A pretty young picture

http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/movies/movie170.htm

01/27/00- Updated 04:14 PM ET
By Mike Clark, USA TODAY


Though people don't necessarily need movies to generate fantasies
about enjoying the indolent life, the second and even more lavish
screen version of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley
(3.5 out of four) certainly helps the process. Here are beautiful
people wearing beautiful clothes against beautiful Italian coastal
settings in a beautiful jazz-club decade (the late '50s in all of
their Bird/Dizzy/Chet Baker splendor).

Only later do suicide, murder, forgery and concealment enter into
what remains a physically pretty picture, but by then we've been
hooked by seeing Matt Damon play a poor-boy opportunist who's more
transparent to us than to his victims (at least at first). In a cast
with unusual depth, Jude Law makes the most of the film's superior
opening hour. He joins Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and dependable
scene-stealer Philip Seymour Hoffman as the principals used and
abused by this leech before catching on to him (the price of
revelation being, in a couple of cases, death).

Highsmith's 1955 novel was filmed by Rene Clement in 1960 as Plein
Soleil (U.S. title: Purple Noon), which enjoyed a national reissue a
few years ago. Damon and Law have the wayward-youth roles originally
played by Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet - a smoothie-for-hire and
the rich, young wastrel he befriends because the latter's
industrialist father thinks it's a way to get the money-draining kid
back from abroad.

Instead, this glorified bounty hunter comes to enjoy sharing his
target's lazy days and wearing sonny boy's fancy clothes.
Complicating matters is his development of a sexual attraction (much
more spelled-out here than in Noon).

A significant plot twist suddenly changes a heated psychological
study into a low-key cat-and-mouse thriller - with 90 minutes to go.
Unlike Clement's half-hour-shorter version, which improves as it
goes and has a more satisfying wrap-up, this overall better
rendering coasts on the momentum of a terrific lead-in.

Still, its vicarious physical pleasures are tough to resist. Anthony
Minghella, in his first film since The English Patient, displays
comparable production values and a cutting-edge Hollywood cast.

In a possible breakthrough role, Law would seem to be the big
winner - along with all the suspense-loving moviegoers looking for
the mass-audience entertainment that nearly everyone wants this time
of year.


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