http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/122499ripley-film-review.html

December 24, 1999
FILM REVIEW
By JANET MASLIN


A flood of adjectives bursts onto the screen at the start of Anthony
Minghella's glittering new thriller, considering ways to describe
Tom Ripley before settling on "talented" as le mot juste. This is
only a minuscule show of ingenuity, but it's also a promise that the
film will keep. "The Talented Mr. Ripley" offers diabolically smart
surprises wherever you care to look.

Its opening credit sequence alone is a model of exquisitely
economical suggestion, showing how the loan of a jacket with a
Princeton insignia leads Tom from the life of a New York City men's
room attendant to a thrillingly new world of opportunity. In a rush
of gorgeous, agile exposition, Tom winds up in Europe, learning to
say "This is my face" in Italian as he trains his binoculars on
Dickie Greenleaf.

Dickie is the spectacularly charismatic dilettante whose life Tom
will eventually steal.

"I can tell you, the Greenleaf name opens a lot of doors," remarks
the chauffeur who drives Tom away from a bleak Manhattan neighborhood
and hands him his first-class ticket for an ocean passage. In light
of the mind games that the movie has in store, both the remark and
the carnal high-low contrast (meat hangs on hooks near the limousine)
are as splendidly barbed as they can be.

As a playwright and television writer who came to filmmaking with two
comparatively modest, whimsical efforts ("Truly, Madly, Deeply" and
"Mr. Wonderful") before the exponential leap of "The English Patient,"
Mr. Minghella now establishes that his Oscar-winning triumph was no
fluke. His hypnotic, sensually charged adaptation of Patricia
Highsmith's fascinatingly reptilian murder story has the same kind of
complex allure that made "The English Patient" so mesmerizing.

This is a more conventional opportunity, being essentially the story
of a homoerotic Faustian bargain played for keeps. But Mr. Minghella,
who wrote and directed "The Talented Mr. Ripley" with acute attention
to every nuance, significantly broadens what Ms. Highsmith had in
mind. Adding a couple of important new characters and bringing the
secrets of Tom's sexual longings to the surface, he risks losing the
profound chill that made Ripley so disturbing in the first place. The
character is several shades less loathsome and more conscience-
stricken than he was to begin with, and his homosexuality is more
openly expressed. But as played by Matt Damon with a fine, tricky mix
of obsequiousness and ruthlessness, the nicer new Ripley is in no
danger of losing his sting.

In a scenic, voluptuously beautiful film (kudos to the
cinematographer, John Seale) that has a traffic-stopping cast, Mr.
Minghella carefully plants the seeds of mayhem. When Tom is hired by
Dickie's father (James Rebhorn) to bring the ne'er-do-well Greenleaf
scion home from Italy, he contrives to bump into Dickie on the beach
and to echo Dickie's infatuation with American jazz. The year is
1958, and it seems an impossibly glamorous time as depicted among
pampered American expatriates in some of Italy's most breathtaking
settings.

Tom's tricks, from wearing an embarrassingly skimpy chartreuse
bathing suit to casually flashing some of Dickie's favorite record
albums, neatly accomplish their purpose. Soon he has made himself
Dickie's latest diversion, and managed this without even alienating
Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), Dickie's girlfriend.

Marge was a thick, lumpen target for Tom's misogyny in Ms.
Highsmith's version. Here, though still hopelessly oblivious to
sexual currents between the men, she becomes a reminder that Ms.
Paltrow makes as savvy a character actress as she does a swanlike
leading lady.

A word about the film's Dickie Greenleaf: this is a star-making role
for the preternaturally talented English actor Jude Law. Beyond being
devastatingly good-looking, Mr. Law gives Dickie the manic, teasing
powers of manipulation that make him ardently courted by every man or
woman he knows. During the first half of the film, Dickie is pure
eros and adrenaline, a combination not many actors could handle with
this much aplomb.

During one especially sharp-edged scene here, as the tensions
surrounding Dickie approach the unbearable, the handsome heir
indulges in what he dismissively calls "Marge maintenance" on his
sailboat. Leaving Tom and another rich crony, Freddie Miles (Philip
Seymour Hoffman, scene-stealingly wonderful here), to wait uneasily
during this sexual interlude, Dickie avidly plays off each passenger
on the boat against the others. Something has to give.

When it does, in the deadly encounter that sends Tom Ripley into his
new life, the film changes greatly in tone. Once its touristy idyll
is over, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" becomes an elaborate round of
gamesmanship about Tom's sleight of hand and how it can be sustained.
The ruse, which Mr. Damon handles coyly and credibly, if not with the
nascent Norman Bates streak that the situation warrants, is given an
added complication by the presence of Meredith Logue. Meredith is a
needy post-debutante played irresistibly by Cate Blanchett. Once
Meredith latches onto Tom, who she thinks is Dickie, whom she regards
as a bored and wealthy kindred spirit, the story has developed all
the dizzying cross-currents it deserves.

The last part of the film, which opens tomorrow, runs into problems.
Eventually tangled up, like Tom, in the particulars of a trail of
crime, it tries to use yet another of Tom's attractions (to another
new character, played by Peter Smith-Kingsley) to settle his fate.
And despite the occasional flash of Hitchcockian magic -- like a
scene involving a razor blade in the pocket of a white bathrobe --
there are late scenes that flounder or lag. These concluding events
are far less meaningful than the ones that sent Tom on his odyssey
of self-invention in the first place. As with any great impostor,
there's more to say about where he came from than where he has to
go.


Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company