by Amy Taubin

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9951/taubin.shtml

Published December 22 - 28, 1999


If you want to set yourself up for disappointment, you've only to look
forward to a movie based on a book you love. But even taken on their
own terms, there's little to recommend either Anthony Minghella's
conspicuously picturesque depiction of beautiful rich Americans acting
ugly in Europe in The Talented Mr. Ripley or Alan Parker's bland
evocation of growing up grindingly poor in Ireland in Angela's Ashes.

Based on Patricia Highsmith's great, dark novel of the same name,
Minghella's Ripley stars a miscast Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, an
ambitious hanger-on who cons his way into an Ivy League smart-set and
murders to secure a lifestyle he envies. Ripley, who is the antihero
of five Highsmith novels, is a fascinating study in psychopathology.
Shrinks would have a field day with his diagnoses: severe narcissistic
character disorder; borderline paranoid schizophrenic; repressed,
self-hating homosexual. What's most disturbing about Ripley is how
normal he seems to himself. Though written in the third person, the
novels are confined to Ripley's perspective. Highsmith burrows into
Ripley's mind and, from that vantage point, reports on how the world
appears to him. Highsmith's relationship to her character mirrors the
kind of boundary problems Ripley has with those to whom he becomes
attached. And it rubs off on the reader. To put it crudely, Highsmith
suggests that the ability to lose oneself in writing or reading a
novel has something in common with Ripley's "talent"—with his
perverse ability to picture himself leading someone else's life—and
that such identifications can lead to murder.

Ripley's chameleonlike personality is what makes him so difficult to
portray on the screen. There have been two prior adaptations of the
Ripley novels. Rene Clement's Purple Noon starred Alain Delon, who
lacked, through no fault of his own, the distinctly American
qualities of the character. Clement also grafted a moral ending onto
the narrative that was totally antithetical to Highsmith's purposes.
Dennis Hopper was a much more successful Ripley in Wim Wenders's The
American Friend. Easily Wenders's best film and, along with
Chinatown, the most powerful '70s neonoir, it combines the second
and third books in the series (Ripley Under Ground and Ripley's
Game). Rather than focusing on Ripley's expatriate alienation,
Wenders shows the devastating effect of American entrepreneurship on
the European middle class. Ripley cons a terminally ill family man
(Bruno Ganz) into becoming a hired gun so that he can leave his wife
and child some money when he dies. The double-faced nature of guilt
is Highsmith's great subject. It would seem that Ripley lacks guilt
but in fact the reverse is the case. His guilt is so heavy that it
compels him to take leave of his own skin lest he end up killing
himself. Wenders mirrors Ripley's guilt with German postwar guilt.

Minghella, a would-be art film director who never takes his eye off
the box office, doesn't allow himself to become embroiled in such
complexity. He turns The Talented Mr. Ripley into a splashy tourist
trap of a movie. The effect is rather like reading The National
Enquirer in a cafe overlooking the Adriatic. Minghella seems to be
aware of the Hitchcockian aspects of Highsmith, but rather than
going for the claustrophobia of Strangers on a Train (the most
successful Highsmith adaptation), he employs the panoramic mise-en-
scene of North by Northwest. Transposing the setting of the film
from Highsmith's early '50s to the more affluent late '50s,
Minghella references Hollywood's initial infatuation with
widescreen cinematography but gives it a decided '90s gloss. Were
it not for the occasional reference to the value of a dollar ($1000
buys six months of footloose living in Europe), you might forget
this is a period movie.

A poor orphan with expensive tastes, Ripley is sent to Italy by a
wealthy shipbuilder who wants him to convince his son, Dickie (Jude
Law), to come home. Ripley, whose gay desire is more exposed in the
film than in the novel, becomes obsessed with Dickie in the way
that a narcissist inevitably does when he finds someone more self-
involved than himself. Ripley envies Dickie, he wants to be Dickie;
Dickie, however, finds Ripley's attentions tiresome and weird. When
Ripley realizes that Dickie is about to cast him out, he kills him
and spends a frantic six months shifting between Dickie's identity
and his own in an effort to cover his tracks.

In the novel, the murder is both premeditated and completely
psychotic. Minghella, in a transparent attempt to make Ripley more
sympathetic, transforms it into Ripley's response to Dickie's
attack on him. Dickie contemptuously tells Ripley that everyone
hates him for being a pathetic social climber and a closet case to
boot. Ripley hits him, probably harder than he might have intended.
Dickie hits back, and the fight escalates into a bloody kill-or-be-
killed confrontation.

Damon, who does an uncanny imitation of Chet Baker's androgynous
rendition of "My Funny Valentine" (thanks, I suspect, to the kind
of vocoder mike that made Laurie Anderson the queen of performance
art), shows signs of wanting to dirty up his American golden boy
image (his strained, toothy grin just makes him look like Alfred
E. Neuman), but Minghella keeps him on a short leash, and he's in
over his head anyway. Law queens his way through the supposedly
straight role, and Gwyneth Paltrow is more tiresome than usual
indulging her specialty of scrunch-faced, tearless crying. On the
other hand, Philip Seymour Hoffman is exactly on the mark as a
supercilious preppie, as is Cate Blanchett as a floundering
heiress. It's a sign of how watered-down the movie is that only
the supporting actors have any bite.

** If Minghella ratchets up the Grand Guignol aspect of Ripley
(by the end, it's like you're watching the Andrew Cunanan story),
Alan Parker mutes Frank McCourt's riotous and extremely moving
autobiographical account of a destitute childhood in Ireland.
Parker is not a director to scant on body fluids, and his
adaptation of Angela's Ashes is awash in chamber-pot overflows
and outhouse leakages. But for all the grungy detail, the film is
far too tidy and polite. I don't have the emotional attachment to
McCourt's writing that I do to Highsmith's, but most readers will
miss the irrepressible gallows humor of the original, not to
mention its vivid real-life characters. As Frank's long-suffering
mom and charming but irresponsible alcoholic dad, Emily Watson and
Robert Carlyle do what they can with the sketchy script. Parker
seems to feel obliged to visit as many of the novel's scenes as
possible in a 145-minute movie (a modest length by Christmas 1999
standards) with the result that the film lacks development and
dramatic coherence. Frank, who ages 12 years over the course of
the film, is played by three young actors, none of them
distinguished.



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