Minghella And Clarke: Middle Class Lads Gone Global

The all-too-sudden loss of Anthony Minghella at 54, due to a hemorrhage following surgery for tonsil cancer, and the less shocking but widely mourned death of Arthur C. Clarke at 90, occasions some thought about degrees of separation. One linkage is director Sydney Pollack, who's widely reported to be ailing himself. He was Minghella's great colleague and friend, and by one-degree-of-Kevin Bacon logic, joined to Clarke via their separate connections with Stanley Kubrick. (Clarke and Kubrick co-authored, and shared an Oscar nom for, 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Clarke revising his accompanying novel partly in response to rushes of shot footage Kubrick showed him; Pollack was memorable as the blandly evil plutocrat physician in Kubrick's career-closing Eyes Wide Shut.)

What's also interesting is the global reach, at least among the intelligentsia, that each of the men attained despite humble beginnings in provincial English towns. Clarke was the son of a farmer in Somerset, getting his first telescope at age 13. When his father died the following year his mother gave riding lessons (he worked in the post office) to help support her four children. One British obituary noted he never lost his regional accent, even after decades living abroad in Sri Lanka.

The West Country accent is said to sound more like the original Anglo-Saxon dialect (and can be heard spouting from characters' mouths in films from Hot Fuzz to Pirates of the Caribbean). It's been likened to the sound of speech still further west, specifically the Isle of Wight where Minghella's Italian-descent parents raised five children above their original pier-side ice cream shop. "My parents worked every day from morning to night," he told the BBC when they visited his Victoriana-filled home town of Ryde, "So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!... our bedroom was above the kitchen, and there was a tannoy [speaker], so when my sister and me used to go to bed they could hear us mucking around upstairs and we'd get this intercom message saying "Shut-up, go to bed!"

Never a heavy hand with the bullhorn himself, Minghella was gracious with crews and cast alike. He never forgot shooting his first film (a tribute to his Italian grandmother) around the pier, and in his Oscar speech the night The English Patient--in which both his parents had small roles-- bested Sir Richard Attenborough's 1982 Gandhi record by snatching nine Oscars including Best Film and Director, he said on stage, "This has been a triumph for the Isle of Wight..."

Both had superior schooling as they grew up, with Clarke joining the newly-formed British Interplanetary Society at age 16, and Minghella (self-described as "a rather disenfranchised and strange teenager") acting in school plays before studying drama at University. They found their specialties early on, a virtue when there's no trust fund in sight.

As Minghella's closest professional colleague, Pollack will presumably now shepherd the projects they were working on together under their expiring Mirage rubric at the Weinstein Company, and Pollack 's well-chosen words to the New York Times' David Carr were a good summing up:

He was interested in the magic. Not fake magic, like hiding the ball under the cup, but real magic, the kind that occurs between people. Nowadays, everybody making movies wants to get the clothes off fast and the guns out quick, he was just the opposite. He was interested in the poetry, lavishing the viewer with story, and scope and richness. Look at what you got for your $12 ticket with Anthony...it's sad for me, but it's also too bad that people won't see those movies.

Jude Law, who acted in three of his six films, said:

He made work feel like fun. He was a sweet, warm, bright and funny man who was interested in everything from football to opera, films, music, literature, people and, most of all, his family whom he adored and to whom I send my thoughts and love. I shall miss him hugely.

He was so well regarded that despite some misgivings the critics had over the years, only a few a few brush strokes of criticism could be seen amidst the praise in a volley of obituaries. As the Independent blogger Tim Walker notes, "Say what you like about The English Patient (and I know it gets right up some people's noses), but it put Britain back on the cinematic map."

Walker's post includes three illustrative links--one to the slightly frantic trailer for Minghella's well-received debut Truly, Madly, Deeply one that contains a massive spoiler portraying a fatal boat ride in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and a third showing Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas slow-dancing, scrupulous inches apart, in English Patient. As Minghella's camera pulls back, cuing us to their romance's constraints, we become aware we've been in a flashback in the mind of the agonized title character. Along with the deft dissolves in the Ripley footage, these moments serve as a reminder that he was a poetic--some have said overwrought--creator of distinctly atmospheric worlds.

