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Minghella's Ripley is different, less sure of himself, more human, and thus reduced in stature. He lies to Dickie's father when he says he went to Princeton with the boy. He believes not in inspired improvisation, as the book's Ripley does, but in studying hard. In the movie, Tom's plotting has the calculation of a Bach fugue; Dickie's avocation is playing jazz saxophone instead of painting, and he loves the dangerous freedom of Chet Baker and Charlie Parker. As played by Law, Dickie oozes a reckless sensuality, turning the beam on and off at will, indulging Marge's love while he stealthily impregnates an Italian woman. In a movie that ups the sexual octane of the book, Tom's interest in Dickie is explicitly homoerotic, the yearning poignant and desperate. The killing in the boat is less murder than the fatal flailing of a rejected suitor. Tom is crushed by Dickie's dismissal, so he crushes Dickie.
"In the book," says Minghella, "there is something so psychopathic about Ripley, and it works wonderfully as a literary experience. I wanted to talk about what was common to us, not what was distancing. To do that I had to take away the sense of premeditation and show the trouble you can get into by this accumulation of small lies and small wants."
As all crime writers are killers, all actors are liars--Ripleys for their art and glory. Highsmith's Tom thinks of himself in moments of stress as a consummate actor thrilled by the conviction of his deceit. "If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous," he observes, "you simply had to act those things with every gesture." What is acting if not the forgery of someone else's personality in order to possess and consume it?
We look at Alain Delon (the delicate stud of Purple Noon) or Dennis Hopper (who gave Ripley a cowboy swagger in the 1977 The American Friend, Wim Wenders' adaptation of Ripley's Game) and see an actor sharpening his tools: the attentiveness, the useful smile, the waiting for a cue to make his move. Ripley watches Dickie, and an actor prepares. We watch the actor playing Ripley and learn the secrets of his duplicitous craft. It's as if a famous seducer had made a how-to video.
Damon, who like Blanchett and Paltrow was cast in the film before achieving Oscar-night eminence, knows how to emit charm--of the aw-shucks variety in The Rainmaker or streetwise in Good Will Hunting. Here, though, he is a plodder. Pasty white among the bronze gods of Mongibello, striding stiffly, with nerdy glasses adorning his pinched face, Damon could more easily be mistaken for the creepy losers Hoffman usually plays (in Boogie Nights or Happiness) than for a patrician hunk like Dickie. The deglamorizing of Ripley pays off beautifully in his final meeting with Freddie, who sees through Tom's sham, quickly spotting the poseur's lapses of taste and showing a delicious upper-class contempt for a real nobody trying to be a fake somebody.