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| Plot Synopsis After the Oscar-winning The English Patient, writer/director Anthony Minghella attempted another tricky literary adaptation with The Talented Mr. Ripley, which features heartthrob Matt Damon cast against type as a psychopathic bisexual murderer. Tom Ripley (Damon) is a bright and charismatic sociopath who makes his way in mid-1950s New York City as a men's room attendant and sometimes pianist, though his real skill is in impersonating other people, forging handwriting, and running second-rate scams. After being mistaken for a Princeton student, Tom meets the shipping tycoon father of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), who has traveled to the coast of Italy, where he's living a carefree life with his father's money and his beautiful girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). Dickie's father will pay Ripley $1,000 plus his expenses if he can persuade Dickie to return to America. As Ripley and Dickie become friends, Tom finds himself both attracted to Dickie and envious of his life of pleasure. In time, he decides that he would rather be Dickie Greenleaf than Tom Ripley, so rather than go back to his life of poverty, Ripley impulsively murders Dickie and assumes his identity. The Talented Mr. Ripley was based on the first of a series of novels featuring Tom Ripley written by Patricia Highsmith; the story was previously filmed in 1960 as Purple Noon, with Alain Delon as Ripley. - Mark Deming, All Movie Guide Reviews LUCIA BOZZOLA AMG (High Artistic Quality, High Production Values) Mixing glamour and pathology, Anthony Minghella's rendition of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) presents a visually alluring backdrop and a view of the decadent rich that almost justifies the eponymous villain's heinous acts. Shooting on location in Italy, Minghella revels in the seductive effect of socialite Dickie Greenleaf's dolce vita, from the hothouse atmosphere of Italian jazz clubs to the deluxe coastal villa and sailboat; the snobberies and carelessness of the wealthy reveal the rotten core beneath the lustrous existence to which Tom Ripley aspires. Matt Damon plays off his fresh-faced looks to make Tom a creepy and ephemeral, yet eerily sympathetic sociopath. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett are pitch-perfect as, respectively, a boorish skeptic and Tom's most innocent dupe; Jude Law turns in a star-making performance as the heartlessly charismatic aristocrat who becomes the focal point of Tom's many desires. Despite strong reviews to go with its artistic pedigree, The Talented Mr. Ripley picked up Oscar nominations only for best costumes, art direction, and score to go with nods for Minghella's adapted screenplay and Law's performance. CHUCK SCHWARTZ, Cranky Critic� $7.00 of $8.00 IN SHORT: The only thing missing is the McGuffin Film buffs already know from that "in short" line what is coming next, for Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley may be the best Alfred Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made. The source material is a novel by the late Patricia Highsmith; an earlier novel was adapted for Hitch's Strangers on a Train. Everything that we could take for granted in a Hitchcock-type wannabe flick (and Brian DePalma has made lots of those) is here: mistaken identities, murder, an incredible amount of sexual tension and ordinary people dwarfed by imposing settings. The Talented Mr. Ripley luxuriates in all of this. It is wrapped in 50s jazz; the hot sounds of Bird and Dizzy in the night clubs; the cool, smoky, asexual sound of Chet Baker's vocals on My Funny Valentine. The settings take you up and down the Italian coast, the stomping ground of the blueblood kidlets who would be called the Jet Set just a few years on. Watching Ripley is like wrapping yourself in silk, until you wonder what that scratchy feeling is and discover in horror that. . . In the year 1958, meet Herbert Richard Greenleaf I (James Rebhorn), his wife Emily (Lisa Eichorn) is wheelchair bound and his son "Dickie" if off gallivanting in Italy with his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). At a recital in a Park Avenue salon, Mr. Greenleaf meets Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), wearing a Princeton jacket, who is just the right age to have been at that school at the same time as Dickie. Greenleaf offers Ripley a "job". He is to go to Italy, expenses paid, and convince Dickie to return to the States and take his rightful place at his father's side. There's a $1000 payment in it if he succeeds. Unknown to the senior Greenleaf is the fact that Tom Ripley is a bathroom attendant at a Manhattan theater. He lives in a basement apartment underneath an industrial strength butcher in New York's meat packing district. His only talents, aside from the ability to play piano, are "forging signatures, telling lies and doing impressions of people" which he admits to Dickie when they meet on the Italian coast. Ripley has prepared himself well for his assignment, but finds it is a lot more fun to play the double agent once he spills the beans, living off his expense money while clubbing around with his new best friends Dickie and Marge. After all, the grass is greener on the