Can Matt Play Ripley's Game?

By RICHARD CORLISS

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."

For a time, the heir is amused by Tom's charm and novelty. But Dickie is easily bored, and he grows tired of Tom. Seeing the chance both to rid himself of a critical friend and to replace him, Tom kills Dickie in the sea off San Remo, buries the body and goes to Rome, setting himself up as Dickie. The ruse lasts until Freddie Miles (Hoffman), an obnoxious but observant pal of Dickie's, comes to visit. Panicked by discovery, Tom bashes Freddie's head and deposits the corpse in a cemetery. Now Ripley's game begins with the police and Dickie's family. Tom will lie, forge letters and documents, anything to keep being Dickie--a role he feels he was born to play.

In writing Ripley, Highsmith had two bolts of brilliance. The first was to let the bad guy get away with his crimes. All mystery writers are murderers; they get into the mind, under the skin, of a killer, if only to determine how the foul deed can be accomplished. Then, typically, they bring in a detective to unravel the plot and cuff the culprit. Highsmith simply ditched the civilized pretense of justice avenged. She tore the final, comeuppance chapter out of Ripley's story, left him giddy with triumph--and let him flourish in four more books. The snake, having shed its old skin, slithers away; the reader is both shocked and pleased. Crime pays.

Minghella does not let Ripley off that easily. He devises two characters who fall for the killer and get in his way: a sweet, rich buttinsky (Blanchett) and a gentle homosexual (Davenport). Can he kiss them, or kiss them off, without bumping them off? We won't tell, but we will say that Tom has second thoughts about his addiction to killing the things he loves. The film lets Tom off the hook for the murders of Dickie and Freddie. Then it creates a new hook and leaves you wondering if Ripley will hang from it.

"I was trying to honor the book, which is about a man who commits murder and isn't caught," Minghella says. "But I also wanted to investigate what that actually means. At the end of the film, Ripley is imprisoned by the consequences of his own action. There's a difference between public accountability and private justice. He appears to have gotten away; he seems to get away with everything. In a way he's sentenced to freedom. It's painful to have this talent for escape, for being able to improvise one's way out of any situation. To Ripley, it's a curse."

Highsmith's second coup was Ripley himself--a fastidious fellow of refined if acquired tastes who is utterly unimpeded by conscience. Tom is a sportsman. "Risks were what made the whole thing fun," he muses. His lack of guilt or shame makes Tom a blithe, resourceful fellow, totally at ease with the man he's become.

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.

This Ripley is an expression of our anxieties, our fear of being rejected or found out for the frauds that, deep down, we may suspect we are. Ultimately he is a figure out of Poe or Dostoyevsky, tormented by disgust at the creature he's become. What he is not is Highsmith's Ripley, a suave villain who loves his work, whom we may not admire but have to envy. Could not Damon have invested a little charisma in the role? One thinks longingly of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was once mentioned for the part. His soft features would have rhymed nicely with Law's; his boyishness could have tempted us into loving Tom instead of only pitying him.

You may ask again, Who cares if the movie is unlike the book? It has to succeed as its own experience. But the alterations here--in a film so sumptuous and intelligent one wants to embrace it--diminish the richness of a chillingly complex character. The film is some stranger pretending to be Tom Ripley. And like Ripley, it had to kill the thing it would become.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York