Anthony Minghella's Talented Mr. Ripley recalls his last directorial effort, The English Patient, in one respect: both screenplays are adapted from novels, and both take significant liberties in their adaptation. And just as Minghella made an effective film out of English Patient that was almost entirely unrelated to Michael Ondaatje's book, Ripley is an fascinating film that owes very little to Patricia Highsmith's novel.
Matt Damon plays the Tom Ripley of the title, a working-class lad with a flair for mimicry and forgery who goes on an errand to Italy: the father of a Princeton-educated wastrel named Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) commissions Tom to track down Dickie and bring him back to New York, one way or another. Plans change when Tom encounters Dickie and his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow): the wealth and bonhomie of Dickie's social circle affects Tom more than he had expected--and rather than Tom influencing Dickie to leave behind his opulent lifestyle, the story chronicles the way that lifestyle seduces Tom. One of the main themes here is the casual cruelty of the privileged, as Dickie initially welcomes Tom into his social sphere and later rebuffs him, calling him a "leech" and taking away his newfound status. The film then shifts into thriller mode as Tom assumes Dickie's name and persona, and carries on a tense balancing act in simultaneously maintaining his "Tom" identity for those who know him that way, and becoming "Dickie" for others.
The Ripley of Highsmith's novel was a calculating, amoral sociopath--the fun lay in seeing what he could pull off--but Minghella's Ripley is arguably more interesting. Damon gives Ripley's character, initially at least, wide-eyed wonder at the luxurious expatriate life, and an innocent though insecure spirit--there's a sense that he genuinely longs to be accepted by Dickie, and ultimately acts out of frustration and jealousy. He assumes the double identity in desperation, in order to extricate himself from another problem, rather than for the pleasure of exploiting Dickie's wealth and status, and tries to eliminate one of his personae so that he can get out of his unwanted double life. (There is no sense, for Highsmith's Ripley, that the trickery is anything but amusing and profitable.) The irony, of course, is every lie seems to necessitate three more, and that neither persona will obligingly fade away. The effect is very Hitchcock--the suspense is considerable, and the trajectory of the story sets up, as in the best Hitchcock (e.g., Vertigo), a strange play of sympathies: the audience recognizes that the protagonist is deeply flawed, yet hopes that he'll evade detection in the end. Law's portrayal of Dickie as a self-assured womanizer who expects the world to revolve around him encourages us to initially identify with Tom, and to continue to sympathize with him even as he builds his network of deceit. (On the other hand, Paltrow is oddly ineffective as Marge, largely because her character is so entirely hung up on Dickie, for whom the audience has no sympathy; it's hard to understand what she sees in him, and the audience waits in vain for her to take on a personality of her own.)
As with English Patient, the film looks gorgeous--many of Italy's most attractive settings, both interior and exterior, are on display--and as with English Patient, Minghella uses the location to great effect. Tanned and expensively dressed, Dickie seems to inhabit the sun-splashed beaches of Italy, and Tom, scrawny and pale, could hardly seem more out of place initially. Over the course of the film, Tom assumes the necessary trappings--clothes and music tastes in particular--so that he can take over Dickie's life convincingly, and yet the audience still identifies him as the insecure working-class boy that appeared at the beginning. The transformation from tourist into expatriate accordingly never seems quite complete, of course, but Damon brings all his acting skills to bear on having Tom gradually learn to fit into his high-toned surroundings, and the result is impressive. Just as the desert divided two of the main characters in English Patient, with Ralph Fiennes's character adapting to it and Kristin Scott Thomas's character resisting, the Italian Riviera both brings together and separates Tom and Dickie. But the overall feel of this film has none of the lush romance of English Patient-- indeed, where the earlier film was all about sweeping vistas and unlimited space, Minghella achieves an increasingly claustrophobic feel in the second half of Ripley, again in a rather Hitchcockian way: smaller interiors, shorter cuts and snappier conversations.
The power of Talented Mr. Ripley lies in Damon's portrayal of Tom, though. Minghella plays up the homoerotic aspects of the relationship between Tom and Dickie, not so much to drive the plot as to drive home a point about Tom: his whole life is built on hiding things, on playing a part, which certainly describes the life of a closeted homosexual in the '50s. Ironically, his double life begins when he lets this particular mask slip a bit; his troubles ensue because he seems to assume that he no longer needs to play that particular role. A grimmer irony is that Tom can never stop playing a part, much as he wants to--and Damon makes it very clear that he does want to, that whatever thrill he once got from assuming the identity of others has dissipated. The ultimate result feels more like tragedy than Hitchcockian thriller (few Hitchcock characters are drawn in such a way that we regret their demise), tragedy in the Shakespearean sense: Tom's insecurity and longing for acceptance set off a chain of events that he is powerless to halt. Damon's performance is subtly expressive--it seems that he's fated never to be allowed to unburden himself completely, and it's that clamped-down aspect that draws the audience's sympathy.
Equal parts character study and thriller, Minghella's Talented Mr. Ripley is easily the equal of English Patient in depth, yet entirely different in mood. Catch it before it leaves the theaters.
Duncan Stevens dns361@merle.acns.nwu.edu
But buy me a singer to sing one song-- Song about nothing--song about sheep-- Over and over, all day long; Patch me again my thread-bare sleep.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews