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ANTHONY
MINGHELLA brought the art house to the multiplex without
forcing anyone to squirm or read subtitles. In doing so,
the filmmaker created a formula that has confounded so
many moviemakers since
Hollywood first erected that famous shingle in the
hills. v With box-office successes such as The
English Patient and Cold Mountain, he brought
the piercing sensitivity of the literary tome into the
hearts of audiences that may not have read the source
material but want to feel like they did.
Alas,
Minghella, who grew up in a noisy Italian immigrant’s
home on
England’s
Isle of Wight, died far too early. He passed away in
London on March 18 of a brain hemorrhage, following
surgery for cancer, according to his publicist. He was a
youthful 54.
THE
Oscar winning director on the set of
Breaking and Entering
with star Jude Law.
It was
Minghella’s canny knack for casting high-wattage stars
in highbrow material that made his movies so special.
With
1996’s The English Patient, Minghella boiled down
Michael Ondaatje’s dauntingly idiosyncratic book to its
emotional essentials. Audiences bought it—the tragic
love story of a badly burned air pilot, the nurse who
takes care of him, those homemade candles, the downed
plane, the African desert, the whole epic sweep. For
many viewers, it was
Lawrence of Arabia all over again—with a pretty
woman. Minghella won an Oscar for Best Director that
year, and the picture took nine awards in all.
The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
nominated Minghella’s screenplay for 1999’s The
Talented Mr. Ripley, but did not give him the
prize. For a darkly defined movie about a murderous
psychopath who gets away with his crimes, Ripley did
some talented business of its own: a respectable $81
million. And if 2003’s Cold Mountain didn’t wow
as many critics as the previous film, it certainly
reached its audience, earning $96 million at the
US
box office, as well as a Best Supporting Actress Oscar
for Renee Zellweger.
Minghella, famously bald, genial and perpetually clad in
black, set his professional destiny with 1990’s
critically lauded Truly Madly Deeply, a Ghost
for the cinephile set, in which a bereaved wife
(Juliet Stevenson) finds love after death with her late
beloved (Alan
Rickman). From that point, he set out to create
stories that tested, but also enchanted, the audience.
He
accomplished this by tossing celebrities into the
dramaturgical equivalent of white-water rapids. In
Cold Mountain,
that was star-licious
Nicole Kidman playing a city woman forced to live a
hardscrabble existence in the Confederate South. And
Matt Damon, best known to audiences as the adorable
townie in Good Will Hunting, was suddenly the
coldly calculating manipulator in The Talented Mr.
Ripley. With this intentional disconnect, Minghella
led mainstream audiences into terrain they might
otherwise never have explored. Moviegoing suddenly felt
as risky as it was glamorous. And the stark definitions
of art and entertainment no longer really mattered.
(Of
course, Minghella wasn’t the only one in Hollywood
successfully combining art-house sensibilities with
multiplex mojo.
Ang Lee did it with Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon, a foreign-language film, packed with action
and a watchable ensemble. Lee did it again with
Brokeback
Mountain, taking a mostly indie topic—homosexual love—and
casting mainstream heartthrobs
Jake Gyllenhaal and
Heath Ledger.)
For
Minghella, the algebra didn’t always work, of course.
Breaking and Entering, in which
Jude Law plays an architect who falls for the mother
of a boy who burglarizes his home, wandered a little too
far into the esoteric zone, and didn’t enjoy the same
critical or commercial success of his better
predecessors.
Arguably, the success of a cultural work can also be
defined in the backlash it arouses. In which case,
The English Patient hit the sweet spot. Last year
Minghella told
The Washington Post about a puppet show on British
television that “did a great job of capturing the
movie’s absurdities.” And in a famous episode on
Seinfeld, Elaine rants and raves against the movie,
which she dismisses as pseudoartiness posing as
meaningful romance.
“Quit
telling your stupid story about your stupid desert and
die already!” she howls in frustration. Now that
flippant, humorous line suddenly rings with a sad
poignancy.
With the
forthcoming No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, an
HBO TV pilot based on the cult books about a female
investigator in
Botswana, it seems Minghella would work his trick
again—bring a commercially unlikely story into the
mainstream. But this time, Minghella’s work will emerge
on its own, without its creative stepfather. But then
again, that’s the magic of Minghella’s movies: Watching
them we know we’ll experience something dicey, out of
the pale, or even dangerous. But because of the sureness
of his hand, we know it’s going to be an enjoyable,
meaningful passage. |
