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talented English director Anthony Minghella has a thing for Miss Piggy.
And Kermit the Frog. And the rest of the cloth and sawdust cast dreamed
up by puppeteering demi-god Jim Henson.
It's true. The same man who took
home the 1997 Oscar as Best Director for the cloyingly beautiful and
seductive |
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Nowadays, it seems Minghella is obsessing over non-Italians who find themselves in Italy without an identity, a description that fits the title character in The English Patient (Ralph Fiennes) as well as it does Matt Damon's lead role in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Tom Ripley is a good-for-nothing, New York City dawdler sent to Rome by a wealthy American industrialist to retrieve his spoiled playboy son, Dickie (Jude Law). When Ripley gets there, he likes what he sees so much - including Dickie's sumptuous girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) - that he decides to off Dickie and literally take his place. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name, in many ways The Talented Mr. Ripley harkens back to the slow-burn suspense genre of the 1950s with a dash of lush period cinematics thrown in - think David Lean meets Alfred Hitchcock, who, incidentally, based his Strangers on a Train (1951) on Highsmith's debut novel. Mr. Ripley is the second movie version of the story, the first being the much-lauded but not-too-faithful French adaptation, Pleine Soleil (1960). This time around, Minghella seeks to restore some of the novel's more unsavory yet intriguing themes. "It's so much about the American experience in Europe," Minghella told the English newspaper, the Guardian, earlier this year. "It's so much about not getting caught, and about a man at odds with his own sexuality." Ripley, as Highsmith originally imagined him, is supposed to be an amoral, sexually confused master of denial, not some kind of hero. And to his credit, Minghella refuses to dilute the moral ambiguity represented by his main character. "Whether that's passable for an American audience, I don't know," he says. "But that can't be my preoccupation. I rem- ember people saying The English Patient wouldn't work because it's about a man who betrays his friend, gives secrets to the Nazis and becomes responsible for the death of people all around him." With an Academy Award-winning film already under his belt, Minghella certainly has come a long way in the last few years. Or has he? Word has it that he has agreed to write an original screenplay for a coproduction between Saul Zaentz (the producer of The English Patient) and Jim Henson Pictures. Miss Piggy will no doubt be happy
to see that Minghella is returning to his roots. |
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