Word: minghella
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...Will Win: As with last year's Sense and Sensibility, Minghella's English Patient seems to be losing some momentum elsewhere, but is pretty unstoppable here...
...Deserves It: Quibble as you will with what Minghella cut. I dare you to read the book and try a version half as good...
There's always a risk when little companies get big dreams. Right now the entire indie industry needs caution. The current boom could be only a bump. Aging moviegoers could go back to TV. Or the next film by English Patient director Anthony Minghella could be more like his previous, invisible effort, Mr. Wonderful. Or the major studios could emerge from their stupor and figure out how to make the kinds of films from which the indies have profited...
...give him what he needs: not absolution but understanding. The lovers are Ralph Fiennes--all coiled sexiness, threat shrouded in hauteur--and Kristin Scott Thomas, who has the gift of making intelligence erotic; they come together in a dance of doom that is abrasive, mysterious, powerful, inevitable. Anthony Minghella's beautiful film, based on the Michael Ondaatje novel, gets the rapture right, with a scope and intimacy rarely seen on film since the David Lean days...
...English Patient is up there with Hana. Minghella, a British playwright whose first film (Truly Madly Deeply) was also about love beyond death, gives care to the segue of image and sound from one scene to the next, to the performers' intonations and gazes, to snatches of dialogue--say, a phrase as glancing as "Yes. Absolutely"--that may echo an hour later to haunt the characters...