Anthony Minghella died of a hemorrhage last month at London’s Charing Cross Hospital, and the news took the creative world by surprise. The filmmaker was just 54 years old and few knew that he had been operated on the week before for cancer. With the astonishing critical and commercial success of The English Patient (1996), Minghella became one of the world’s leading writer-directors after just his third film. He left only eight, however. (His last was the made-for-television The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.) One of those seven he didn’t write, and four were adaptations of novels. In the book of interviews, Minghella on Minghella, he says he did this to make as many films as possible while learning the craft: “The reason I’ve been tempted not to write my own work, but to adapt existing material, is because I’ve only made a few films and I want to make forty,” he said. “It’s a job you can’t practice; you have to do it.”
He never got the chance to make those forty. Some might think that Minghella will be remembered as a capable but not particularly creative interpreter of other people’s work. That’s like calling Alfred Hitchcock or David Lean mere translators rather than the genre-changing geniuses they were. Of course, Minghella hasn’t left a legacy as rich as theirs, but his body of work is stunning, and includes one film every bit as masterful as their best.
Minghella’s films–besides the instant classic The English Patient, his best known are Cold Mountain (2003) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)–are a varied lot, but just about every one features the music of Bach.
“I listen to Bach every day,” he told me when I interviewed him at the Toronto International Film Festival a year and a half ago, noting that he keeps two photographs on his desk: one of Samuel Beckett and the other of the pianist and Bach interpreter Glenn Gould. (Minghella was a very learned man, but wore his learning lightly.) Like many English actors and directors, he began his career in theater and television; he actually got his start as a student at the University of Hull writing incidental music for the theater. He wanted to become a pianist or a composer but didn’t feel he had the talent. Instead, more than any other contemporary filmmaker, he brought a distinctly musical sensibility to the cinema.
All the films Minghella wrote are small dramas writ large. “I love scale in movies, I love the cinema of cinema,” he told me. “But I have very small handwriting and I think my interests are very small. So there’s an interesting tension between what I want to write about and what I want to look at.”
The English Patient, a sweeping epic that swept the Oscars with nine wins, is about a burn victim remembering his failed love affair against the backdrop of World War II. Cold Mountain is The Odyssey retold, simply the story of a man trying to make his way back to a home that’s changing faster than he can get there. Breaking and Entering (2006), his final feature film, was, like The English Patient, just the age-old story of an adulterer, but one whose affair takes place in a changing London facing the clash of multiculturalism. Minghella never had a life’s theme, like Hitchcock, but there are common threads amongst his work: His films are about people who can never be together because of the larger, complicated world in which they live.
Another common thread is the composer. Gabriel Yared scored five of Minghella’s eight films, alongside the classical, jazz, and folk composers he sprinkled throughout his work. Music was important in tying together those big themes and small stories Minghella felt himself torn between. Music, of course, expresses the most personal of emotions and the grandest of ideas: Think of Bach’s beautifully felt, individual music written for the glory of God. Minghella’s films are filled with Wagnerian motifs, and in all of them music is the key to the larger world.
In The English Patient, a Hungarian folk song that Katharine thinks is Arabic encapsulates the film’s themes of the frustratingly inadequate borders on our maps and in our hearts. The nurse, played by Juliette Binoche, is sternly told by a soldier that the Germans may have hidden a bomb inside the piano she’s just been playing at an Italian monastery; she laughs that she must be okay because she’s been playing Bach. In The Talented Mr. Ripley Minghella exhumed the Italian 1950s hit “Tu Vuo Fa L’Americano” which, in a jazz club scene, serves at least three purposes: It allows Tom Ripley and his eventual prey Dickie Greenleaf to bond; it introduces the classical music-loving Tom to a new genre of music and, with it, a new way of life; and it slyly comments on the events of the thriller.
Minghella’s work contains something of the abstraction and multiplicity of meaning in music. He doesn’t feel the need to explain everything in his intelligent films. In the devastating finale of The Talented Mr. Ripley, the process of careful calculation that leads Ripley to kill the only person who loves him is left for the viewer to unravel. That ending wasn’t in the Patricia Highsmith novel, by the way; he turned her sociopath into a human being. Minghella made his adaptations his own.
In fact, Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient was widely considered unfilmable before Minghella turned it into one of the greatest films of all time. It did nothing less than change the way we think of the epic.
“The rules of filmmaking have often been about narrowing down the population and having heroic heroes and bad, bad guys and a clear narrative,” he pointed out to me. “But actually, our experience of life is nothing like that.” Some critics were incensed by a romantic hero who sold useful maps to the Axis powers. But The English Patient wasn’t a morality play. Minghella’s films are politically informed, but he never allows politics to trump people.
Nowhere is that approach more apparent than in his foray into opera. His brilliant, stark production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly opened the 2006-07 Metropolitan Opera season. The Met is known for its showy sets, but Minghella’s stage was almost bare. His focus was on the people, not the background. He told me his production was inspired by Glenn Gould and his “forensic . . . compositional” method.
“One of the problems with repeated productions with opera . . . is that directors feel forced to put something over the opera,” he said. “‘They’re Americans in Vietnam and we’re going to have machine guns. . . .’ I tried to do exactly the reverse.”
Minghella’s production was so revelatory because it swept away such allegorical readings. He didn’t want a political drama to overwhelm the human drama. Indeed, in his films, the human drama often manages to overwhelm the wider events. In the epics he’s likely to be best known for, The English Patient and Cold Mountain, Minghella’s vision might have been just as majestic as David Lean’s. But though he made big films about big things, he made his debut with a small film about a cello player and a pianist–criminally, Truly Madly Deeply (1990) is out of print on DVD in the United States–and never lost his interest either in a scale suitable for humans or the music that can express both.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and entertainment writer at the Washington Times and fiction editor of Doublethink.
