"The Talented Mr. Ripley"
salon.com > Arts & Entertainment Dec. 24, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/12/24/ripley
Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law star in a deluxe version of
Patricia Highsmith's creepy classic.
By Charles Taylor
It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as
Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," but Anthony Minghella
manages somehow. Minghella has filmed Highsmith's nasty classic of
homicidal paranoia in the deluxe style he used on "The English
Patient" -- all tasteful creaminess, like an expensive dessert cart
presented by a discreet waiter. The characters can't get into a boat
without Minghella's first giving us an eyeful of postcard-pretty
Mediterranean coastline. No one can pass through customs without a
wide-angle view of the period-perfect customs hall. (The movie is set
in the late '50s.) Hotel rooms are as pristine as in a travel
brochure. After a while, you get the message -- Anthony Minghella
doesn't want to get his hands dirty.
As Highsmith begins the story of Tom Ripley in the first of the five
books she featured him in, he's riding out a New York autumn, vaguely
taking advantage of a circle of contacts whose means are far above
his while working scams almost as an amusement. He meets up with the
father of a spoiled rich acquaintance named Dickie Greenleaf, who has
decamped to Italy with dreams of being an artist. (Minghella makes
Dickie an aspiring jazz musician.) Dickie's mother is ill, and his
father, who wants him back, offers to pay Tom's fare to Europe, plus
expenses, if Tom will try to persuade Dickie to return. Pressing this
tenuous connection, Tom travels to Italy and inserts himself into
Dickie's life, precipitating a rift between him and his girlfriend.
When it becomes clear that Dickie has no intention of going back --
and that his recalcitrance will mean the end of the good life Tom has
settled into -- Tom methodically plans Dickie's murder, executes it
and takes over Dickie's identity. After the murder, Highsmith shows
Tom living as Dickie and, when that becomes impossible, transferring
Dickie's riches to his own coffers.
In outline, the book sounds like a noirish parable of class
resentment -- and Tom, who has been brought up in shabby
circumstances by an unloving aunt, is certainly eaten up with envy
over the money and the opportunities Dickie takes for granted. But
that envy is Highsmith's pretext for rooting around in the mind of
a coolly detached psychopath. Tom is running deceptions and con
games and screwing with people's minds long before he gets a chance
at Dickie Greenleaf's money. (And he continues doing so in the books
that follow, long after he is able to take the good life for granted.)
Minghella must have envisioned Tom as something like a murderous
version of Montgomery Clift's George Eastman in "A Place in the Sun."
As played by Matt Damon, Tom is the kid who's got everything going
for him but money. His charm and good looks and good manners allow
him to fit in easily among people who, if they knew his background,
wouldn't give him the time of day. In adapting the novel, Minghella
has made Ripley both nice and pitiable. When he kills Dickie (Jude
Law), it's purely on impulse -- he's only reacting to Dickie's
hurtful remarks about his being a leech. It doesn't seem to occur to
Minghella that he is a leech; in the book, Dickie's girlfriend,
Marge, picks up on the creepy way Tom gloms onto Dickie (not to
mention Tom's attraction to Dickie), but Minghella misses it.
He does add a few fancy touches meant to convey Tom's splintered
personality: the literally splintered views of him in the title
sequence (so reminiscent of the work of movie titles designer Saul
Bass); a shot of Dickie's face while Tom is saying, "This is my
face"; a later shot of Tom's head above the top of a standing mirror
in which Dickie's body is reflected. But for much of the movie, Tom
is just an awkward kid given the chance to lead the life of Riley
(we even get to see him crying at the opera) and then cruelly shut
out when he ceases to amuse Dickie -- and when Dickie becomes
embarrassed by Tom's presence among his posh friends.
Part of what makes the movie so ridiculous is the casting of Damon,
who has the world-beater smile and high-WASP good looks that
naturally belong to the type of well-bred guys Tom Ripley tries to
emulate. Having Damon hide behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses
doesn't change any of that. Tom needs to be soft and seemingly weak,
so that when we pity him we become the butt of his joke. (Tobey
Maguire could have hit this role out of the park.) Damon's sudden,
accurate impersonations are startling (at one point he directs an
impression of someone he's just killed to the corpse), but he simply
comes across as too stable and sturdy to suggest the quavering
sickness of Ripley.
