Matt Damon ruthlessly pursues the good life in 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'

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By Terry Lawson
Detroit Free Press
Published: 12/22/99


The beginning of Anthony Minghella's sun-soaked, sinister adaptation
of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" sees Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a sometime-
classical pianist, teaching himself jazz via the time-honored
blindfold test. He plays a record, then attempts to distinguish who is
leading the band or playing the solo.

Unlike a lot of urban young men his age in the late 1950s, Tom is
doing this not to enhance understanding or hipness, only his
opportunities. But he does turn out to have a jazz sensibility. Tom
Ripley, who would kill to have the life he thinks he deserves, is a
born improviser.

Ripley also is one of the most seductive characters in literature and
a forefather of a modern archetype: a suave, remorseless serial killer
with whom we are encouraged to identify. (The model was taken to
repellent extremes in "American Psycho.") The director purposely put
Tom in every scene of the film that bears his name, so there is no
escaping who he is -- a nobody -- and what he wants, which is to be
somebody.

Specifically, Tom wants the life of jazz lover Dickie Greenfield (Jude
Law), a wealthy dilettante hiding out from responsibility in Italy.
Mistaken for one of Dickie's Princeton classmates by Dickie's blue-
blooded father (James Reborn), Tom is given a ticket and $1,000, and
is sent to bring Dickie back home. But when he gets his first look at
the golden boy, tanning himself on a beach with his beautiful blond
girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), Tom knows he isn't
taking anyone anywhere. He's home at last.

Impressing Dickie with his naive enthusiasm and honesty and, most of
all, his slavish devotion, Tom is appointed mascot: "He makes me
laugh," Dickie explains to Marge, a writer who loves Dickie in spite
of herself. Dickie's cynical chum Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour
Hoffman) doesn't get the joke, and when he's around, Tom is relegated
to the backseat, where he quietly seethes. He's come all this way,
only to be returned to the outside.

Patricia Highsmith's novel, published in 1955, was a morality tale
with the wrong ending. It was the story of a man, who, upon making an
awful mistake, tries to cover it up with another and another, only to
find himself caught in a terrible trap of his own making. The key was
that Ripley was able to unmake it, not only to escape, but to prosper.

It was shocking at a time when crime never paid, but "The Talented Mr.
Ripley" wasn't a crime novel. It was a story of class and unrequited
longing, and so, too, is Minghella's fairly loyal adaptation. He has
taken liberties; Marge was hardly the sensitive soul in the book she
is here. And he has given her a less confident counterpart in Meredith
Logue (Cate Blanchett), an heiress whom Tom, posing as Dickie, seeks
to re-create in Marge's image.

But Minghella isn't at all cagey about Tom's homosexuality, as was the
case in Rene Clement's excellent 1960 version, "Purple Noon," and
there is none of that movie's self-loathing. Chief among Ripley's
talents is an ability to accept his good fortune.

Minghella shares that gift. The success and Oscars bestowed upon "The
English Patient" gave him something like Dickie's carte blanche, and
he's spent it swimmingly here, on lavish locations and beautiful
people. One's tolerance for Damon, who spends half the film making
himself geeky and the other half being irresistible, will be tested
here, since he is on screen for almost every second. But all that gee-
whiz, boyish insincerity works wonderfully in this context, and is
well contrasted with the jaded yet immature worldliness Law brings to
Dickie.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" isn't about women, even though Paltrow and
Blanchett provide occasional relief from all the posing and power-
posturing. The real Delilah here is Hoffman's Freddie, who boasts of
all his hetero sex while stirring Tom and Dickie's powder-keg pot
like a less-lispy Truman Capote.

Highsmith would revisit the endlessly improvising Ripley four more
times over the next four decades, and I wouldn't mind a bit if
Minghella did the same. Tom's worth keeping an eye on.