveen Andrews (TV's Lost) and Willem Dafoe, in roles so engaging that you quickly begin to wonder why the movie wasn't about these characters instead. Tying everything together is Juliette Binoche in compassionate performance as a character with ultimately quite little to actually do.
Back when I worked at the website The Tuesday Night Movie Club, we would force the loser of the annual Oscar pool to watch and then review The English Patient as punishment. I never lost that particular pool, but never heard the end of it from the poor bastards who did. This is a painful film, both saccharine and heartless, and after Mr. Wonderful and this I had just about written off Anthony Minghella as a director.
THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999)
(Remember the good times...)Luckily for me, Minghella followed his Academy Award-winning opus with The Talented Mr. Ripley, an adaptation of the first in Patricia Highsmith's remarkable series of Ripley tales. Highsmith's Ripley is an impenetrable man who uses everyone around him in cunning, cruel and outright sociopathic ways to achieve whatever his ends are at a given time. It's captivating to watch him work, and the suspense frequently derives from hoping he gets caught, instead of the other way around.
Minghella, however, took the source material and made a film about why Tom Ripley does what it is that he does. In one of Matt Damon's very best performances, Ripley constantly finds himself sacrificing what he truly desires in order to fulfill what he thinks he wants. He manipulates and consumes lives for the illusion of happiness - to have others see him as successful and desirable - but sacrifices relationships with the people he truly cares about in order to do so. Frequently through murder. The great tragedy comes not from this dilemma, but in a fatal flaw in his very character. Ripley is too damaged and incomplete a person for anyone to truly like him for who he really is, whatever that means in his case. So the murder and con games, and the fleeting moments of vague satisfaction that they bring, are as happy as he will ever get.
This emphasis on character takes what would in most hands be a quick, pot-boilerish film noir to a running time of 2 hours and 39 minutes, but the plot is crisp enough and the suspense unbearable enough that it doesn't feel like your time has been wasted. It's a remarkable film that had me thinking that Minghella as a director is completely bi-polar, and only capable of making films that I love dearly or utterly despise.
As a side note, 2002 brought us another adaptation of one of Highsmith's Ripley novels, with John Malkovich taking over as the lead. Ripley's Game takes a less empathetic look at the character, but Malkovich's performance provides all of the nuance needed to find a human being inside the monster. It's one of the best films ever made that never saw theatrical release, and I recommend it with absolute confidence that you'll thank me for it.
COLD MOUNTAIN (2003)
(I couldn't find any pictures of the albino acrobat sharpshooter, but let's try to take this movie seriously anyway, all right?)Minghella's last film (that I saw, at any rate), proved me wrong on that count. Cold Mountain is an over-long, melodramatic mess of a movie, and like The English Patient, the various asides and subplots are on the whole far more interesting than the love story they are supposed to support. Jude Law loves Nicole Kidman. Jude Law goes to war. The war is hell, and the initial battle sequence is one of the best scenes Minghella ever shot, so Jude Law leaves to walk home.
The problem is that home is apparently over 50 billion miles away, leading to a frustrating number of montages showing Jude walking, and walking, and walking while some amorphous singer drones over and over again, "I'm going to FI-ind my true LO-ove." Look, we get it, okay? But along the way, he encounters a large number of characters who - with generally only one or two scenes each - are fascinating and dramatic enough that you forget that, once again, you really don't care about Minghella's protagonists. Phillip Seymoure Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Cillian Murphy and Jena Malone still come vividly to mind as I recall this film, and all in remarkably positive ways.
Less positive are Nicole Kidman and Butterfly McQueen's story, which we cut back to at regular intervals. At least, I think that was Butterfly McQueen. When she's in whiteface she sure looks a lot like Renee Zellweger, doesn't she? Zellweger's performance in a role clearly designed for a racial stereotype inexplicably won an Oscar that year. And for the record, I like Renee Zellweger, but man, Minghella was trapped in another period of storytelling at unusual interviews throughout this film. All of the female driven melodrama, complete with a far-too-broad for any modern movie villain, all feel like they were ripped directly from a D.W. Griffith film. And the villain's trusty albino crackshot acrobat sidekick? Where exactly does that come from?
My on-again, off-again relationship with Anthony Minghella probably stops here, with a mixed-bag of a film that alternates between the director's finest work and his worst, and while it certainly is a tragedy that he died far, far too young, it almost seems like an appropriate capper. Minghella gave me characters and films that both enlightened and infuriated me, frequently within moments of each other. While I prefer to remember the good times, in order to move on I need to also come to terms with the bad. Anthony Minghella taught me that, and I'm thankful for it.
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