Anthony Minghella won himself an Oscar for his adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker-winning novel The English Patient, which no one would have called an easy novel to adapt. He managed to turn a hazily poetic novel into a grandly tragic love story set against the awesome scenery of the Sahara.
Now he has turned to Patricia Highsmith’s 1956 psychological thriller, The Talented Mr Ripley, a novel which in many ways is very far from The English Patient. It is not pretty or grandiose; it is morally ambiguous. Highsmith’s prose is cool to the point of flatness, and her interest is in portraying an amoral character, one who murders but feels no guilt – only a concern at being caught. And, of course, a rather delicate squeamishness at the mechanics of murder and the disposal of corpses, as befits a cultivated man.
Tom Ripley is a young American drifter whose only talents are for the con man’s art of impersonation and improvisation. He finds himself heading to Italy to persuade Dickie Greenleaf, scion of a rich manufacturing family (a class against which Highsmith had some animus – better to be a murderer with good taste) to abandon his wastrel’s life and come home.
Ripley works his way into Dickie’s life, improvising skillfully all the way. But he doesn’t want Dickie to go home. He wants to be Dickie. Here, Highsmith is making a sardonic point about social status and those Americans who went to Europe until the Fifties to acquire some sophistication. Such thoughts would not enter the minds of today’s Americans, but that’s what Ripley does – with a vengeance.
The irony that he needs to commit a murder to do so is not lost in the film, though Minghella, who wrote the script, gives Tom more of a conscience – and more of an emotional motivation to commit his first murder – than Highsmith does. He also gives Tom a moral comeuppance, which Highsmith does not do (until the last of her four Ripley novels, and then it is the hand of blind fate that strikes him a devastating blow).
Minghella also makes more of the homoerotic subtext of the novel, which has been taken by more than one reader as a classic of closeted-homo literature. The significance is broader, though: Highsmith sees how the marginalised can feel themselves to be somehow inauthentic. Tom certainly does. How he deals with that sense of inauthenticity is to create more masks for himself, more invented selves. He makes a kind of authenticity of inauthenticity, in which respect he’s something of an Oscar Wilde figure. As Ripley says in the film, rather Wildeanly, better to be “a fake somebody than a real nobody”. Authenticity itself must be performed.
Speaking of performances, Oscar-nominated Jude Law is great as the dissolute Dickie, while Matt Damon doesn’t quite cut it as Tom. He has a certain blandness and blankness, which may be why Minghella chose him to play a man who has to steal a personality. Damon, however, can’t convey the subtle levels of role-play that it is Ripley’s gift to be able to carry off, or the kind of ironic detachment with which he does it, and which makes him such an interesting character. Perhaps Law and Damon should have swapped roles; or perhaps Hitchcock should have made it with Cary Grant.
Despite a tendency toward preciousness and settings too pretty to underpin the story’s dark heart, the film is very watchable. Minghella ably uses short, mobile scenes to shift the narrative along, and keeps us in suspense over how we should feel about the ambivalent Mr Ripley.