‘Mr. Ripley’ shows off director’s talents, too
http://detnews.com/1999/entertainment/1224/mripley/mripley.htm
Thursday, December 23, 1999
By Susan Stark / Detroit News Film Critic
Anthony Minghella follows the brilliant success of The English
Patient with The Talented Mr. Ripley, a complex psychological
study of a serial murderer . This, in a word, is a film about
envy.
Again, Minghella proves himself the most stylish and literate
of film makers. Beyond that, the two major movies to his credit
(he bowed with the minor classic Truly, Madly, Deeply) have
little in common.
Based on the first of the late Patricia Highsmith’s esteemed
novels about a bright, chameleonlike young nobody who poses,
lies and murders his way to somebody-hood, the new movie offers
Matt Damon his most challenging role yet. He plays Tom Ripley, a
New York men’s room attendant whose life changes after he
borrows a sports jacket with a Princeton insignia. Taken for a
Princeton man by a tycoon, he is promptly sent to Italy to bring
home the man’s renegade son.
It’s the opportunity of a lifetime for Ripley. He views it,
correctly, as just that.
Yet almost immediately, Damon’s Ripley falls in love with the
lifestyle of the gleamingly handsome young hedonist he has been
sent to bring back to New York and a responsible life in the
family business. More pointedly, Damon’s Ripley falls in love
with the man, as well. That takes him, as well as the viewer,
quite by surprise, but he adapts quickly and in ever more
surprising, horrifying ways.
Damon does well by the all-American poseur’s earnest, engaging
surface and also by his increasingly dark interior. By turn
ingratiating and horrifying, this is a character that tests
audience sympathy on several levels.
On the one hand, Damon’s Ripley is a fresh-faced, eager and
very bright if unpolished young man who falls desperately in
love with the life and person of a rich, spoiled, arrogant,
breathtakingly handsome young man who teases and taunts him for
his lumpen ways. But for all that, the privileged man allows him
more than a taste of the good life. Your heart goes out to Damon’s
talented, tormented Mr. Ripley.
On the other hand, Ripley quickly progresses from relatively geeky,
innocent imposter, out for a lark, to scheming, ruthless
pscyhopath. Just where and why you decide to part company with him
becomes an individual emotional and moral test. Most movies are
painted in black and white; this one explores all sorts of
intriguing grays.
That, along with Minghella’s ravishing use of music as both
structural and aural guide, provides points of sustained interest
in a scenario and a group of characters that wear thin over the
course of more than two hours.
Privilege, like virtue, is certainly its own reward. Yet on screen,
watching a pack of spoiled young Americans throwing their money and
aimlessness around abroad becomes tedious. The piece is set in the
’50s. The world has become much smaller since then. It’s a real
leap to see Italy, even in the film’s south-to-north sweep, as a
foreign country.
Still, Minghella and a choice company manage as often as not to
summon a distant time and its point of view in persuasive terms and
to establish the idea that this, finally, is a scenario about
emotional geography, a scenario tied more closely to state of mind
than to time or even place.
Behind Damon, the company prominently includes Jude Law, as the
golden guy who becomes both beacon and ruination for Damon’s
Ripley; Gwyneth Paltrow as Law’s main partner in the gleam, but
stronger and more intuitively intelligent than she first appears;
Cate Blanchett, heartbreaking in her every gesture as a pitifully
insecure if privileged young American abroad; Philip Seymour
Hoffman, as the bluff, ungainly but ardent member of the swanky
young expatriate set; and Jack Davenport, as a sweet Brit who
hangs out on the fringe of the aggressive, emotionally groping
American clique, but knows his heart better than any of them.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice, or at least not promptly, in
movies as in life. Yet until a story as extraordinary as Michael
Ondaatje’s The English Patient comes along, Minghella suggests
with The Talented Mr. Ripley that the rule of lightning may not
apply to him. It’s a thoughtful, demanding, distinctive, often
illuminating film about grown-up choices for grown-ups.
A Miramax/Paramount Pictures release. Opens Saturday in area theaters.
Copyright c 1999, The Detroit News