Why Truly, Madly, Deeply is so Goddamn Sad.
Not many films made me cry. I can think of five off the top of my head. Normally when old people die, like in Cocoon, I get the sniffles; my grannies were important to me when I was a child.
The film that left me most distraught, perhaps because I wasn’t expecting its emotional impact, was The Lives of Others. I couldn’t actually stop crying for a good 20 increasingly embarrassing minutes after it ended, wailing up Charing Cross Road.
However, there is only one film that I can rely on to make me cry throughout and on cue no matter how often I watch it, and that is Anthony Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Since Alan Rickman, Jamie in the film, died, I thought I would put myself through the ringer again and re-watch the film I first saw when I was 15 and have inflicted on various people since.
The magic is still there: blubbing, with full facial contortion occurred four or five times. This time, newly, I also cry at the end when Nina (Juliet Stephenson) is getting together with Mark (Michael Maloney.) I always found him rather drippy before and I was snobbish about his job.
Let’s be manly about this and construct a list: in TMD, we may cry when Juliet is raging in the therapist — it’s a great and honest scene, acted with abandon. It doesn’t get me going, but I’m sure some are triggered.
Then I, personally, cry when Alan (Jamie)returns to accompany Nina’s piano with his cello as well as when they play Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.
I cry when Nina gave into Michael Maloney’s more sensitive charms. And then I cry when she and Mark kiss and I cry when Jamie says goodbye — himself shedding one manly tear.
It seems remarkable to me that during one film, I can cry for both happiness and sadness on more than one occasion. So the cursory explanation of why the film is so sad — that Nina is sad about Jamie being dead — can’t be right.
Like laughing, crying is a release of sudden emotion. We tend to laugh when we are surprised by something incongruent; I think TMD shows how we can also be left in tears when we understand something very beautiful very quickly, particularly people’s noble motivations.
The simple stuff: Nina’s scene in the therapist is powerful because she is voicing powerfully and without regret the rage that living people feel towards the dead — for leaving them. We are proud — probably even jealous — of her ability to bring forth such Southern European sentiments without embarrassment.
When Jamie comes back, we cry because we are giving full feeling to the fantasy that someone can return to us if we miss them enough.
After Joan Didion’s husband died, she said she expected to be “prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss.” However, she became “a literally crazy, cool customer who believe[d] [her] husband was about to return and need[ed] his shoes.”
Jamie says he “didn’t die properly,” never aging why and ads that he comes back because, “I couldn’t bear your pain.”
He is the voice of Nina’s fantasy. And it is a beautiful idea and we cry because we know it’s not possible and now we know what it would look like if the people we loved could live forever.
And, as in love, in mourning, all the other normal people — those pesky buggers who actually care about us, the Sandies and the Claires and all the othe people who would shave their heads and cut their limbs off for the hurting beloved, become drab and annoying. The bereaved find themselves in a absurd situation of caring as much about someone who isn’t there as much or more they cannot deal with the people who are. This is tragic and is what makes grieving people so impossible to cater for. They are horribly ungrateful and selfish. We have all the resources ready to help them out. We lay them out in front of them, like a three-course meal have cooked, hoping they will tuck in and find nourishment. And instead they spit in the appetiser.
* * *
As soon as Jamie comes back, he begins to annoy both Nina and us. He is constantly cold and turns the heating up to unbearably high levels. He is also childish, surprising and alarming Nina with bath toys and dripping water on her head when she’s asleep. Soon he moves his mates in to watch endless videos.
Now Jamie’s mates keeps us on our toes about whether this is a ghost story or not. TMD is actually one of a sub-genre of love stories featuring people who appear to come back from the dead.
Ghost is obviously a love story.
In Sous le Sable, an equally fine but very different film, Charlotte Rampling’s Marie is clearly losing her marbles when her husband reappears.
But in TMD, we don’t know for sure. Or rather we pretend we know it’s all in Nina’s head because then this is a parable about grieving and moving on. But we don’t really.
Henry James invented the psychological ghost story in Turn of the Screw. Therein the unnamed governess believes her young charges possessed and the grounds of her workplace haunted. However, only she sees the ghosts she talks about, and we suspect she is insane and has killed one of the children herself. This story is adapted for The Others.
