The Talented Mr. Ripley ****
Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre) Released in the UK by Buena Vista International on February 25, 2000; certificate 15; 140 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 1.85:1
Directed by Anthony Minghella; produced by William Horberg, Tom Sterngerg. Written by Anthony Minghella; based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Photographed by John Seale; edited by Walter Murch.
CAST..... Matt Damon..... Tom Ripley Jude Law..... Dickie Greenleaf Gwyneth Paltrow..... Marge Sherwood Cate Blanchett..... Meredith Logue Philip Seymour Hoffman..... Freddie Miles Jack Davenport..... Peter Smith-Kingsley James Rebhorn..... Herbert Greenleaf Sergio Rubini..... Inspector Roverini Philip Baker Hall..... Alvin MacCarron
For years Hollywood made films with black and white characters -- only recently has it realised that people are not so simple, and come in shades of grey. Heroes are more flawed these days than they were fifty years ago, and villains no longer sit twiddling their moustaches, giggling maniacally or stroking kittens. Anthony Minghella is one of the few filmmakers whose work goes even further. He doesn't just throw his characters a few ambiguous traits. He makes us respond to them in challenging ways.
Consider his Oscar-winner "The English Patient", which required us to sympathise with the passion and pain of a man who could be cold, selfish and cowardly. And now "The Talented Mr. Ripley", adapted from the first novel in a series by Patricia Highsmith, whose hero is a deceptive psychopath we fear but feel compassion for.
His name is Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a bathroom attendant who is mistakenly believed to be a graduate of Princeton University by rich shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn). Tom is only happy to play along; later, to another character, he will admit his greatest talents to be "telling lies, forging signatures, impersonating practically anybody."
Greenleaf thinks Tom was a classmate of his son Dickie (Jude Law), and persuades him to take an all-expenses-paid trip to Italy for the purpose of bringing the chap back to America. Dickie is living in Mongibello with his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), spending his easy-going days lounging on the beach in pursuit of such epicurean delights as eating, drinking, screwing, sailing and saxophone-playing.
Tom ingratiates himself without difficulty, and has a great time living with Dickie and Marge, accompanying them on all their adventures. He's a yes-man, always smiling, wanting to be shown things; he makes Dickie feel important. But the rich brat gets fed up with this, and decides to toss Tom aside. "We should spend some time apart," he says. "You can be a leech! You bore me!"
Tom's response is to murder the man (who he had fallen in love with), assume his identity and use it to arrange a life for himself in Rome. He changes his appearance just enough to match Dickie's passport photo, checks into hotels under his name, buys things with his traveller's checks. It's better to be a fake somebody, he reckons, than a real nobody.
I expected "The Talented Mr. Ripley" to be one of those movies where we get some sort of dark glee out of the protagonist's villainous actions. And it could have worked well on that level, but Minghella's sincerity makes it something more compelling -- a torrent of conflicting emotions, like I suggested in my opening paragraphs. We share the love and anger Tom feels toward Dickie, because he is a selfish child who treats other people as playthings, but does become wonderfully warm when paying attention to someone. We agree with Dickie's eventual judgement that Tom is creepy and phoney, and yet it seems so unfair, because we sense Tom had never had any good fortune before meeting Dickie and Marge.
The biggest contradiction throughout the film is the one between our revulsion and seduction. Dickie's life is a grotesquely lazy one, and Tom living it as an impostor is downright evil, but then again, we can sort of see the attraction. Minghella has updated the setting of the novel by almost a decade, so the story now takes place in the late '50s, and coincides with Italy's 'dolce vita' period. Cinematographer John Seale captures its dreamy, boozy atmosphere with images of rich, luxurious colour, and it is, as Tom puts it, "one big love affair".
Even the earliest moments of this, though, have an underlying tension to them. Before meeting Dickie and Marge, Tom has introduced himself as Dickie to a cute young woman named Meredith (Cate Blanchett), so from the outset we know he's plotting something. Meredith forms a fascination with Tom that acts as an ironic counterpoint to his own obsession with Dickie, but her character is really in the movie to complicate the plot. A lot of its second half, you see, revolves around Tom keeping up both of his identities, and much tension is generated by this one idea, with Tom having to carry on creating lies to keep his head above water with different sets of people. The longer he goes without getting discovered, the more tense things get, because it's more improbable he can stay in control of such a labyrinthine web of deceit.
At the centre of this breathtaking thriller are some great performances. Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman are perfect as young, arrogant members of the idle rich, giddily staggering around with excited eyes, ecstatic at both the beauty of their surroundings and the knowledge they could buy them. Paltrow is uncomplicated, clear and honest as the one normal character in the picture, who eventually realises what Tom's up to, but can't get anyone to believe her. And then there is Damon, who struts with force and confidence when pretending to be Dickie, but plays Tom as someone constantly faking a nervous and plain front. That's pathetic, because it shows he's got no confidence in his own personality, and chilling, because he doesn't mind killing for somebody else's.
COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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