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It's physically difficult to walk into a movie theater these days, seeing how the floor is littered with people falling all over themselves to say good things about The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella's followup to The English Patient, which won him an Academy Award for direction in 1997 as well as garnering the Best Picture statuette. That film's opening shot of expansive of Saharan sand unspooling like an arid Escher print is a high point in cinema history. So when Minghella once again turned to an acclaimed, literary novel -- albeit one 45 years old -- for story material, there was no reason to think he couldn't pull off another winner. And as yet another inventive opening credit sequence rolls, which if you end up watching on video may have you reaching to adjust your set's color and almost had me looking back at the projection booth to see if two overlapping prints were running, expectations look ready to be met.
Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a mid-1950s Gothamite eking out a living as a men's room attendant and occasional classical piano accompanist. Innocent circumstance while playing at a wedding acquaints him with a wealthy shipbuilder who would like to retrieve his wayward son from an extended bohemian jaunt in southern Italy. Believing the furiously self-educated Tom to be one of Dickie's former Princeton classmates, he offers to pay him a handsome 1950s fee to do the job, which Tom, dying to escape his squalid apartment, can't pass up.
Struggling to get by has apparently cultivated the usual New York City survival techniques in Tom -- forgery, mimicry, etc. -- which after a paid passage he uses to insinuate himself into the Mediterranean digs of Dickie (Jude Law, from Gattaca and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) and his aspiring-novelist fiancée Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). But even before meeting them, an overpowering sense of inferiority has prompted him to impersonate his foil to a traveling socialite (Cate Blanchett, in another one of the mousy supporting roles she's taken since so largely commanding the screen in Elizabeth), early putting thoughts in Tom's head that not only could he get away with pretending to be rich, but he could like it.
Dickie and Marge, especially Dickie, are having too much fun doing a really god job of embodying the Ugly American and pretending to hate the rich to remotely consider coming home. Instead they set out to enlist Tom's help in holding off Dad's efforts, which works for a little while until ADD poster child Dickie gets bored, goading Tom to turn murderous when he's faced not only with the prospect of returning to his stateside life of hopeless insignificance, but with monstrous unrequited love. Because Tom is gay, but we knew that because in the 1950s no straight guys had those deep-cut abs, so after he's offed Dickie in a fit of jealous pique, he has to cover his tracks by fleeing under the guise of his victim, with whom he shares a generic resemblance, to play one identity against the other. And get more of Dad's money.
Too bad the movie isn't as interesting as the plot.
Scripted by Minghella himself, this second film treatment of the novel by Patricia Highsmith (the first was from French director Réne Clément in 1960; Wim Wenders later adapted a sequel, with Dennis Hopper starring; and another sequel is coming later this year from the director of Melissa Joan Hart's movie debut, Drive Me Crazy), a knotty English Dorothy Parker who initially came to cinematic attention when Hitchcock adapted her Strangers on a Train in 1951, The Talented Mr. Ripley succeeds on one count in effectively depicting the potential evils of easy cash. But Matt Damon is inscrutably wooden as the title character; except for a brief early look at his impoverished routine, we don’t get any insight to what would drive him to multiple murder. Or how and why he developed his impressive array of special talents.
It's like a Zen recruitment brochure, in which excess money, privilege, and sex are depicted as leading to inner disharmony, trouble with Italian cops, and the inability to properly operate a Vespa scooter. C
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