As Dickie and Marge, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow look right, and
their behavior -- Dickie's alternating patrician reserve and
boorishness, Marge's absolutely impersonal solicitude -- feel right.
But the characters aren't that interesting, and the casting of
Paltrow is particularly infelicitous. Paltrow has a ways to go as an
actress, but she can be a charming presence. Here, though, Minghella
seems to have cast her solely for her golden-girl air, and though
he's made Marge smarter than Highsmith's somewhat misogynist
portrait (her Marge is something of a cow), he seems --
inadvertently -- to be saying the very thing Paltrow's detractors
say: that there's not much to her beyond her looks.
As a textiles heiress who becomes smitten with Tom (a role invented
by Minghella), Cate Blanchett gets to kick up her heels a little
more. At first she seems to be laying it on a bit thick, but her
Meredith does lay it on thick, and Blanchett projects an almost
girlish charm behind the artifice. As Dickie's caddish friend Freddy
Miles, Philip Seymour Hoffman zooms in driving a red convertible and
pretty much walks off with the movie in his pocket.
Hoffman's Freddy has a frat-boy grossness that belies his wealth,
and an arrogance beyond what his brains or looks should allow for.
He gets away with his bad behavior because he has the money to get
away with it. It's always startling to see an actor capture a type
you've encountered in life but never seen on film, and Hoffman's
gusto gives the movie the dose of dirt it so desperately needs.
Patricia Highsmith's admirers have long argued that she is much more
than a genre writer. I'm not convinced. In "The Talented Mr. Ripley"
she wrote a damn compelling novel, but I don't find her chill,
rancid misanthropy pleasurable. Still, it's easy to see why
filmmakers are attracted to her combination of nastiness and swank.
The trouble is that the pretty/kinky surface seems to blind
potential adapters to this book's booby traps.
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" isn't a mystery (we're never in doubt as
to what's happened), and it's not really a thriller. It's an arm's-
length dissection of the personality of a psychopath, and in movies
that distance translates as coldness. The temperature didn't matter
much in Rene Clement's 1959 adaptation of the novel, "Purple Noon"
(featuring French cinema's great tabula rasa, Alain Delon, as
Ripley) because Clement presented the life of the decadent rich
with an unabashed whorishness. (It was an honestly voyeuristic
version of the lifestyle Antonioni and Resnais would spend the next
decade clucking over.)
But Tom isn't a psychopath who invites feelings of recognition or
even protectiveness the way that a warmer though much more extreme
character like Norman Bates can. Maybe because on some level
Minghella recognized that, he set out to make us share in Tom's
culpability. The director softens everything about the book, then
ladles on prestige production values. To his credit, he seems to
have little patience with the old notion -- which Highsmith
subscribed to -- of repressed homosexuality as a metaphor for
aberrant behavior. (And Highsmith was a lesbian.) Though Minghella
is more open about Tom's sexuality, his presentation of it still
feels held back; he's hesitant about making it just one more part
of Tom's splintered psyche. And while he doesn't tack on the
moralistic ending with which Clement closed "Purple Noon," his
jiggering with Highsmith's carefully worked-out plot results in
something that, in its own way, feels nearly as moralistic.
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is a film made by a man who is
uncomfortable with the material he has chosen to adapt. Watching
this sluggish, uninvolving picture, too carefully made to be
obviously bad, too steeped in quality to offer visceral thrills or
sensual pleasure, recalled for me the feeling of watching "The
English Patient."
Paralyzed with respect for the dried-out floweriness of Michael
Ondaatje's prose, Minghella treated a soapy wartime romance
(albeit one that asks you to weep over a Nazi collaborator) as a
profound tragedy. Here he treats a mean, squirrelly little book as
a major statement on class envy and the dissolution of personality.
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is, in a way, a predictable failure.
Having earned the kind of praise he did with "The English Patient,"
Minghella isn't going back to the modest style and the organic
emotion of "Truly, Madly, Deeply," his first and still his best
film. It's even more depressing to see these glamorous young stars
sealed up in a the kind of glossy prestige picture whose boring
refinement works against the very idea of star power. In a weird
way, Minghella has remained true to Tom Ripley's fantasies: He's
made a movie that is killingly tasteful.
salon.com | Dec. 24, 1999
Copyright c 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.