The Talented Mr. Ripley Review
by Gary Jones (gary AT bohr DOT demon DOT co DOT uk)March 11th, 2000
Written and directed by Anthony Minghella, and based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a psychological thriller of jealousy and confused identity among the privileged classes. Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is paid by a wealthy businessman to persuade his wayward layabout son Dickie (Jude Law) to return home from Europe. Tom travels to Italy, meets Dickie and girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Patrow) and is soon sharing their bohemian tourist lifestyle, but the friendships formed are not all they seem and soon come under strain.
The film is deliberate but compelling, its restrained pace punctuated by a couple of moments of extreme violence, including one of the most effective screen murders I've ever seen. The best aspect of the film, though, is Matt Damon's magnificent performance as the scheming and manipulative but strangely pathetic Tom Ripley, whose talent, and compulsion, is to take on the identity of those around him. This is not an easy role to have taken on and was a very brave choice for an actor with a career as a pretty-boy movie star ahead of him. Such actors might be tempted to rebelliously take on a role against type, such as Leo de Caprio's rumoured but abandoned casting as the killer in American Psycho. Damon's role here is that of a subtle and sympathetic monster, something much more difficult and carried off brilliantly.
With The English Patient, Anthony Minghella was likened to David Lean. Such comparisons with great British film-makers seem not to have irritated Minghella, because The Talented Mr. Ripley shouts its Hitchcock influences from the rooftops. Apart from its Hitch-like plot and themes, the film's original score, by Gabriel Yared, is frankly little more than a Bernard Herrmann pastiche (although if you're going to copy anyone, you might as well copy the best). Some trademark Hitchcock shots are used, as when the viewpoint rotates as we close in on a tormented character from above, and when the camera travels over the heads of a formally-attired opera audience to tightly frame the main character in one of the boxes with the Yared/Herrmann score driving the allusion home. Even the opening credits have a similar look to the distinctive credits created for Hitchcock by Saul Bass.
The current fashion is for long films - it seems that nobody thinks a film less than two hours long will be taken seriously. At 139 minutes, The Talented Mr. Ripley drags occassionally and could have been more effective if it was half an hour shorter. Hitchcock famously once said that the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. If his bladder could have taken the strain, he would have been proud of Ripley. (8/10)
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Gary Jones <gary@bohr.demon.co.uk>
Homepage: www.bohr.demon.co.uk
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