But with The Talented Mr Ripley British screenwriter/director Anthony Minghella makes a stimulating and sometimes galvanising stab - if that's the right word - at putting Highsmith on the screen. Despite flaws and shortfalls, it remains more a Highsmith film than a Minghella one - Highsmith's devious persona haunts every frame. The filmmaker takes Highsmith very seriously and is relatively faithful to the original. Despite an inspired introduction of a jazz theme to evoke the fifties beat generation, overall there is a slight BBCish reverence towards the source material. The movie has a studied look, being heavily and somewhat self-consciously into style. This makes the film a little long and leaden in places, and I looked for a more deft and mercurial treatment, more in the way of the original Ripley himself. The production values are high and sit a little smugly on the screen, like a coffee table book. The sense of place is strong and potent, even if a touch picture postcard travelogue here and there, like a TV holiday programme parachuting into fifties Italy. Some irritating flashiness and visual clichés of peasants riding horsedrawn carts along cobbled streets mar the first third of the film, which is also the slowest in pace. The movie takes awhile to catch fire.
Tom Ripley seems a character so much of today, so much a product of the serial killer age that I question the decision to make the movie a period piece. It gives the film a stilted feel, showing off with the locations and the research, the period artefacts. Of course, these elements give the film a quaintness and make it more saleable, especially in America, all that European culture and picturesque landscapes. But it undersells Ripley and makes things too easy for him. He needed to come up against profilers and DNA testing. This is a story about thinking the unthinkable, then doing it, then doing it all over again. Despite hiccups, things go too smoothly for Ripley in this movie.
The performances and their lingering sense of menace and unease are excellent. Silhouettes framed in private hells. You can see the rehearsals echoing behind the grief of Gwyneth Paltrow's Marge Serwood, yet she nevertheless provides great charm and forcefulness. Jude Law steals the screen as Dickie Greenleaf in a performance of great virtuosity, depicting a darkside to the character which not only compliments but also doppelgangers Ripley. Cate Blanchett as Meredith Logue is sexy and vulnerable, manipulator and manipulated. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles is so obnoxious that you look forward to his predictable murder - horrific when it comes - and thus become implicated in it.
As Ripley, the extraordinary Matt Damon has an impossible task, because we all have our own idea of Ripley, what he should look like, how he should behave. The film actor who comes closest for me was Cary Grant - that lethal urbanity. But then, bemusingly, Grant came closest to Chandler's idea of Philip Marlowe. Damon's Ripley is too callow, too innocent, too easily putdown and humiliated. He whinges too much, cries too easily, looks too sad and pensive; isn't sufficiently catlike, calculating, animalistic. Damon's body language is too hesitant. The switch in his identity to capricious lotus eater Dickie Greenleaf too superficial.
However, this in part is down to Minghella's otherwise superb screenplay, which changes Highsmith's character in one significant respect: Ripley's murder of Dickie Greenleaf is unpremeditated in the film, the result of fury ignited by Greenleaf's cruel demeaning of Ripley's character and the affections he harbours towards him.
This substantially alters Ripley's character-arc in the film. He is not the sociopath of Highsmith's novels and it was a little difficult to believe therefore that he would be capable of the subsequent string of killings. His talent for murder seems based purely on the need to survive rather than as the consequence of Ripley's inner nature. Thus Damon sometimes appears a gauche schoolboy in the face of scornful sophistication and although this makes him more likeable and accessible he is also less credible. Perhaps Minghella felt that the audience - or the studio - wouldn't accept the born killer of the books, audience identification would be undermined, and so he had to soften Ripley's innate malevolence, give us a little bit of motivation. The problem this poses is to lose the cold side of Ripley's character as created by Highsmith, and the ambiguity one feels towards him. He loses some of his fascination.
The result on screen is not quite believable, despite an intense and often moving performance by Damon. His Ripley responds to his own violence with a beautifully expressed emotion and grief which nevertheless suggests Ripley would not have committed these killings in the first place. Julian Symons in a TV discussion with Highsmith once accused her of being "soft" on Ripley who was surely a psychopath. Highsmith smiled enigmatically and said that she didn't believe Ripley was a psychopath. It was clear that not only did she approve of him, but Ripley was Highsmith's alter ego. Although wanton when driven to violence, it is also true that Ripley kills purely out of self-preservation and not sadistic pleasure, occupying an amoral world, a capsuled existence indifferent to ordinary laws and morals most people abide by. Ripley is a moral and physical isolate and this doesn't really come across in the film.
But this is wanting the movie to be like the book and
they are, of course, two distinct works of craft and art. And the film is a
terrific achievement in many respects, well worth seeing. It is very edgy and
you are made to root - uncomfortably - for Ripley. Minghella manages to convey
much of the atmosphere in Highsmith, the delicate feline sensibility behind
those dark stories is there on the screen, the masks and double lives, the black
humour, the cruel irony. Because of the character-led psychological base of
the novels, and their fine spidery underwritten style, Highsmith is enormously
difficult to transpose to the screen as Chandler discovered, sacked for his
efforts, when he tried to dramatise Strangers on a Train for Hitchcock.
European cinema is littered with Highsmithian corpses. Even the great Wim Wenders
failed with Dennis Hopper, for God's Sake, as Ripley, in The American
Friend, from Highsmith's Ripley's Game, as ludicrous a
waste of a great novel as Altman's sacrilegious - and just damn bad - version
of Chandler's The Long Goodbye. The inevitable Hitchcock seems
to have succeeded best in translating Highsmith to the screen - Hitchcock and
Highsmith having shared similar obsessions and turned the psychological thriller
into great art. Now there appears to be a welcome renaissance in Highsmith,
with several adaptations of her novels in the movie works.