THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1999/12/122405.html
BY ROGER EBERT
Villains usually last through only one crime novel, while heroes are
good for a whole series. That's a great inconvenience for their
authors, because villains are usually more colorful than heroes.
Patricia Highsmith's novels about Tom Ripley are the exception, a
series of books about a man who is irredeemably bad, and yet
charming, intelligent and thoughtful about the price he pays for his
amoral lifestyle.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, her first Ripley novel, published in 1955,
shows Ripley in the process of inventing himself and finding his
life's work. He was a poor man who wanted to be a rich man, an
unknown man who wanted not to be famous but simply to be someone
else. Some men are envious of other men's cars, or wives, or
fortunes. Ripley coveted their identities.
The novel shows him annexing the life and identity of a man named
Greenleaf. It was filmed in 1960 by Rene Clement as "Purple Noon,"
with Alain Delon as Ripley, and now it has been filmed again by
Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient"), with Matt Damon in the
title role. One of the pleasures of the two adaptations is that the
plots are sufficiently different that you can watch one without
knowing how the other turns out--or even what happens along the way.
That despite the fact that they both revolve around Ripley's
decision that he can be Greenleaf as well as, or better than,
Greenleaf can be himself.
"Purple Noon" begins with the two men already friends. "The Talented
Mr. Ripley," adapted by Minghella, has a better idea: Ripley is an
opportunist who stumbles onto an opening into Greenleaf's life, and
takes it. He borrows a Princeton blazer to play the piano at a
rooftop party in Manhattan and a rich couple assume he must have
known their son Dickie at Princeton. He agrees.
The Greenleafs are concerned about Dickie (Jude Law), who has
decamped to the decadence of Europe and shows no sign of coming home.
They offer Tom Ripley a deal: They'll finance his own trip to Europe
and pay him $1,000 if he returns with their son. Cut to a beach in
Italy, where Dickie suns with Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), and
the original deception turns evil.
Remember that Ripley is already impersonating someone--Dickie's old
Princeton friend. That works with Dickie ("I've completely forgotten
him," he tells Marge), but eventually he wonders if anything Tom
tells him is the truth. Ripley, at this point still developing the
skills that will carry him through several more adventures,
instinctively knows that the best way to lie is to admit to lying,
and to tell the truth whenever convenient.
When Dickie asks him what his talents are, he replies, "Forging
signatures, telling lies and impersonating almost anyone." Quite
true. And then he does a chilling impersonation of Mr. Greenleaf
asking him to bring Dickie back to the United States. "I feel like
he's here," Dickie says, as Tom does his father's voice.
By confessing his mission, Tom disarms Dickie and is soon accepted
into his circle, which also includes an epicurean friend named
Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Also moving through Europe
at about the same time is a rich girl named Meredith Logue (Cate
Blanchett), who believes things about Tom that Dickie must not be
allowed to know. But I am growing vague, and must grow vaguer,
because the whole point of the movie is to show Tom Ripley learning
to use subterfuge, improvisation and lightning-fast thinking under
pressure to become Dickie Greenleaf.
Highsmith wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley five years after writing
Strangers on a Train, which Hitchcock made into a film he sometimes
called his favorite. The two stories are similar. Strangers is
about a man who meets another man and offers to trade crimes with
him: I'll kill the person you hate, and you kill the person I hate,
and since neither one of us has any connection with our victim or
any motive for killing him, we'll never be caught. Talented has
Dickie blamed for the drowning death of a local woman and Ripley
"trading" that death as a cover-up for another.
Hitchcock's film subtly suggested a homosexual feeling in the
instigator, and Tom Ripley also seems to have feelings for Dickie
Greenleaf--although narcissism and sexuality are so mixed up in his
mind that Ripley almost seems to want to become Greenleaf so that
he can love himself (both Ripley movies have a scene of Ripley
dressed in Dickie's clothes and posing in a mirror). This
undercurrent is wisely never brought up to the level of conscious
action because so many of Tom Ripley's complicated needs and
desires are deeply buried; he finds out what he wants to do by
doing it.
Matt Damon is bland and ordinary as Ripley, and then takes on the
vivid coloration of others--even a jazz singer. Jude Law makes
Dickie almost deserving of his fate because of the way he adopts
new friends and then discards them. Gwyneth Paltrow's role is
tricky: Yes, Dickie is her boyfriend, but he's cold and treats her
badly, and there are times when she would intuit the dread secret
if she weren't so distracted by the way she already resents Dickie.
The movie is an intelligent a thriller as you'll see this year. It
is also insidious in the way it leads us to identify with Tom
Ripley. He is the protagonist, we see everything through his eyes,
and Dickie is not especially lovable; that means we are a co-
conspirator in situations where it seems inconceivable that Tom's
deception will not be discovered. He's a monster, but we want him
to get away with it. There is one sequence in the film involving
an apartment, a landlady, the police and a friend who knows the
real Dickie that depends on such meticulous timing and
improvisation that if you made it speedier, you'd have the Marx
Brothers.
Ebert's review of "Purple Noon" is online at www.suntimes.com/ebert.
Copyright c Chicago-Sun-Times Inc.
Copyright c Chicago Sun-Times Inc.