THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY

Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow
Paramount, Rated R

Wednesday, December 29, 1999
http://www.ew.com/ew/review/movie/0,1683,1044,talentedmrripley.html


Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is a sneaky, murdering enigma in "The
Talented Mr. Ripley," writer-director Anthony Minghella's artful
transposition of Patricia Highsmith's chillingly perverse 1955
psychological crime novel into an attractive, unsettling crime
travelogue. The unnerving antihero doesn't approach the amorality
of Highsmith's Ripley, an icy psychopath who ruthlessly kills to
maintain the cultured, comfortable life he has made for himself
by stealing another man's identity. But Minghella's Ripley may be
a better, more dangerous phony for our time: pleasant except when
cornered, cute except when evil. Embodied by Damon with his
fashion-ad grace and magazine-cover smile, this '90s version of a
mid-century devil displays a greater range of emotion than the
late Highsmith favored and expresses his homoerotic longings more
openly than she had interest in. He's a killer as puppy dog, an
accidental psychopath.

As such, he's as good a Ripley for Minghella to start with as any
in trying to make cinematic sense of one of literature's great
modern con men, previously brought to the screen in Rene Clement's
1960 French eyeful "Purple Noon." And indeed, the literary-minded
British filmmaker, who three years ago wrestled the hard-to-adapt
novel "The English Patient" into the Oscar ring, has made a classy,
subtle drama that incorporates fine jazz and divine tourist vistas,
the pleasures of young men roughhousing and the beauty of young
women sashaying through the streets like Ruth Orkin photos come to
life. Having taken the gentler, more scenic route to displaying
Ripley's dark talents -- talents that include lying, forging,
flattering, and imitating -- Minghella makes an enticing,
intelligent, well-shaped picture about the extreme perils of class
envy and sexual panic.

The setting is a sun-drenched late-'50s Italy where an impoverished
Tom Ripley, having passed himself off as an upper-crust Princeton
grad, has been dispatched by a wealthy New York businessman (James
Rebhorn) to bring home his indolent playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf
(Jude Law), currently living la dolce vita with his equally languid
American girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). Enchanted by Dickie
(and who wouldn't be -- Law, in a star-making performance, is the
sexually magnetic center of every scene he's in), Tom becomes a
favored playmate of his wanton new friend. When the two
exhilarated, sweat-shiny Americans get down in a smoky Italian jazz
joint, it's a cinch to feel the boy-to-boy crackle in the air.
Paltrow does what she can with Marge, the real outsider in this
psychodrama, but there's not much for the actress to do except look
suspicious by degrees, as she did in "A Perfect Murder."

Damon is at once an obvious choice for the part and a hard sell to
audiences soothed by his amiable boyishness. The actor's persona,
that of well-adjusted Private Ryan unwilling to leave the
battlefield without his buddies, doesn't suggest a fellow who can
convincingly go postal. But the facade works surprisingly well when
Damon holds that gleaming smile just a few seconds too long, his
Eagle Scout eyes fixed just a blink more than the calm gaze of any
non-murdering young man. And in that opacity we see horror.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" slithers along with great elegance and
purpose for most of Ripley's reign, stumbling only at the end when
Minghella trips on the limitations imposed by his own updated
psychoanalysis. But one schematic addition proves invaluable: As
Meredith, a rich American deb to whom Tom, bound for Italy, has
passed himself off as Dickie -- a deception for which someone will
eventually pay -- Cate Blanchett fills her small role with note-
perfect detail. By the end, when Ripley's talents threaten to fail
him, she's the reason. Somehow, believe it or not, I think the
ornery, talented mystery novelist who invented him might have been
pleased by such a turnabout.

Grade:  A-

-- Lisa Schwarzbaum