Falling in love with a murderer can be tough on the conscience. Recognising aspects of yourself in him can be tougher still. With the five Tom Ripley novels that she wrote between 1955 and 1991, Patricia Highsmith invited us to do both.
Ripley is unique. Far from being the stereotypical stony-hearted killer disguised as greasy charmpot, he’s actually a thoroughly considerate, top-notch bloke, who just happens to kill people in his spare time. His murders always seem essential, even though most of them are a by-product of Ripley’s enviable surfeit of leisure time, or a means of protecting his unethical fortune, beautiful wife and luxurious French mansion. A rampant capitalist who reads The Observer, a serial killer who turns squeamish at the sight of boiling lobsters, a “happily” married heterosexual who is excessively interested in young boys, his whole lifestyle is a tangle of inconsistencies, yet we wouldn’t want him to lose it for the world.
Highsmith refused to judge Ripley’s actions, and this – combined with her tendency to value characterisation and atmosphere over plot – has meant that there’s been a reluctance to transfer her work to the big screen in the past, or a tendency to trivialise or moralise it. Even a master of darkness like Hitchcock, adapting Highsmith’s debut novel Strangers On A Train, felt the need to halve the body count. Meanwhile, the most successful celluloid Ripleys remain Alain Delon in Plein Soleil and Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend – the first of which has little in common with the real Ripley and the second of which Highsmith would only say she “accepted”.
Highsmith died in 1995 without seeing her characters transform to the big screen in pure form, and there’s still some doubt as to whether this transition can be achieved without advocating cold-blooded murder as a good way out of a tight spot. Highsmith, however, always believed it possible, and this year a whole army of film luminaries, headed by Anthony Minghella, are out to prove her right.
Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley, starring Matt Damon (as Ripley), Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law, will be followed by Ripley’s Game (starring Rupert Everett), plus adaptations of Carol (from Beautiful Thing director Hettie MacDonald), The Blunderer, Suspension Of Mercy and The Cry Of The Owl.
In Highsmith’s first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, the protagonist is a smalltime New York tax thief sent to Italy to persuade an old school friend, Dickie Greenleaf, to return home to America. Greenleaf is everything Ripley is not – rich, popular and confidently heterosexual – so Ripley, consumed by self-loathing, drowns him and assumes his identity, leading Greenleaf’s loathsome girlfriend, Marge, and the Italian police on a wild goose chase, before escaping to the good life in France.
In his unfaithful but stunning 1960 version, Plein Soleil, director Rene Clement chose to portray Greenleaf as plain and ordinary while Alain Delon’s Ripley was a bronzed French idol motivated by greed and passion (for Marge: no longer loathsome, but hugely desirable). But just when Ripley has inherited his friend’s money and girl, the body is washed up and Ripley’s chickens come home to roost.
There are three crucial elements in The Talented Mr Ripley not featured in Plein Soleil, explains Minghella. “It’s so much about the American experience in Europe, so much about not getting caught, and so much about a man at odds with his own sexuality. He’s also supposed to be the plain friend at the party. But in Plein Soleil, who would want to be Dickie Greenleaf when you could be Alain Delon?”
Minghella wanted to restore the novel’s issues of displacement and sexual wavering. “Ripley is a real nobody who’d rather be a fake somebody – most of us know how that feels. He’s a master of denial.”
Ripley’s enigmatic qualities are outstripped only by those of Highsmith herself. She wrote her unofficial debut novel, a gay love story called Carol, in 1952 under a pseudonym and, fearful of being persecuted for her lesbianism, fled America for Europe. Old friends describe her as anti-male, yet she thrived from day-to-day with a young, virile one inside her head, creating peripheral female characters around him. She lived as a virtual recluse with a cat called Omen, wrote in a concrete bunker and said in 1977: “If I had to be incarcerated in a family from which I could not escape, to spend time with them and not have a room of my own, I would reach the point of killing them.”
Yet, at the time, she was renowned for her warm, sensitive descriptions of domestic Utopia. She disparagingly referred to children as “drunken dwarves”, yet wrote frequently about adolescents and made an effort to keep up with pop culture, covering the drug scene in Switzerland when she was in her 70s. Reading her work was once compared to “having tea with an extremely dangerous witch”. But actually having tea with her was, by many accounts, nowhere near as cordial. “I used to be in awe of making a phone call to her,” explains Tanja Howarth, Highsmith’s agent and close friend. “She was a very lonely person who abhorred small talk and cocktail parties and wouldn’t forget if someone made a mistake. I remember a launch party where I introduced her to an editor who’d put the wrong dedication in her book. I said, ‘I’m sure you’ve met.’ And Pat said, ‘We corresponded —’ Then she looked into the editor’s eyes very deeply and added, ‘Acrimoniously’. With one word, the whole room was silent.”
How does Howarth account for the resurgence of interest in Highsmith? “She was a genius, and the Germans were the only ones who ever saw it. Unfortunately, she was also a very naive young woman and she signed a lot of very bad film contracts, which are only just beginning to be unraveled now. I also think Ripley is a timeless creation.”
“Compartmentalisation is a disease of the late 20th century,” comments Anthony Minghella, “and I think Ripley is an extensive illustration of that. People can relate to the way that his life fragments and the only way to make sense of it is to draw a perimeter fence around the different parts of his life and see if he can survive without shedding too much light on the various territories.”
But even Minghella confesses it was difficult to put Ripley on screen in undiluted form. “I want the audience to inhabit every decision that Ripley makes and feel the terrible accumulation of accidents. I’ve tried to draw a much more compassionate character, tried to gear everything towards the fact that it’s a tragedy: it’s not about the exhilaration of escape, it’s about the punishment of escape. His punishment is that he can’t escape from himself. Whether that’s passable for an American audience, I don’t know, but that can’t be my preoccupation. I remember people saying The English Patient wouldn’t work because it’s about a man who betrays his friend, gives secrets to the Nazis and becomes responsible for the death of people all around him.”
Can the chunky, slimy Matt Damon capture both Ripley’s unique, Gauloise-tipped charm and nefarious flipside – the inexorable darkness that Highsmith yearned for in film adaptations of her work? It seems unlikely; but the odds are that sometime soon an approximation of the real Tom Ripley is going to be coming to a cinema near you. When you meet him and fall under his spell, be prepared to ask yourself some serious questions.