A WOLF IN CHEAP CLOTHING

http://www.nypostonline.com/movies/20356.htm

By JONATHAN FOREMAN


THE first hour of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" -- one of the most
glamorous films since director Anthony Minghella's own "The English
Patient" -- is terrific. It's as seductive and stylish as its main
characters -- wealthy, pretty, young American expatriates playing
around in Italy's most beautiful locales in the late 1950s.

Unfortunately, this film of mistaken identity, murder, class envy
and (bi)sexual tension doesn't live up to its own promise.

Even though Minghella has changed Patricia Highsmith's startlingly
amoral novel to make it more of a tragedy (and to make its
homosexual subtext explicit), and despite a star-making performance
by Jude Law, you find yourself becoming less and less emotionally
involved in the story.

It's 1958, and Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is playing piano at a tony
Park Avenue party while wearing a borrowed Princeton jacket.

The host, a shipbuilding magnate named Greenleaf (James Rebhorn),
assumes that Tom was at school with his son Dickie (Law), who has
run off to sail in Italy with his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Tom is, in fact, a bathroom attendant, whose main talent besides
playing classical piano is, in his own words, "forging signatures,
telling lies and doing impressions of people."

Greenleaf offers Tom $1,000 -- enough to live in Europe for six
months -- if he will go off to the Adriatic and persuade Dickie to
come home. Tom accepts. But you get a glimpse of troubles to come
when he tells a fellow passenger on the ship over -- an heiress
played by Cate Blanchett -- that his name is Dickie Greenleaf.

When Tom arrives in Italy, he's so taken by Dickie Greenleaf and
his wonderful life that he soon confesses to being an agent of his
father.

Both Dickie and Marge are great-looking, confident people, but Tom
is clearly stunned by Dickie's good taste, his ease in the world
and his skill at anything he tries. Dickie, who has some of the
careless arrogance of Tom Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby," likes
having an acolyte around, so he kind of adopts Tom, lending him
clothes and encouraging him to accompany him and Marge everywhere.

It turns out to be a double seduction, and Tom's desire for Dickie
is connected with a desire to be him. That desire takes over when
fickle Dickie gets tired of Tom, and is then murdered by him in a
sudden, shocking moment of violence.

Tom instantly decides to take over Dickie's life and to live in
Italy on Dickie's allowance. It will mean avoiding Marge and other
people who know the real Dickie Greenleaf, but Tom is brilliant at
leading a double life.

Unfortunately, as time goes on, the requirements of that life cost
him the only person who has ever loved him for himself.

The more you get into the story, the more you wonder if there hasn't
been a mistake in the casting -- if it shouldn't have been Law
playing Tom Ripley and Damon playing Dickie Greenleaf.

It's not that Damon is bad as Ripley, but you just don't sense the
charm or smoothness Tom would have to have in order to insinuate
himself into this charmed circle of wealthy American expats.

And while Law brilliantly carries off the role of golden boy
Dickie -- there are moments when he could almost be a young
Redford -- you could easily believe him as the kind of seductive
chameleon a Ripley should be.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, on the other hand, is perfect as the upper-
class bully whose own meanness gives him the ability to see through
Ripley's act and into the uncertainties that motivate him.

But what Minghella does brilliantly is capture the feel of a magical
time and place. There's one scene, in particular, in a jazz club,
with young Italians rapturously singing their love of American
culture, that is just thrilling.


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