The Tilted Mr. Ripley

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I suppose you'll be wanting to know what it was really like in Europe in 1957 when, like Tom Ripley as played by Matt Damon, I arrived on the Queen Mary. I was there, of course, trying to find myself or, alternatively, someone who looked even remotely like Gwyneth Paltrow.

For starters, I have to say that The Talented Mr. Ripley's depiction of young Ivy Leaguers living abroad in the late '50s completely overlooks the role of pinball machines. Yes, pinball machines. In those days, every little cafe on the Left Bank seemed to have one. Americans were drawn to them. Someone whom Ripley's friend Dickie Greenleaf might have known at Princeton would wander into a Left Bank cafe, fully committed to behaving like a French intellectual. He'd be carrying a paperback copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. He would promise himself to spend most of the afternoon staring down into his drink the way French intellectuals always stared down at their drinks in Left Bank cafes--either because they had just thought of something profoundly ironic or because it had occurred to them that what they persisted in drinking tasted very much like cough medicine.

He would try to avoid looking at the pinball machine in the corner. But gradually he'd lose his resolve and go to the bar to get change. A few tables away, a young Amherst graduate who had been reading Camus, occasionally nodding sagely and muttering "Quelle ironie," would drift over to the machine and see how the Princetonian was faring. "I won 14 games off that baby yesterday," the Amherst man might say. A conversation would ensue. That's how Americans with a deep interest in Sartre and Camus met each other in Europe in the late '50s.

Those of us who were actually over there at that time think showing Dickie Greenleaf lounging around a gorgeous pad with Gwyneth Paltrow instead of standing in front of a pinball machine at a grubby cafe, trying to concentrate on working the flippers while being talked at by a really pretentious guy from Amherst, lacks verisimilitude. At least we hope it does.

Also, we can't help noticing that nobody in The Talented Mr. Ripley ever discusses the exchange rate. At that time, European countries tended to overvalue their currency wildly in the official rate of exchange, so everyone exchanged money on a fluctuating black market. For a while, I worked in the TIME bureau in Paris, in a job only marginally more ennobling than the men's-room-attendant position Tom Ripley held down at the start of the movie, and the high points of everyone's week was the Friday-morning visit of a distinguished-looking money changer known as Monsieur Moustache. Much of the rest of the week was spent discussing how Monsieur Moustache's rate varied from what some correspondent had found while on assignment in Geneva or Tangiers.

As someone who enjoyed The Talented Mr. Ripley, I point all this out in the spirit of constructive criticism--some notes, you might say, for the remake. Next time, the tension between Tom and Dickie could be over how hard you can hit the machine without causing it to tilt, or whether you get more lire to the dollar in Zurich or Trieste. Gwyneth would be nowhere in sight.