'Mr. Ripley' is an intriguing dance to the Hitchcock beat

http://www.oregonlive.com/movies/index.ssf?/movies/criticrev/99/12/al_61frip24.frame

Friday, December 24, 1999
By Shawn Levy of The Oregonian staff


Alfred Hitchcock was proud of the moment in "Psycho" when madman
Norman Bates buries the car of one of his victims in a swamp. As
the car sinks into the mire, it briefly stops, and, as Hitchcock
observed, the audience grows anxious, as if rooting for the murder
to be successfully covered-up.

The cinema creates such intimacy between the viewer and the viewed,
Hitchcock concluded, that audiences will identify even with an
outright villain and start rooting for him.

Hitchcock didn't film "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the 1955 novel by
the dry, icy Patricia Highsmith, but he did make one of his best
films of her "Strangers on a Train." And "Ripley," like "Strangers,"
has Hitchcockian themes of doubling, guilt, desire and murder.

Coincidentally, when "Psycho" was released in 1960, "Ripley," which
shares with that film a story involving missing persons and subsumed
identities, was released by French director Rene Clement as "Plein
Soleil" ("Purple Noon").

Now "Ripley" gets its first English-language treatment at the hands
of writer-director Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient") and
star Matt Damon. It's a film of lavish beauties and some dullnesses,
rich in acting, photography and dcor and daring in its sexual
ambiguities and frank cruelty.

Like "Psycho," it moves in such unexpected directions that we wind
up rooting for a killer and thief to pull off his schemes. Thanks
largely to Damon, delivering a mature and complex performance and
boldly risking his teen-idol mantle, the film is successful despite
its protracted length and occasional languor.

The film tells the twisted Horatio Alger story of Tom Ripley, a
feckless New York pianist and men's-room attendant. Ripley has
gifts -- he can forge signatures and do uncanny vocal
impersonations -- and a willingness to exploit them, but he has no
worthy opportunities.

Until he meets Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), that is. Greenleaf
is a shipping magnate whose only son, Dickie (English actor Jude
Law), is living as a bohemian layabout in a fishing village south of
Naples, Italy. The elder Greenleaf, mistaking Ripley for a Princeton
chum of Dickie's, hires Ripley to go to Italy and convince Dickie to
return home.

Once there, however, Ripley is immediately smitten with Dickie,
Dickie's girl Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and the expatriate lifestyle
of jazz clubs, sailboats and martinis at noon.

Ripley reveals to Dickie his purpose in making the trip and joins
with Dickie in a scheme to rip daddy off, encouraging him to believe
that the effort to retrieve Dickie is working and thus bleeding more
money out of him.

It's a precarious existence for Ripley. For one thing, Dickie swerves
between passions and revulsions mercurially. Ripley, who has a secret
sexual longing for the young heir, never knows if he's in favor or out
with him. For another, Dickie's upper-class chums, such as playboy
Freddie Miles (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), see viciously through
Ripley's pretensions and remind him that he doesn't belong. Marge is
sweet to him -- and maybe, just maybe, sweet on him -- but Ripley
knows that his time in this reverie is ticking off irreversibly. And
he finds, ultimately, that the only way to hang on to what he wants
is to resort to murder, lies and, in the way of these things, further
acts of murder and more lying.

Minghella and his visual team (cinematographer John Seale and
production designer Roy Walker) create a comely heaven of the late
'50s in Rome, Venice, Italy, and the seaside village of Mongibello,
Italy. There's a dizzying richness of period detail and repeated
motifs of water, smoke and fractured mirrors and frames. The film
moves musically -- aptly, given Ripley's own musical gifts and the
jazz fetishism of Dickie and his crowd.

Chiefly, though, there is the acting. Damon is expansive and evasive
at once, scrambling and dissembling and mutating to keep in
everyone's good graces, to keep the law and nosy friends of Dickie's
at bay, and, at some level, to seduce everyone he meets, male or
female.

He even does a credible Chet Baker imitation, singing "My Funny
Valentine" in a voice that's neither male nor female, real nor faked.
It's a fabulous star turn.

Law ("Gattaca," "eXistenZ") plays Dickie well as an irresistible
pixie with a mean streak. Hoffman is a lascivious, hung-over delight.
Paltrow and Cate Blanchett have less vivid roles to play, but fill
them admirably, with no sense of showiness or vanity.

As the film builds, it slips now and again into a strange dullness,
perhaps inevitably, as so much of the story consists of
conversations. But when it's over, you find yourself in a very rare
and curious situation indeed: Minghella, Highsmith, Damon and company
have got you rooting for the bad guy and feeling good about it.

It's a refreshing sensation, even if it makes you feel a touch
seasick at first, and the fittingly eerie conclusion to a lavish and
unsettling movie.



Friday, December 24, 1999