Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) in Venice
“Ripley is condemned never to
be free to be truly himself ever again. His pact with the devil is that he preferred to be a fake somebody to a real nobody”
|
“You enter into an airless, claustrophobic world with Tom Ripley,” says the British director, who became an art-house favourite with Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1990 before rocketing into another league entirely with the multi-Oscar-winning The English Patient. “In the novel, Ripley´s cool, dislocated perspective lures the reader in, convincing us that what objectively might be extreme makes perfect sense in Ripley´s head. In making the film, the challenge was to excite the audience to commit to the material as I did as a reader: to inhabit each step of Ripley´s journey until, like a child in the sea who has forgotten the tide, we look back and see how perilously far we are from the shore.”
Tom in Rome with American socialite Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett).
|
The titular Mr Ripley (marvellously played in the movie by Matt Damon) starts the film as a likeable con artist, harmlessly pretending to be someone else when a guest at a party notices he is wearing a Princeton jacket. After that first deception, it is almost as though he cannot stop. But of course he could: it´s just that he doesn´t want to. As he says, “We´ve all wanted to be somebody else, to trade ourselves in”.
So Tom does just that, holding on tenuously to his own name but taking on the identity of an imaginary college friend of heir to a shipping fortune Dickie Greenleaf, played as a sun-drenched sybarite by British actor Jude Law, effortlessly adopting an East Coast Brahmin accent. Dickie has taken off for Europe, and his father (James Rebhorn) wants him to come back and face up to his responsibilities. So he pays for Tom, Dickie´s supposed college chum, to go to Europe and try to persuade him to return.
Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) in Venice and (far right) with Dickie (Jude Law) and his fiancée, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow).
|
Arriving in Italy, Tom effortlessly ingratiates himself into the world of Dickie and his girlfriend Marge (a dazzling Gwyneth Paltrow). But the deception becomes more convoluted, and before long Tom finds himself not just con-man but a murderer as well.
The extraordinary thing about The Talented Mr Ripley is that there is no mystery surrounding the crimes: we know who committed them because we see him doing so. The fascination comes both from the gradually tightening web of circumstances which force Tom to be ever more inventive, ever cleverer, and the increasing weight he finds himself bearing.
“The novel is about a man who commits murder and is not caught,” says Minghella, who began working on an early draft of the screenplay while Highsmith was still alive (she died in Locarno in 1995). “The film departs from this in one crucial sense by concluding that eluding accountability is not the same as eluding justice. You don´t really get away with anything. Ripley, always looking to love and be loved, sabotages his opportunity for love. In annihilating self, assuming someone else´s identity, Ripley is condemned never to be free to be truly himself ever again. His pact with the devil is that he preferred to be a fake somebody to a real nobody. In that way, Ripley´s adventures in Europe become a cautionary tale, describing the cost involved in abandoning who you are in favour of who you would like to be.”
Minghella is not the first director to take the Highsmith road: over the past half-century, film-makers have been repeatedly tempted by Highsmith´s coolly perfect crime plots, but only once has a classic resulted. That was nearly half a century ago, when Alfred Hitchcock (with a little help from Raymond Chandler, who collaborated on the script) turned the writer´s first novel into one of his finest films: Strangers on a Train (1951).
|