other side. . . . . . and Dickie is just so damned cute. There always was a strong eroticism running through Hitchcock's work. An off the cuff line by Paltrow's character "It's a good thing we're not getting married. We'd have to take Tom on the honeymoon." is about as far as Hitchcock could have gone, but Minghella is freer today to make the homoerotic elements of Ripley's attraction to Dickie plain as day. And, no, there is no gay sex and this is not a gay story. It's a story of a poor man who creates himself in the image of a rich man and decides he wants to be the image instead of the reality. In doing so, certain instincts emerge. The greatest of them all is not sexual, it is survival. When the senior Greenleaf calls the deal off and Dickie kicks Tom loose -- calling him a third class leech -- things get really honest and, as revealed in the teevee spot, bloody. So here is Tom Ripley, liar, forger and Dickie lookalike carefully taking on the persona of his former friend. His impersonation goes so deep that it includes an attraction to Marge, even as the new "Dickie" does his best to stay away from the haunts of the rich. Which brings us to two more important characters: Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an arrogant and suspicious bon vivant with a red sports car, a devil may care attitude and a "string of fianc�es" so long it'll be at least a decade if he comes out of the closet; Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett) who, like the "Dickie Greenleaf" she meets coming off the Queen Mary and picking up his luggage at the "R" section, likes to travel "under her mother's name". This very rich daughter of a textile magnate, who will date "Dickie" later in the flick, could be the spoiler in Ripley's spontaneous identity change. She runs with the same crowd and it can only be a matter of time before someone figures out that her "Dickie" and Marge's "Tom" are one and the same. There are other characters and twists to the plot, both before and after that eventual meeting. You'll have to discover those for yourself and watch carefully as the police close in. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a "thriller" with a capital T. On average, a first run movie ticket will run you Eight Bucks. Were Cranky able to set his own price to The Talented Mr. Ripley, he would have paid... A great, adult flick, all across the board. If Chet Baker were still alive to see how his music is used in this movie, well, the Chet Baker I knew would just smile. ROGER EBERT Chicago Sun-Times Villains usually last through only one crime novel, while heroes are good for a whole series. That's a great inconvenience for their authors, because villains are usually more colorful than heroes. Patricia Highsmith's novels about Tom Ripley are the exception, a series of books about a man who is irredeemably bad, and yet charming, intelligent and thoughtful about the price he pays for his amoral lifestyle. The Talented Mr. Ripley, her first Ripley novel, published in 1955, shows Ripley in the process of inventing himself and finding his life's work. He was a poor man who wanted to be a rich man, an unknown man who wanted not to be famous but simply to be someone else. Some men are envious of other men's cars, or wives, or fortunes. Ripley coveted their identities. The novel shows him annexing the life and identity of a man named Greenleaf. It was filmed in 1960 by Rene Clement as "Purple Noon," with Alain Delon as Ripley, and now it has been filmed again by Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient"), with Matt Damon in the title role. One of the pleasures of the two adaptations is that the plots are sufficiently different that you can watch one without knowing how the other turns out--or even what happens along the way. That despite the fact that they both revolve around Ripley's decision that he can be Greenleaf as well as, or better than, Greenleaf can be himself. "Purple Noon" begins with the two men already friends. "The Talented Mr. Ripley," adapted by Minghella, has a better idea: Ripley is an opportunist who stumbles onto an opening into Greenleaf's life, and takes it. He borrows a Princeton blazer to play the piano at a rooftop party in Manhattan and a rich couple assume he must have known their son Dickie at Princeton. He agrees. The Greenleafs are concerned about Dickie (Jude Law), who has decamped to the decadence of Europe and shows no sign of coming home. They offer Tom Ripley a deal: They'll finance his own trip to Europe and pay him $1,000 if he returns with their son. Cut to a beach in Italy, where Dickie suns with Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), and the original deception turns evil. Remember that Ripley is already impersonating someone--Dickie's old Princeton friend. That works with Dickie ("I've completely forgotten him," he tells Marge), but eventually he wonders if anything Tom tells him is the truth. Ripley, at this point still developing the skills that will carry him through several more adventures, instinctively knows that the best way to lie is to admit to lying, and to tell the truth whenever convenient. When Dickie asks him what his talents are, he replies, "Forging signatures, telling lies and impersonating almost anyone." Quite true. And then he does a chilling