Film review

Anthony Minghella (1999)

Nineteen-ninety-nine was a strong year for English-language films:  American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Sweet and Lowdown, Three Kings, and The Talented Mr Ripley, whose best features are the highlights of Anthony Minghella’s regrettably short film-making career.   His adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated novel isn’t short:  at 140 minutes, it’s a little too long; and the longer it goes on, the murkier Tom Ripley’s psychology becomes, though without a sense of increasing complexity.  Highsmith’s Ripley is a psychopathic killer.  Minghella’s Tom kills three people but the first and seminal homicide is presented as a crime of passion; the other two murders are desperate acts of self-protection.  At the very start, Tom (Matt Damon) is shown sitting in a ship’s cabin, his face desolate; the tight camerawork makes the image strongly claustrophobic.  Tom’s voiceover muses, ‘If I could just go back – if I could rub everything out, starting with myself’.  This hint of remorse isn’t contradicted in what’s subsequently revealed of Tom’s character but it’s the last we hear of his thoughts about what he’s done.  This makes The Talented Mr Ripley frustrating yet it’s rarely less than absorbing.

Tom Ripley, who spends much of the film pretending to be someone else, makes use of disguise from the opening scene, though not maliciously.  He’s playing piano at a posh New York cocktail party, wearing a borrowed jacket.  He returns the jacket to its owner at the end of the engagement but not before shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn) and his wife (Lisa Eichhorn) notice the jacket’s Princeton insignia and wonder if Tom was a contemporary there of their son, Dickie.  Tom doesn’t disabuse them (it’s later revealed that he once worked at Princeton as a piano tuner).  He goes from the cocktail party to his evening job, menial duties in the men’s room of a theatre.  Within a very few screen minutes, however, he’s en route to Italy, commissioned by Greenleaf senior to persuade his son, who’s luxuriating in a village on the Amalfi Coast, to return to America and prepare for his destiny of running the family business.

Over the first hour of The Talented Mr Ripley, set in the mid-1950s (when the book was first published), Minghella works up a deft pattern of characters both using and surprising each other.  Herbert Greenleaf charges Tom with an assignment for which, beyond travelling expenses, he’ll be paid on successful completion.  When he first comes to the attention of Dickie (Jude Law) and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), they find unsophisticated, eager-to-please Tom a slightly ridiculous, endearing novelty in their sybaritic lives in Mongibello (a fictional place, which Highsmith modelled on Positano).  Once Dickie hears Tom’s unnervingly accurate mimicry of his father’s voice, he takes the newcomer a bit more seriously.  For his part, Tom is set on exploiting his glamorous hosts’ hospitality but finds himself smitten with Dickie.  The latter’s rich socialite pal Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman) spends time in Mongibello, roughhousing with Dickie, treating Tom with indolent contempt.  With her boyfriend otherwise engaged, Marge might seem to have more time to get on with the book she’s supposedly writing; in the event, Freddie’s arrival draws her and Tom, both feeling abandoned by the man they adore, closer together.  The synergy of intending and of failing to control people and feelings is strong.  Minghella uses locale and the effects of heat and sun – chiaroscuro, stupor and short tempers – to reinforce the beguiling yet fractious atmosphere.

Tom’s appetite for the good life and for dissimulation is in evidence even before he reaches Mongibello.  Awaiting his luggage at the end of his ocean-liner voyage, he gets into conversation with Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett) and gives his name as Dickie Greenleaf.  ‘Not the Shipping Greenleafs?’ asks Meredith, who really is the scion of a monied industrial family (the ‘Textile Logues’).  The expanding pleasure he takes in Dickie’s company, along with a sense of things developing too rapidly for Tom to keep on top of, is vividly captured in a sequence in a jazz club, where Dickie performs ‘Tu vuò fà l’americano’[1] with an Italian singer and musician (Rosario Fiorello), and drags Tom on stage to join in.  The conjunction of Tom’s growing infatuation with Dickie and Dickie’s disenchantment with Tom is dramatised very effectively, too.  As Marge tells Tom, Dickie is prone to switch attention from one person to another with hurtful facility.  (This is shockingly illustrated when Silvana (Stefania Rocca), a local woman, impregnated then rejected by him, drowns herself.)  Dickie does more than simply tire of Tom, however:  he becomes suspicious.  Dickie takes a bath, Tom asks if he can get in; Dickie promptly refuses; Tom’s panicked response – ‘I didn’t mean with you in it’ – is not convincing.  Dickie returns from a trip to Rome to find Tom in front of the mirror, dressed in Dickie’s clothes.  Tom is certainly possessive but does he want Dickie’s body or his identity?  Minghella expertly blurs the distinction between the twin aspects of Tom’s desire.

This ambiguity isn’t sustained in the pivotal episode in San Remo.  Dickie takes Tom there as a farewell treat before they go – on Dickie’s say-so – their separate ways.  Out on the sea on a small boat, they argue:  Dickie says he’s going to marry Marge; he calls Tom ‘boring’ and a ‘leech’, who ‘gives me the creeps’.  Firing questions at Tom about who he really is, Dickie punctuates them with contemptuous little slaps.  As he turns away Tom smashes him across the head with an oar.  Dickie is seriously hurt but retaliates.  This is how Minghella’s screenplay describes the ensuing combat:

‘They struggle, locked together in a life or death wrestle to get control of the oar.  Dickie’s blinded by his own blood, loses his grip.  Ripley, terrified, hits Dickie again and again, the oar like a carpet-beater banging down flat, blood on the blade, blood on Ripley, until he’s on his knees, heaving for breath, letting his arm drop, then realizing, disgusted, that he’s let it rest in a pool of blood.  He starts to sob, sprawls there, sobbing, next to Dickie, horrified by what he’s done.’

