First question: who is Tom Ripley? He is the lead character in five novels by Patricia Highsmith and now, as incarnated by Matt Damon, a beguiling movie icon in the making. Second question: Who cares? For a start, an international coterie of readers spread across four decades. To that devoted coterie, add Anthony Minghella. "Ripley is one of the most interesting characters in postwar fiction," Minghella says, and he ought to know. The writer-director has spent three years, ever since he finished his Oscar-winning epic The English Patient, puzzling out the emotional vectors of crime fiction's most seductive sociopath.
Set mostly in southern Italy, Minghella's tantalizing movie captures the pulse, temperature and texture of the idle rich at play and the yearning of Ripley, who wants that good life so much he'd kill for it. Inhabiting this very dolce vita is a quintet of smart-looking young performers--Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Davenport--giving vigorous life and fine shading to roles of wealth or breeding. They parade their star quality (or supporting-actor quality) not by screaming and cussing Method style but by radiating an unforced glamour that recalls Hollywood in its Golden Age.
Observing these blessed creatures, coveting their unearned good fortune, is Damon's Ripley, more muted and awkward than they but a fast study. Ripley's outsider status is what especially appealed to Minghella, 45, a playwright and former professor whose Italian immigrant parents still make and sell ice cream on the Isle of Wight. "This sense of a man with his nose pressed up against the window, the sense that there's a better life being led by other people--to me, these feelings are familiar and pungent."
To discuss Minghella's adaptation of the Ripley book--how he has deepened it, enriched it, possibly distorted it--we'll be spilling a bean or two about the plot, which is, anyway, well known from the novel (published in 1955 and still in print) and a 1960 French film version, Rene Clement's Purple Noon (which is on video and was rereleased in U.S. theaters in 1996). You're welcome to see the new movie first--it should be on every naughty child's Christmas wish list. Then come back and we'll talk.
Back so soon? Good. Let's go.
Highsmith described The Talented Mr. Ripley as being about "two young men with a certain resemblance--not much--one of whom kills the other and assumes his identity." In the novel, Tom Ripley, an orphan in his mid-20s with a gift for larceny and mimicry, is hired by a rich shipbuilder to go to Mongibello, an Italian resort village where the man's son Dickie Greenleaf (played by Law in the new film) has been idling, to try persuading the lad to return home to the family business. Tom agrees, sails to Europe and, on seeing Dickie, is dazzled by his luscious indolence. Dickie paints, indifferently; he tans, splendidly; and he flirts with Marge (Paltrow), a young American who has a crush on him. Dickie is an effortless charmer who enjoys watching people try to charm him, and Tom is up to the challenge. "Dickie inherited wealth, looks and privilege," says Minghella. "Ripley inherited nothing and has nothing. He so much wants the life that Dickie has that he'll do anything to get that life."