'Ripley' stands up to inevitble Hitchcock comparisons

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By Chris Hewitt
Saint Paul Pioneer Press
Published: Dec. 22, 1999


The talented Mr. Ripley is a deft mimic who lies to everyone, even
himself. He's indisputably villainous -- and yet you can't help but
root for him. Mr. Ripley's talents include lying, murder and looking
smashing while he rides around sunny Italy on a Vespa motor scooter.

A ravishing, suspenseful and emotionally satisfying thriller, "The
Talented Mr. Ripley'' is a rare remake that improves on an original
that was pretty good in the first place. The original was the French
"Purple Noon,'' and both films are based on Patricia Highsmith's
novel "The Talented Mr. Ripley,'' in which a drifter (Matt Damon)
takes up with wealthy Americans (Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law) in
Italy, finds that he likes their lifestyle and realizes that, if he
doesn't get too picky about morality, he can slip into their
expensive, Italian-made shoes.

Ripley is a tricky character -- he does awful things, but he doesn't
premeditate them. You can imagine that he'd be charming right up
until the moment he slit your throat. In Damon's astonishingly good
performance, we see that Ripley is a deft improviser with a knack for
getting himself out of seemingly impossible situations. The
centerpiece scene of "Ripley'' is at an opera, where three people
Ripley has been lying to come together and where we hold our breath,
hoping he'll find a way out of this jam.

The suspense is created because we want Ripley to walk away from
trouble. He's technically the villain here, but we root for him
anyway, because his longing is the most recognizable emotion in the
movie. Paltrow and Law are too perfect and golden to need anything,
but Damon's Ripley is desperately needy -- he's reaching out to other
people in an attempt to fill the hole at his center. Also, because
the movie is structured as flashbacks related by a mournful Ripley,
we know he regrets the events he is telling us about.

In adapting "The Talented Mr. Ripley'' for the screen, writer/director
Anthony Minghella takes the focus off Highsmith's idea that we all
have the capacity for evil and plays up the homoerotic subtext. In an
attempt to fit in with Law and his crowd (which includes the
superlative Philip Seymour Hoffman as a snobby boor), Damon studies
and imitates their behavior, but his gaze shifts from curious to
erotic in a playfully tense scene in which the two play chess while
Law takes a bath. Ripley's repressed sexuality (in the book, he was
asexual, but he would have hopped in the sack with a wombat if the
wombat could get him into the social register) fits perfectly with
Minghella's take on the material, which suggests the price of not
knowing who you are, of lying to yourself.

In Minghella's "Ripley,'' lying to yourself leads to nasty behavior.
Ripley gets everything he thought he wanted by using his abilities
as a mimic to try on other people's identities, but it seems unlikely
that those things will make him happy. Because the one thing Mr.
Ripley doesn't have is a talent for getting out of his own skin.



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Chris Hewitt can be reached at [e-mail] or at [phone].