Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008
March 19, 2008

Filmmaker Anthony Minghella died yesterday at the age of 54 of complications from surgery he had a week ago to treat tonsil cancer. Though Minghella had been in the feature film racket for some 20 years and made a half-dozen films (not a huge number for two decades of work), he seemed to only be approaching the close of the first part of his career, having created unequivocal smashes (1996’s The English Patient), moderate successes (1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and 1993’s Cold Mountain) and one outright disaster (Breaking and Entering from 2006).  Surely, the man had much more to offer.

Minghella started off as a writer in the mid-Eighties, when he himself was in his mid-twenties, penning episodes of the venerable British family series Grange Hill, which has been on the air for 30 years and shows no signs of slowing down. The series is about the day-to-day lives of children as they hop, skip and jump their way through middle school—one of the most true-to-life, unpolished topics that Minghella would ever tackle. After that, in the late Eighties, he penned a bunch of stories for the then-underappreciated Jim Henson’s The Storyteller series, which dealt with the fantastic and the mythological—colorful tales that were targeted at children and families and that were as far removed from Grange Hill as one could imagine. These two TV shows were the prologue to Minghella’s feature film career, where it comes as no surprise that of the half-dozen flicks he directed, he penned five of them. (He was undoubtedly a hired gun for the one he didn’t write, 1993’s Mr. Wonderful, an undistinguished indie-flavored rom-com with Matt Dillon, Annabella Sciorra and a pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini.)

It’s the amalgam of real life and the fantastical that Minghella fused together for his directorial debut feature, 1990’s Truly, Madly, Deeply. My personal favorite film by Minghella, it stars Juliet Stevenson as a pianist who is broken up by the death of her cello-playing lover, played by Alan Rickman. The real life aspect comes in the form of Stevenson’s grieving, the sadness her friends feel and the sorrow of waking up in a home that’s only other living inhabitants are rats. The fantasy comes in the form of Rickman returning to his lover and home as an apparition who simply isn’t ready for the permanence that death implies—he wants to continue performing duets with his lover, when he's not inviting other ghosts over for dinner and TV and ridding the house of the troublesome rats. It’s a delightful tale of true love—eternal love—and what a pain in the ass it can be when one of the lovers takes it all too literally.

“I really, truly, madly, passionately, remarkably, deliciously... juicily love you,” Rickman announces to Stevenson at one point in Truly, Madly, Deeply. I’ve got to imagine that Anthony Minghella loved writing those words for his dramatic fantasy about love and death and longing, topics he was to further explore in his subsequent films. He undoubtedly had much more to say about the subjects and it’s tragic that we’ll never get to see and hear any more from him. But for me, he hit the nail on the head in his very first film.

Posted by Laurence Lerman on March 19, 2008 | Comments (0)