Film
The Talented Mr. Ripley
- Director
- Anthony Minghella
- Certificate
- 15
- Running Time
- 139 mins
A very superior period genre thriller invoking obvious Hitchcock comparisons, not least because author Patricia Highsmith also wrote the novel on which Strangers on a Train was based, the late Anthony Minghella’s follow-up to The English Patient boasts a terrific performance by Matt Damon as the eponymous chameleon sociopath.
New York, 1958. Bespectacled, earnest, impecunious Tom Ripley (Damon) allows himself to be mistaken by a wealthy shipping tycoon for a former college chum of his feckless son Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), a jazz-loving playboy who shows no inclination to return home from the sun-drenched beaches of Europe. Greenleaf senior offers Ripley a deal: a no-strings-attached freebie to Italy, plus a further $1,000 payoff if he returns with the errant Dickie in tow. But before he’s set foot off the cruise liner, Ripley has already casually impersonated his target and rather taken to the role, with all the privileges and status it brings. When he tracks down the tanned and charming philanderer and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), the attraction to his lifestyle and indeed Dickie himself – for the story has a strong homoerotic undercurrent – becomes overwhelming. Except that the calculating Ripley doesn’t want to fall in love with Dickie quite as much as he wants to become him. And for that to happen, inconvenient Dickie must disappear.
Minghella handles the slow (arguably too slow) build-up expertly, establishing Ripley’s gift for mimicry and his sexually charged bonding with the handsome wastrel, until the really quite unexpectedly brutal moment when everything changes. Jude Law has little more to do than lounge around looking hunky and glamorous, although he does this to perfection. Damon, however, pulls off in style a much more difficult role as the amoral and manipulative schemer Ripley, requiring a complete physical transformation from his initial blandness. Unfortunately, Gwyneth Platrow cuts a thin and insubstantial figure throughout, outclassed at every turn by Cate Blanchett as the rich girl who knows too much. And the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman plays another splendidly unappealing character in the form of Dickie’s laddish, bon viveur society chum Freddie Miles. There are perhaps rather too many melodramatic twists towards the end as quick-thinking Ripley evades what seems like certain rumblement several times over, but Minghella’s genre-transcending aspirations deliver some superb photography and period detail while the tootly jazz soundtrack performs its usual function as cinematic shorthand for sophistication.
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