His six features were a mixed bag. He had a halting start, going from the almost cultishly beloved tearjerker Truly, Madly Deeply (1990), made for the BBC but also released as a feature and earning him a Bafta award for the screenplay to 1993's Mr. Wonderful was a blue-collar romance featured Matt Dillon as an electrician who falls back in love with former wife Annabella Sciorra even as he tries to replace her with Mary Louise Parker--a nice problem to have, though most reviewers didn't think so, and the experience alienated Minghella from Hollywood filmmaking. Still, the considerable attraction of his script for Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel helped him attract Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas for The English Patient, though only late intervention by producer Saul Zaentz provided the budget to keep them on board (when studios balked at their casting) and mount the $27 million picture on a series of mostly Italian locations. It went on to make ten times that cost, and survive as the kind of classic that films like Atonement (in which Minghella played Vanessa Redgrave's interviewer in a key late scene) desperately wish to be.

Time's Richard Corliss raved that "This, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies can do," and The Washington Post's Desson Howe said "This is a movie to lose yourself in," hen cited key specifics: "In the mesmeric context of the movie -- the result, in large part, of John Seale's burnished-yellow cinematography, Stuart Craig's exotic set design and Gabriel Yared's haunting score -- these exchanges come across as divine. Every gesture between the lovers feels graceful, luxurious and textured."

The film had its detractors, too, but the subsequent Ripley won its high ratings (81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes versus English Patient's 84) with a slightly different set of strong adherents.

Using Jude Law for the first of three times (Binoche also had a Minghella trifecta), he well exploited the actor's slightly brittle quality (that would not serve him nearly as well in 2003's Cold Mountain--though the Academy thought otherwise, giving him an Oscar nomination, alongside a win for Supporting Actress for Renee Zellweger.) But it's the febrile, agonized side he drew out of Matt Damon that helped cement the sometime phenom as an actor of range and depth.

Last year's Breaking and Entering found the director in a kind of career reconsideration. Only 33 percent of critics liked the tough story of an architect (Law) who cheats on his common law wife (Robin Wright Penn) with the mother (Binoche) of a teenage thief. The New Yorker's David Denby was kinder than most in calling it "a shrewd and decent movie rather than a great one".

"The idea behind Breaking and Entering," Minghella told an interviewer around the time of release in January of 2007, "was to return to what I set out to do in the first place, which was make small films as a writer director that I'd created, rather than adapted from novels."

With an array of characters representing the various ethnicities that make up modern London, he may have been sorting out the issues, which acclaim and wealth allowed him to leave behind, of immigrants in a class-ridden society:

One of the curiosities can be the differences, rather than the similarities, between people walking down the street -- differences in expectation and privilege, in wealth and opportunity. It's not tension or aggression, but a kind of guarded indifference. We coexist rather than create communities."

Minghella recently announced he was stepping down as head of the British Film Institute (BFI) after five years to concentrate on directing:

I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not.
I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.
It is as if I have been working in a tunnel and I've no idea what the reaction is going to be.
It is a naked thing to admit, but I feel very strongly that I want people to appreciate that I am not just a flash in the pan.

He had recently completed work on the Botswana-set The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which he directed after co-writing with Four Weddings and a Funeral scribe Richard Curtis. The adaptation of the Alexander McCall Smith novel will keep its appointed unveiling, cast as a form of tribute, on England's BBC1 on Easter Sunday. (HBO will show it, along with six further episodes, sometime in 2009.)

Minghella had two projects in the pipeline: New York, I Love You, a filmic paean to the city for which he had written and directed a segment, and the drama The Ninth Life of Louis Drax.

BBC Fiction controller Jane Tranter gave a good precis of the sensibility that will make Minghella's loss an especially painful one: "The work he had recently completed on The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency was quintessentially Anthony - epic but personal, thought provoking but entertaining, edgy but with a strong moral heart and warmth."

For, again, two middle class English boys, Clarke and Minghella occupied a great many column inches in the wake of their closely concurrent deaths. One was a master of showing us a richly detailed past; the other, older one, a master at predicting a richly speculative future.

Indeed, Clarke pretty well predicted the present system of satellites that shoot communications to earth (they inhabit a belt called the Clarke Orbit, some 22,000 miles over the equator); one lingering idea of his that some still call feasible is an elevator--potentially to be made out of advanced carbon nanotubes compounds-into outer space. Whether that happens or not, it seems he, along with Kubrick, predicted the present era in which services like Facebook threaten to go from being our servants to our masters:

DAVE: Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

DAVE: What's the problem?

HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

(Anthony Minghella and Juliette Binoche attend the after party for the premiere of "Breaking and Entering", January 2007, New York City; photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)
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