The Talented Mr. Ripley

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If I could just go back, I’d rub everything out, beginning with myself." On first hearing this voiceover at the beginning of Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, you might think you’re going to see a film about regret or guilt, or perhaps a refined kind of melancholy. But it’s not long before you realize that for the speaker, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), such emotion — any emotion — is always a performance. Part child, part psycho, all chameleon, Tom is at times rather ordinary in his Clark Kent glasses and mousy-brown hair. At other times, he’s devastatingly beautiful, as when he takes a smoky jazz club stage to sing "My Funny Valentine" in a dead-on imitation of Chet Baker at his prettiest, and, at still others, too damn creepy for words.

He’s also Matt Damon, which means that the movie has been drawing serious mainstream attention: cover stories in Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, and The New York Times Magazine. Ripley seems important because its young stars are chic, its locations expensive, and its Oscar-winning makers — Damon, The English Patient director Minghella, and Gwyneth Paltrow — esteemed by the industry. With all this stacked against it, how can Ripley possibly come out all right?

"Neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not." Novelist Patricia Highsmith made this observation concerning her Tom Ripley, introduced in the 1955 book on which the movie is based and revisited in several sequels. The latest Ripley, unlike Alain Delon’s super-smooth incarnation in 1960’s Purple Noon, is vulnerable, hungry (Damon lost weight for the part), and, on occasion, conscience-stricken — not that any of this makes his actions acceptable. That justice is not done helps the film rather than him: The messiness of its concluding reel makes its many exquisite surfaces seem suddenly pervious, cynical, fragmented and arbitrary. Unlike The English Patient, this movie doesn’t exact moral payments from villains or grant viewers sentimental buffer zones.

The plot puts nascent serial killer Ripley within reach of his victims-to-be through a series of injustices and mistaken identities. At a party, shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn) mistakes bathroom attendant Ripley for a Princeton graduate. (He’s wearing a borrowed school jacket.) Ripley riffs on the error, pretending to know Greenleaf’s profligate son Dickie (Jude Law), who’s been spending his allowance at Italian jazz clubs. He offers Ripley $1,000 to fetch Dickie back home to take his proper place in the family business.

To accomplish his mission, Tom practices being Dickie’s best friend and mirror image (mostly, he devours everything he can about jazz). As Tom leaves New York, you see that his depressing basement apartment is located near a meatpacker’s: He watches the carcasses swing and drip blood as he gets in Greenleaf’s slinky limo, then leans back into the leather seat and smiles. The kid is finally cutting loose.

Once in Mongibello, Tom continues to do his homework, spying on Dickie and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Paltrow, tanned and darling in her pastel bikinis) with big binoculars, rehearsing his upper-class intonations. His appearance on the beach elicits giggles; as Dickie puts it, he’s "so white!" But Tom’s a quick study, and soon he’s hanging with the aristocrats, sailing, swimming and drinking fine wines. He also discovers Dickie’s affair with a local girl, Silvana (Stefania Rocca), which titillates and inspires him. It makes Dickie imperfect but also more perfect, a man beyond mundane mores. Tom is smitten.

This is the movie’s trickiest negotiation, making Tom’s love for Dickie at once homoerotic and homicidal, a means to both self-identification and self-loathing. Wanting Dickie, he’s jealous of Marge, and so, pleased to see her dogged, though he’s uncomfortable when Dickie also steps out on him with an old chum, Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman, affecting a nasty rich-kid attitude). Wanting to be Dickie, Tom flirts openly with Marge (or more precisely, he’s not so patently misogynist as Highsmith’s version). But all this is really about Tom’s lack of identity and self-hatred, not because he’s gay — omnisexuality seems quite fine in the circles to which he aspires — but because he’s broke. When Dickie inevitably gets bored with and mean about his leechiness, Tom has no emotional or intellectual recourse: His assault on his ideal brother-lover-self is vicious, pulpy and shocking rather than cathartic, a clunky, horrible scene out of Theodore Dreiser rather than Highsmith.

Taking on Dickie’s identity (along with his passport and trust fund), Tom can only get increasingly confused: As Dickie, he leaves messages for Tom, and vice versa. Freddie makes some inquiries, the cops poke around, Marge frets, Herbert Greenleaf shows up — poor Tom is feeling the heat. This is what the film does improbably well, making Tom sympathetic even when you know he’s a brute.

Taking Tom’s point of view, The Talented Mr. Ripley treats his self-reinvention not solely as pathology (surely, this is clear enough) but as a desperate and understandable effort to achieve the class/sex/race mobilities that he sees all around him. Montages of his romantic club-hopping with Dickie make the point: White boys play black, straight boys play gay, the moneyed boys play whatever they want. Watching or performing, absorbing or reflecting: As Dickie’s alter ego, Tom seems able to have it all. He’s even wooed by two people at once: heiress Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett) thinks she loves him as Dickie, and Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport) thinks he loves him as Tom. It’s not so much the amorality of his new existence that dazzles, but the choices. They’re suddenly so plentiful, they’re overwhelming.

Swirling, extravagant, and strange. What’s a newly wealthy American in Europe to do? The movie never does straighten out its own schizophrenic regard for class (snobbery is hurtful and bad, but look: Paltrow is so passionate and lovely, so perfectly embodying her privilege), or its discomfort with Tom’s sex and gender ambiguities. (He’s so dapper yet ingenuous, so brutal yet femme, so icy and yet so… Matt!) Ripley is a fascinating mess, despising but also adoring the garish trappings of wealth and caste, using what would seem to be its detrimental excesses (stars, budget, hype) to its advantage. It’s as much about idealizing Hollywood and commodity culture as it is about demonizing its hero. It’s about a system of production, a set of expectations and a stylized ethics that’s offensively normal.

—Cindy Fuchs