There’s no suggestion that the attack on Dickie is premeditated:  Tom reacts as a spurned and furiously offended lover.  Afterwards, ‘Ripley lies by Dickie in the bottom of the boat, in the embrace he’s always wanted’.  He then disposes of the corpse, weights the boat with rocks so that it sinks, and, as in the film’s opening scene, borrows a jacket, before returning to the hotel where he and Dickie have been staying.  The jacket is Dickie’s, of course, but it doesn’t seem that Tom means to impersonate him until the hotel receptionist mistakes him for ‘Signor Greenleaf’.  Tom starts to correct him – ‘No, I’m …’   He gets no further only on second thoughts.

This is a pivotal moment in two ways.  Tom’s decision to pretend to be Dickie dictates the plot that follows; and, from now on, you’re always puzzled as to his motivation.  Tom’s behaviour becomes that of a ruthless, ingeniously self-serving opportunist very different from the passionately distraught killer.   Minghella’s descriptions of Tom’s nerve and resource in pursuing his impersonation – and of him switching back to his own identity for meetings with the baffled Marge and others – are fascinating but they don’t articulate with the complexity of the film’s first hour.  There are highly suspenseful scenes, in which Tom escapes detection and arrest by the skin of his teeth.  There are also times, during the last half-hour or so, when the narrative starts to feel drawn out – for example, Tom’s interview with police in Venice, and when Herbert Greenleaf arrives in Italy with a private detective, Alvin MacCarron (Philip Baker Hall), in tow.

By this stage, Tom has murdered Freddie Miles, who arrives at Dickie’s Rome apartment, finds Tom alone there and smells a rat.  (This is another bludgeoning attack with an object to hand – Freddie is slain with a marble bust of the emperor Hadrian.)  In the last scenes, Tom is on a ship to Greece with Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport), a friend of Marge’s who has become his lover and travelling companion.  Their fellow passengers include Meredith Logue, who not only still thinks that Tom is Dickie but also knows Peter.  Tom has no option but to get rid of the latter and, with tears in his eyes, strangles Peter.  The film ends, where it began, with Tom in his cabin, locked into the inescapability of his crimes.

This might seem to echo the fate of Patricia Highsmith’s protagonist at the close of the novel (the first of the five in which Ripley would feature) – ‘was he going to see policemen waiting for him on every pier that he ever approached?’  The tone is very different, though, and Highsmith’s Ripley is able quickly to put the thought out of his mind as he resumes his travels.  Of course Anthony Minghella was free to rework the character as he saw fit but he does so half-heartedly:  the film’s Ripley lacks coherence.  Still, there’s plenty to admire and enjoy in The Talented Mr Ripley – John Seale’s supple, sinister lighting, Walter Murch’s editing (especially brilliant in the ‘Tu vuò fà l’americano’ sequence), Gabriel Yared’s score.  Minghella is an able storyteller and writes excellent dialogue.  His direction of the actors is just about impeccable.   What appeared to be, on the film’s original release, an unusually high-powered young cast, looks all the more remarkable twenty years on.

Seeing them again now, I think I was unfair to Minghella’s leads when I said in my note on Plein soleil that Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet ‘are in a different class from Matt Damon and Jude Law’.  Damon has done some fine work since The Talented Mr Ripley but it’s doubtful that he’s taken on a comparably challenging role.  (Things would have been different if, as originally planned, he’d been Lee Chandler in Manchester by the Sea (2016).)  Although he was actually in his late twenties when he played Ripley, Damon passes for a good few years less than that.  He’s also, compared with now, surprisingly skinny.  Both the youthfulness and the lean-and-hungry look work well:  Damon’s Tom seems inchoate, volatile, needy.  Perhaps his awkwardness shades into creepiness a bit too soon and conspicuously but this is a very good performance.  Jude Law’s role is showier and his acting perhaps shallower but he’s a dazzling presence – which gives Dickie’s sudden removal from the film real impact.  Law conveys, as well as charm, a streak of potentially violent antipathy.  It comes through in Dickie’s angry rejection of his father’s values and the ethos of Princeton.  When, later on, MacCarron tells Tom how Dickie ‘half-killed’ a fellow student there, you believe it.

Watching Gwyneth Paltrow’s swift, incisive mood changes – Marge can move from sunny to sulky and back as if at the flick of a switch – makes me wish this actress could have done the same in Sylvia a few years later.  As Marge becomes increasingly helpless, the build-up of misery inside Paltrow gathers considerable force.  Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb as Freddie; his nonchalant gestures and scornful drawl are vilely funny.  In a role largely invented by Minghella, Cate Blanchett is so vibrantly witty that Meredith occasionally threatens to take the film over.  In another such role, Jack Davenport is thoroughly effective:  he makes Peter Scott-Kingsley’s affair with Tom sadly touching.   James Rebhorn is rather too deliberate as Herbert Greenleaf:  whenever he has something to say, it temporarily slows proceedings down.  As already indicated, Tom’s interview with the Venetian police is one of the less successful bits in the film but his exchanges with Inspector Roverini, a detective in Rome, are splendid.  Sergio Rubini’s blend of sheepishness and persistence makes Roverini hard to read – amusingly for the viewer, unnervingly for the talented Mr Ripley.

15 August 2021

[1] This jazz-swing number (‘You Want to Be American’) was a big hit in 1950s Italy.