impersonation of Mr. Greenleaf asking him to bring Dickie back to the United States. "I feel like he's here," Dickie says, as Tom does his father's voice. By confessing his mission, Tom disarms Dickie and is soon accepted into his circle, which also includes an epicurean friend named Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Also moving through Europe at about the same time is a rich girl named Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), who believes things about Tom that Dickie must not be allowed to know. But I am growing vague, and must grow vaguer, because the whole point of the movie is to show Tom Ripley learning to use subterfuge, improvisation and lightning-fast thinking under pressure to become Dickie Greenleaf. Highsmith wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley five years after writing Strangers on a Train, which Hitchcock made into a film he sometimes called his favorite. The two stories are similar. Strangers is about a man who meets another man and offers to trade crimes with him: I'll kill the person you hate, and you kill the person I hate, and since neither one of us has any connection with our victim or any motive for killing him, we'll never be caught. Talented has Dickie blamed for the drowning death of a local woman and Ripley "trading" that death as a cover-up for another. Hitchcock's film subtly suggested a homosexual feeling in the instigator, and Tom Ripley also seems to have feelings for Dickie Greenleaf--although narcissism and sexuality are so mixed up in his mind that Ripley almost seems to want to become Greenleaf so that he can love himself (both Ripley movies have a scene of Ripley dressed in Dickie's clothes and posing in a mirror). This undercurrent is wisely never brought up to the level of conscious action because so many of Tom Ripley's complicated needs and desires are deeply buried; he finds out what he wants to do by doing it. Matt Damon is bland and ordinary as Ripley, and then takes on the vivid coloration of others--even a jazz singer. Jude Law makes Dickie almost deserving of his fate because of the way he adopts new friends and then discards them. Gwyneth Paltrow's role is tricky: Yes, Dickie is her boyfriend, but he's cold and treats her badly, and there are times when she would intuit the dread secret if she weren't so distracted by the way she already resents Dickie. The movie is an intelligent a thriller as you'll see this year. It is also insidious in the way it leads us to identify with Tom Ripley. He is the protagonist, we see everything through his eyes, and Dickie is not especially lovable; that means we are a co-conspirator in situations where it seems inconceivable that Tom's deception will not be discovered. He's a monster, but we want him to get away with it. There is one sequence in the film involving an apartment, a landlady, the police and a friend who knows the real Dickie that depends on such meticulous timing and improvisation that if you made it speedier, you'd have the Marx Brothers. Awards 1999 Academy Best Adapted Screenplay (nom) -Anthony Minghella Best Art Direction (nom) -Roy Walker/Bruno Cesari Best Costume Design (nom) -Gary Jones/Ann Roth Best Original Score (nom) -Gabriel Yared Best Supporting Actor (nom) -Jude Law 1999 British Academy Awards Best Adapted Screenplay (nom) -Anthony Minghella Best Cinematography (nom) -John Seale Best Director (nom) -Anthony Minghella Best Film (nom) Best Film Music (nom) -Gabriel Yared Best Supporting Actor (win) -Jude Law Best Supporting Actress (nom) -Cate Blanchett 1999 Golden Globe Best Actor (Drama) (nom) -Matt Damon Best Director (nom) -Anthony Minghella Best Film (Drama) (nom) Best Original Score (nom) -Gabriel Yared Best Supporting Actor (Motion Picture) (nom) -Jude Law Other Awards Best Score (win) -Gabriel Yared -1999 -Broadcast Film Critics Association #2 Film of the Year - -1999 -National Board of Review Best Director (win) -Anthony Minghella -1999 -National Board of Review Best Adapted Screenplay (nom) -Anthony Minghella -1999 -Writers Guild of America |
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| THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY 1999 - USA - 139 min. - Feature, Color Director -Anthony Minghella |
| Genre/Type -Drama, Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Period Film, Crime Thriller Flags -Adult Situations, Adult Language, Brief Nudity, Violence MPAA Rating -R Keywords -bourgeois, murder, identity, impulsiveness, lifestyle, obsession, tycoon, upper-class, assumed-identity, sexual-attraction Themes -Assumed Identities, Americans Abroad, Dangerous Friends, Serial Killers, Class Differences, Unrequited Love Tones -Ominous, Elegant, Tense, Understated, Urbane Moods -Spellbinders Set In -Italy Color type -Deluxe color Sound by -Dolby Digital/DTS Produced by -Mirage Enterprises / Miramax / Paramount / Timnick Films Release -Dec 25, 1999 (USA) Released by -Paramount DVD Street Date -Jun 27, 2000 Cast 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 Celia Weston -- Aunt Joan Rosario Fiorello -- Fausto Stefania Rocca -- Silvania Ivano Marescotti -- Superintendent Verrecchia Anna Longhi -- Signora Buffi Alessandro Fabrizi -- Sergeant Baggio Lisa Eichhorn -- Emily Greenleaf |
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