19 March 2008
Anthony Minghella (1954-2008)
)Published on March 19th, 2008 @ 09:44:53 am, using 765 words, 57 views
Back in 1996, he taught me the word ‘uxoriousness’ and the memory of that brought a stunted, warm and dry smile to my face yesterday as I learned of his passing.
I had once sat at Borders Westwood in Los Angeles and heard him read from his screenplay adaptation of The English Patient, led there by the kind of excessive love of a film (I wonder if there’s a word for that kind of love) few motion pictures have inspired in me.
I admired him greatly. As a director, he took on quite a challenge when he chose to direct the movie version of a near impossible-to-adapt novel. I’ve always felt a kinship with people who can’t resist a challenge. On his foreword to the screenplay he acknowledged the difficulty of adapting such a book to the screen:
Michael Ondaatje’s mesmeric novel has the deceptive appearance of being completely cinematic. Brilliant images are scattered across its pages in a mosaic of fractured narratives, as if somebody had already seen a film and was in a hurry trying to remember all the best bits. In the course of a single page, the reader can be asked to consider events in Cairo, or Tuscany, or England’s west country during different periods, with different narrators; to mediate [sic] on the nature of winds, the mischief of an elbow, the intricacies of a bomb mechanism, the significance of a cave painting.
Upon deciding to adapt the novel, he recounted a decision which impressed me:
I promptly borrowed a cottage in Durweston, Dorset, and loaded up my car with books. I began adult life as an academic and nothing gives me more pleasure than the opportunity to tell myself that reading is a serious activity. I waded through eccentric books on military history, letters and diaries of soldiers in North Africa and Southern Italy, pamphlets from the Royal Geographical Society written before the war. I found out about the devastation visited on my father’s village near Monte Cassino, discovered we had a namesake who was a partisan leader in Tuscany, learned about the incredible international crucible that was Cairo in the 1930s.
The one book I didn’t take with me was The English Patient. I had been so mesmerized by the writing, so steeped in its richness, that I decided the only possible course available was to try and write my way back to the concerns of the novel, telling myself its story.
It takes someone with a strong sense of individuality and command of storytelling to do that - to not deny oneself room for creation in the face of something already created, to fend off the crippling effects of intimidation, self-doubt and self-imposed restraint when none is called for. He was by no means a follower. Another trait I’ve always had a lot of affection for.
As a result, the novel and movie of The English Patient are the least interchangeable novel-movie counterparts that I’ve ever encountered. They are complementary. Companion pieces. They both brim with moments, words, images individual to each of them - well worth visiting and revisiting.
I can’t think of a better tribute than to post here a scene I love - the scene that taught me the word ‘uxoriousness.’ A scene sprung from the imagination of Anthony Minghella that is nowhere to be found in the Ondaatje novel and stands as something that would be unknowingly yet sorely missed had it never been created.
D’Agostino: Mrs. Clinton - Count Almásy
Katherine: (smiling, offering her hand) Hello. Geoffrey gave me your monograph when I was reading up on the desert. Very impressive.
Almásy: (stiff) Thank you.
Katharine: I wanted to meet a man who could write such a long paper with so few adjectives.
Almásy: A thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it. Big car, slow car, chauffeur-driven car, still a car.
Clifton: (joining them and joining in) Broken car?
Almásy: Still a car.
Clifton: (hands them champagne) Not much use, though.
Katharine: Love? Romantic love, platonic live, filial love - ? Quite different things, surely?
Clifton: (hugging Katharine) Uxoriousness - that’s my favorite kind of love. Excessive love of one’s wife.
Almásy: (a dry smile) Now there you have me.
(The English Patient - A Screenplay)
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Anthony Minghella, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, novel, film, uxoriousness, scene, challenge, individuality, storytelling
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