Tom (Matt Damon) takes Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) on a fruitless search for the missing Dickie.
“The anxiety that what happens
to Ripley is
familiar, at least
in nightmares”
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THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY |
Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films present a Mirage Enterprises/ Timnick Films production of an Anthony Minghella film.
Prod: William Horberg, Tom Sternberg; Exec prod: Sydney Pollack; Dir: Anthony Minghella; Scr: Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith; Ph: John Seale; Prod des: Roy Walker; Cost des: Ann Roth, Gary Jones; Ed: Walter Murch; Mus: Gabriel Yared.
With Matt Damon (Tom Ripley), Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge Sherwood), Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf), Cate Blanchett (Meredith Logue), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Freddie Miles), Jack Davenport (Peter Smith-Kingsley), James Rebhorn (Herbert Greenleaf), Sergio Rubini (Inspector Roverini), Philip Baker Hall (Alvin MacCarron).
International
distribution:
Miramax
International.
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But it has taken 48 years for a film-maker to pull off the trick again. And Minghella has done so by making Highsmith´s masterpiece - which is, at the same time, her most difficult novel - into a movie whose scope and pace and passion recall the classic Hollywood movies that were being made at the time at which Highsmith wrote the novel (it was first published in 1955, and was awarded the Edgar Allen Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America).
In the scenes in which Tom and Dickie go to Rome - where the former meets up again with the film´s most complex character (Cate Blanchett´s unhappy socialite Meredith Logue) and the latter with its most amusingly two-dimensional (Philip Seymour Hoffman´s spoiled rich kid Freddie Miles), there are repeated echoes of Fellini´s masterpiece, La dolce vita: this, after all, was the age of the via Veneto. But there is also more than a hint of that other piece of Roman madness: Vicente Minnelli´s Two Weeks in Another Town, where Kirk Douglas fought demons not that different from Ripley´s.
The process which has brought Minghella´s movie to the screen began at least 15 years ago, when producer William Horberg first began to wonder about obtaining the rights to the book. It was another eight before he began the tortuous process of doing so (they were held by the estate of French producer Robert Hakim), and began developing the project at Sydney Pollack´s Mirage Enterprises. The actual shooting of the film began on August 10, 1998, in Rome, with the unit subsequently moving on to Naples, Palermo, Mongibello, Ischia, Tuscany and Venice, before completing the 16-week schedule in New York.
Minghella is not the first film-maker to take on this particular Highsmith novel: veteran French director René Clément had a go in 1959 in an adaptation called Plein soleil (the English title is Purple Noon), with the impossibly handsome 24-year-old Alain Delon making his debut as a European Tom.
Happier times: Tom and Dickie (Jude Law) with Dickie’s friend
Fausto (Rosario Fiorello) in the
Naples jazz club scene.
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The result was impressive: an intellectually acute French film noir. But it wasn´t Highsmith. And Minghella´s version, for all the apparent liberties he has taken with the plot, shifting attributes from character to character and stressing elements that Highsmith herself only hinted at, undoubtedly is. In fact, it is probably the nearest any film-maker has ever come to capturing the evil lurking beneath glittering surfaces that is the essence of Highsmith. And, thanks to an extraordinarily sympathetic (and brave) performance by Damon as Tom, Minghella has pulled off that other essential element in the Highsmith cannon: the sense of complicity we have with Ripley - the desire to see him get away with it - which draws us into the story until it is too late to pull out.
“I think we have all known what it´s like to feel on the outside of things,” says Minghella. “We might even have pretended to be someone we´re not, in order to succeed or be accepted. It´s one of the things that makes us human. This unsettling connection to Tom Ripley, one of the most fascinatingly flawed characters in fiction, and the anxiety that what happens to him is familiar, at least in nightmares, prompted me to make this film. In it, I´ve tried to explore the traps we set for ourselves, through our pretences and deception; to acknowledge that this is where we might end up without the reassuringly tight belt of morality clinched around our waists.”
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