In TMB, we (think) we are familiar with this trope and we understand why Nina would imagine Jamie might “return” and why he would “disappear.” This construction allows for a rich reading of Jamie’s “actions” as a function of her grieving process. For example, his cleaning and tidying the place, seemingly against her will, is in fact the part of herself where discipline and self-respect reside re-emerging. She can wallow in filth and memories, or she can smarten up and face the world. Does Jamie seem like the kind of person who would learn Spanish? No, of course he speaks Spanish; he is Nina.
And yet. How do we account for the fact that we see Jamie when Nina doesn’t? Not only that, but we also see him scheming with his mates. He has a plan and he carries it through. His plan is to annoy the person he loves so that she gets over him and moves on with her life. And what does a bunch of foreign-sounding film buffs represent? Can we conceivably imagine this is a part of Nina’s psyche creating this vision?
“Why are they all men?” she asks.
We don’t know.
It’s like the disappearance and reappearance of the rats. Yes, they come back when Jamie goes and at first we think it’s proof that he is a ghost. But George the exterminator predicted that they often lay low.
Maybe there is a clue, though, to Jamie’s nuanced character (her complex recreation of an internal Jamie) when she asks: “were we always like this?”, we have the shocking thought that maybe they weren’t that happy together when he died. Maybe the annoying behaviour (not just the stupidity, but the moaning about the government and the nagging and the mistrust and dismissiveness) was actually just what he was like. Could it be they were on the rocks? Maybe she feels terribly guilty about how things were left. Or maybe she is just remembering the reality as the idealised mirage dissipates.
We find they were only truly happy when they were playing music together. Music is as close as they get to sex in this film. (At least they are not talking: Nina and Jamie are unhappy when they talk.) This — which becomes the soundtrack — helps boost the blub-o-meter because Minghella has exquisite taste in music.
In choosing Bach’s 3rd Viola da Gamba Sonata and the Walker Brothers’ Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore as their duet pieces, he selects two of the greatest melodies ever written as well as tracks which express a certain restless yearning. (Neruda’s poem is also in excellent taste, and carries a mood of defiant tragedy).
This puts my crying as Nina grows closer to Mark into perspective. We cry at the enthusiasm of Mark’s developmentally disabled clients’ enthusiasm at seeing her back, because we know that he has been enthusiastic about her and we (stereotyping like crazy) like to believe such people are pure and do not lie; they can see a fellow good spirit.
Then there is the fact that, purely at the level of the traditional love story — if we chopped off the beginning and end — Nina is going for the good guy, who clearly possesses a more loving spirit, kinder heart and better sense of fun than the Jamie has or had. She’s trading up. She’s making the adult choice. That is not to say that Rickman’s Jamie is not delicious and desirable. But he’s the bad choice we often need to get over — always painfully — in order to discover lasting happiness. I mean, let’s not pretend he was going to happily give Nina a child.
By the end of the film, the idea that Jamie is a figment of Nina’s imagination has been cast aside. We are too invested in the notion of a Jamie committing the ultimate sacrifice. And that realisation, that he would risk her falling out of love with him — to hate him — just so she can live her life, is the unbearable sadness which really floors us. This is a love beyond all others we had thought about, feasible here because Minghella a tragic trope of Shakespearean quality based on an unexplored emotional situation.
* * *
So, to sum up: why is TMD so goddamn sad? Because it takes us on several emotional journeys at once — Nina’s grief / lack of self-respect blossoming into acceptance / self value; Mark getting the woman he deserves for his years of self-abnegation (dynamic co-dependent people are hard to find); and finally, of course, Jamie’s huge sacrifice of his own positive self-image in Nina’s eyes for her own good.
Nina, Jamie and Mark also dwell in a sad universe full of men who care for Nina but cannot reach her. She reminds me of Penelope waiting Odysseus return. It is our world, too: the London of buses and cheap cafes and struggling. The dialogue is naturalistic and the characters self-effacing. It’s all quite familiar.
“Don’t get posh,” says Nina to her nephew, who’s at a private school. “Say ‘bum’ and ‘Trotsky’ twice a day before meals.
All this is wrong-footed by our uncertainty about what is actually occurring. It’s a deeply odd film in many ways, with all these men everywhere and the symbolic rats that come and go, and the cold ghost with the sniffles. As Minghella has our rational brains figuring out what to believe, what he hits us with sucker punch after sucker punch — and we are totally unguarded.
This is why I think TMD is the saddest film ever made — and, in its modesty, one of the most loveable.
