Anthony Minghella: An Appreciation

by Brian Eggert
03/19/2008

As you may have heard, British filmmaker Anthony Minghella died on Tuesday, March 18th. But rather than dish out your usual objective obituary, I’ve decided to remember Minghella by taking the time to discuss his work, as he was one of my favorite modern directors, though sometimes overlooked by American audiences.

With a background in theater direction and television script editing, Minghella’s first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, was originally slated to air on the BBC in 1990. Positive previews moved the film passed its television debut, straight into theaters. An instant success, this film would earn him the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for Best Original Screenplay. Offering the then-typecast villain actor Alan Rickman a chance to show the world he's capable of more than international terrorism (as in Die Hard), the film is a blithe romance-ghost story about a woman (Juliet Stevenson) coping with the death of her husband (Rickman). And while the label “ghost story” might seem cliché, Minghella infuses the material with his usual, unforeseen emotional turns—we’re never sure if the ghost is real, or a construct there to help the living party work through her loss.

Minghella worked best with his own material, as we discovered when he directed the poor Matt Dillon-starring romantic comedy Mr. Wonderful, made in 1993, from a script not his own. Perhaps being out of his usual environment, growing into a Hollywood director, and helming someone else’s writing took a toll on him. Indeed, this average movie is often forgotten as a part of his oeuvre, as it meets none of the criteria that makes every other film on his résumé great.

Waiting another three years before making his next film, Minghella went on to direct his masterpiece in 1996, this time from his own screenplay adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient, #98 on Deep Focus Review’s Top 100 Films. A virtual unknown name in the United States, the director’s critically acclaimed romance won nine Oscars (including Best Director), six BAFTAs, and two Golden Globes. Set during WWII, the story ruminates between a complicated, apparently amnesiac victim (the magnificent Ralph Fiennes) near death after a plane crash, cared for by a lovelorn nurse (Juliette Binoche). Telling the patient’s story in flashback, intercut with the nurse’s slow emotional healing, Minghella recalls the tone and scope of master filmmaker David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Brief Encounter).

The English Patient's desert contains vast hills of isolation, a wasteland but opportune locale for an ironic affair, and, later, tragedy. In the vein of Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the desert becomes at once beautiful and frightening, here shot with grandiose splendor by cinematographer John Seale (who also photographed Minghella’s next two films). And like Lean, Minghella will be remembered as one of the few directors to turn the epic into something about emotions and drama, rather than war or violence.

Expanding on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, Minghella adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1999, changing Tom Ripley into a tragic anti-hero, versus the sociopath Highsmith makes him out to be. As played by Matt Damon in his Oscar-nominated performance (the film was nominated for five Academy Awards in all), his best, Ripley wraps us up in his web of lies, forcing us to empathize with the confused character so desperate for approval yet capable of haphazard murders. Minghella weaves Hitchcockian suspense inside of Damon’s frantic, but eerily composed character. Despite several other filmic adaptations of Highsmith’s Ripley novels, Minghella gives the series its most affecting passages, examining a character who takes considerable effort to understand. The audience must read into Ripley’s guilt, his masochistic tendency to thrust himself into inescapable lies, and also how his frequent shy behavior contrasts his liar’s confidence. This film, more than any of Minghella’s others, reaps the greatest rewards for its substantial complexity to resolve.  

Forced to shoot Cold Mountain in Romania, Minghella felt detached from his environment, since normally the director demands working on his film's actual locations. The story takes place in Civil War-era America, but producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein insisted on cutting costs by filming in Transylvania. Furthermore, casting foreign actors like Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Ray Winstone, and Brendan Gleeson as Americans with southern accents proved awkward. An adaptation of Charles Frazier’s novel, the film was well received, earning seven Oscar nominations and Renée Zellweger’s (rather undeserved) win for Best Supporting Actress. While perhaps out of touch with himself and the film he was making, there are still moments of great beauty worthy of praise in this film.

And just when Minghella’s name was becoming somewhat expectantly synonymous with the award-worthy period epic, he wrote and directed the challenging, contemporary-set, metaphor-laden Breaking and Entering in 2007, his first original screenplay since Truly, Madly, Deeply. The film stars Jude Law as an architect hoping to develop urban sprawl by improving its landscape; meanwhile, he finds himself cheating on his wife (Robin Wright Penn) with a Bosnian woman (Juliette Binoche), who has suspicious intentions. With this last film, he doesn’t give over to the audience’s need to be entertained. Instead, he challenges us to crack open the symbols he’s stitched into his narrative, even title, and work to understand its meaning. While a bit unconventional for traditional film to make the viewer work so hard, nevertheless the experience returns vast compensation, as do all his films.

More recently, Minghella appeared briefly as the television interviewer in Atonement, in a rare acting credit. And the director’s last film, a feature-length pilot episode for HBO’s adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s series of novels about The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has finished its Botswana shoot. As the series is set to premiere on March 23rd, his death should not affect the finished product, though one regrets that he’ll be unable to receive what’s sure to be acclaim for his new series, on which he was executive producer.

Each film since his first remains focused, immersed in a centered thesis that guides his narrative. His work has been called literary, a term I believe to be accurate, in that Minghella lays down themes like an author, revolving around them in such a way that begs for the reader, or viewer rather, to interpret. His later films offer continual challenges in viewer participation; simply viewing isn’t enough. Audiences are asked to make their own judgments, as opposed to having the film illustrate findings for them; we’re asked to consider what we’ve seen, versus following an express pathway to answers. His films are unique reads, offering endless possibility in their interpretation and visual motifs.

On CNN, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a close friend of Minghella, said, “Anthony Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and brilliant, but still humble, gentle and a joy to be with. Whatever I did with him, personally or professionally, left me with complete admiration for him, as a character and as an artist of the highest caliber.”

Minghella died of a fatal hemorrhage at London's Charing Cross Hospital, after an operation to remove a growth on his neck. He was only 54. His passing is a wound on the film industry. At the very least, his body of work remains. I implore you, if you've not seen his films, do, treat yourself.