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Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow get wrapped up in murder and mayhem in The Talented Mr Ripley |
Director: Anthony Minghella
Cast: Matt Damon (Tom Ripley), Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge
Sherwood), Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf), 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), Celia Weston (Aunt Joan)
Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – sociopath, confidence
trickster, human blank piece of paper and murderer – is so unknowable he’s been
played on screen by actors as wildly diverse as Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper,
John Malkovich, Barry Pepper and, perhaps most famously today, by Matt Damon.
Ripley’s complexity – Highsmith described him as “suave, agreeable and utterly
amoral” – and his general blankness and ability to adapt to different
situations make him a challenging character to bring to the screen. Minghella’s
film goes for a dark, Hitchcockian feeling drama that gives a lot of focus to
feelings of sexual confusion and inadequacy in Ripley that motivate his actions
and increasingly spiral out of control, leaving him isolated and damaged.
Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) allows himself to be mistaken by the
owner of a shipping line, Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), as an old Harvard
classmate of his son Dickie (Jude Law). Inveigling his way into Herbert’s
trust, he is sent to Italy to persuade Dickie to return to America and take up
a job in his father’s company. Happily taking the all-expenses-paid trip,
Ripley finds himself besotted with the glamour and easy charm of Dickie, a
handsome playboy, and soon positions himself as travelling companion to Dickie
and his fiancĂ©e Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). But Dickie’s attention is
only fleeting, and soon Ripley feels betrayed as Dickie starts to refocus
elsewhere – leading eventually to Ripley murdering Dickie in a fit of jealous
pique and using his faint resemblance to Dickie’s passport photo to assume his
identity and live off his allowance – all the while dodging meeting Marge,
friends of Dickie and the police (who are searching for the disappeared Tom
Ripley).
Minghella’s film is a complex, psycho-sexual thriller, shot
with a sun-kissed warmth that accentuates the glamour and style of the Italian Riviera,
while subtly keeping us distant from the characters and their increasingly
complex motives. The richness and lushness of these expensive lives look as
appealing and seductive to us as Ripley finds them when he arrives. However,
its dark undertone is never lost, and the film is edited and assembled with a
certain chill and coolness while Gabriel Yared’s score mixes some fun jazz
remixes with more a ominous tone as the bodies start to pile up.
I love a lot of Minghella’s work. He’s an intelligent and
literate director, and the script he prepared for this film shows that he’s a
master of taking complex, multi-layered pieces of fiction and turning them into
something impressive and cinematic. But watching The Talented Mr Ripley, with its effective mix of period charm and sixties
swing, its clever apeing of sixties filming styles, its riffing on Hitchcockian
tropes and its picture book locations around Italy, part of me wonders if this
film started pushing him too far down the path of being a “literary” director.
His film is intelligent, and alternates between being chilling and fun, but at
times it’s also wearing its “important film-making” badge a little heavily.
It’s like the film is straining a little too much for prestige, as if the
luscious design, complex plotting, sharp dialogue and clever visuals are aiming
a little too much for matching The
English Patient’s Oscar hoovering.
Maybe that’s why, despite everything that is good here, this
film doesn’t have quite the same success as that film. This is, I’ll confess,
an odd thing to say in a film that is generally very positive – if a little too
long – but there it is. Sometimes these things are intangible in a way. Part of
the film’s problem is that very complexity of plotting and motivation that he
(arguably) builds on from the book. One of the film’s biggest question marks
hangs over Ripley himself.
Imagined here as a slightly diffident, awkward, closeted
graduate, he never really convinces as the kind of ruthless opportunist the
plot demands him to be. Much as the film – and Damon’s performance – nails the
sociopathic blankness of Ripley, his ability to switch smoothly from persona to
persona, at the same time Ripley either seems to care too much or too little.
Damon never quite convinces as a man so in love with the highlife that he is
happy living off the allowance of (and pretending to be) the adored friend he
bludgeons to death in a boat.
This is where the homosexual undertone of the original has
been converted into a overtone – and the film’s overplaying of Ripley’s
physical, puppy-dog attraction to Dickie make him feel more dependent. The film
works really hard to make him as sympathetic and vulnerable as possible, to
make him a victim of his own warped circumstances and morality, and it never
quite manages to make this make sense, or to carry real consistency. For all
you feel Minghella wants us to think we are drilling into what makes a killer,
the more we learn about Ripley the less substantial as a character he feels.
Damon, despite this, gives a good and generous performance.
Generous because, playing quite a pathetic, indescribably blank man, he really
manages to fade into the background of scenes. It does mean that he cedes most
of the best work to his co-stars. Jude Law is radiantly cool, fiery,
passionate, selfish and hugely attractive in a star-making turn as Dickie.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is the epitome of a Bullingdon club bully turned young
adult as Dickie’s school friend, seizing scenes with a louche aggressiveness.
Cate Blanchett is equally brilliant as a warm, friendly socialite who
inadvertently stirs terrible ideas in Ripley.
These actors are all highlights in a superbly mounted
production, but one which doesn’t reveal or tell us as much as we might expect.
Instead, Minghella gets slightly lost in his own intelligence when adapting the
book, pushing the story into deeper, psycho-sexual motivations for its
character that end up obscuring and fudging the actions he carries out in the
film. It’s a gorgeous looking film, packed with wonderful scenes, but Damon’s
Ripley seems too sensitive, too prone to the edge of tears, impossible to see
as a man who could become a serial murderer. By giving a greater hinterland to
Ripley, Minghella also changes the character fundamentally. It makes for an
interesting development – but Ripley’s desperation, his essential weakness, his
lack of control make him feel inconsistent with the setting and plot he is in.
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