For Minghella, compassion was a cinematic signature

In "Truly, Madly, Deeply," the grieving wife played by Juliet Stevenson (with all faucets open) misses her husband (Alan Rickman) with such ferocity that she wills him back into ghostly existence. It's as though she never really knew him while he was alive and demands an extension on their time together. The film, a comedy soaked with tears, has been described as the thinking moviegoer's "Ghost," but it's not so much about love defeating death as it is death kissing life on the forehead and moving on. The reason the film works, though - the reason it's still my favorite of all Minghella's films - is the intemperate anger and sorrow with which Stevenson batters on the wall of the afterlife. Not a subtle movie but a deeply, even profoundly gracious one.

The director's later work was nothing if not tasteful, and gradually, I'd argue, that became a liability. "The English Patient" (1996) deserves its awards not for the scope of its epic period canvas but for its pained crisscross of love and events - for the way it shows the world's demands (and plain bad luck) thwarting desire time and time again. That's in Michael Ondaatje's original novel but Minghella envisions it with a ruthless eye, not to mention an ear for the silences between people. Like Kristin Scott Thomas's character, we're all stuck in the desert waiting for rescue.

Then there's Matt Damon as Tom Ripley in 1999's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," a man who carries his own desert inside him. He tries peopling it by pretending to be another man - the unlucky Dickie Greenleaf, played by Jude Law - but living in another person's skin proves as impossible as loving a ghost or another man's wife during wartime. Minghella's "Ripley" lacks the farcical nastiness of Patricia Highsmith's great novel, and I still think Damon's miscast (rightly or wrongly, I would have welcomed an actor whose edge showed a wee bit more - Christian Bale, perhaps, or Edward Norton). But where Highsmith genuinely hated people (that's what makes her writing so readable and so ugly), Minghella is moved to sympathetic awe by what they're capable of.