TITLE: Talented Mr. Ripley GENRE: Thriller, Drama, Crime DIRECTOR: Anthony Minghella LEAD ACTORS: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon RUNNING TIME: 120 minutes CERTIFICATE: 12A
The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented: all those words describe Tom Ripley (played by Matt Damon) a man with an innate ability to impersonate anyone within minutes of meeting them (think John Culshaw on a large scale).
Mr Ripley is styled nicely and the filming seems quite sophisticated; you get to study Tom Ripley's character with open-mouthed awe. He doesn't conform to ridiculous gay and homophobic stereotypes; he is neither girly nor a sissy but, rather he is a psychopath blessed with the ability to impersonated people which can be either very good or very bad.
Ripley is driven by his need to be accepted and become someone, he openly admits to impersonating people and faking papers.
The film opens with Tom (a toilet attendant) borrowing a Princeton Jacket to play the piano at a party. During the party Tom chats to a man whose son recently graduated from Princeton. Tom pretends to know the man's son and is soon offered $1,000 by the man to go to Italy and convince his son Dickie Greenleaf (played by Jude Law) to come back home.
Dickie is an embodiment of all the modern socialites, he has no visible talents yet he craves fame and wants to go to the best places and be seen at the best parties. Besides girls, his only real interest is in
Jazz and he can barely play a tune; all the music he knows belong to other people and he can't write his own music, his interest varies between wanting to play the Saxophone and learning to play the drums.
Despite being from two different ends of the society, Dickie and Tom have similarities in their characters; both have incomprehensible issues with acceptance in Dickie's case he wants to be accepted by his father but he has yet to sort out his issues with sexuality. While Tom wants to be accepted as a socialite despite being very different to them and in the words of Dickie 'not cool'.
Talented Mr Ripley is a great story based on a series of books by Patricia Highsmith and the screen play was written by the director Anthony Minghella. I can't help feeling a little short changed in some parts, some scenes were abrupt and others were unnecessarily prolonged for no apparent reason. Minghella should stick to directing rather than writing because that is where he shines most.
Minghella's portrayal of Italy is not wholly accurate and very uninteresting , it seems as if he shot the scenes in his backyard and the viewers don't get to have a feel of what Italy is like or what it's all about and why someone like Dickie would choose to stay there when there are bigger countries with greater Jazz crowd.
Anthony tried to break away from the rather conventional narrative style in which the story was written (i.e. crime, detection, and resolution) by adding new characters and elongating the story; it ends up looking like a really bad cut and paste job and there are too many loose ends that need to be tied up. For a character that is driven by perfection, Tom ends up being too sloppy. Initially he painstakingly spent hours studying Dickie, jazz and learning what made Dickie tick but for a meticulous character he left a paper murder trail as long as the London Bridge at the end of the film and the police would have to have a I.Q of -1 not to catch him.
Though set in 1950, Talented Mr. Ripley presents issues facing 21st century socialites' Dickie's problems with his sexuality and socialites need for approval by everyone from the press to their parents were touched on in the film and are not rare in reality as well in this day and age.
Another issue touched on is the 'get famous by any means necessary' trend that most people (like Tom Ripley) seem to have developed, trying to live above their means and going through various unthinkable exploits just to achieve social recognition as portrayed in the film. That isn't uncommon these days.
The movie raises questions about the representation of gay people in films, though Tom's character doesn't conform to a popular gay stereotype, it raises other questions about the portrayal of gay people in films, films like Basic Instinct, Silence of the Lambs have portrayed psychopathic gay people. In Basic Instinct, the character of Catherine Tramell is played by Sharon Stone and she openly shows bisexual and gay tendencies, the same applies to The Silence of the Lambs the serial killer Buffalo Bill Played by Ted Levine has gay inclinations though not explicitly gay both characters can be described as psychopathic based on their behaviour. Are they psychopathic because they are gay or are they gay because they are psychopathic? The writers of these films seem to think that there is a link between homosexuality and psychopathic behaviour.
Though not as dark as the films mentioned above, Anthony Minghella unintentionally links being gay with being psychopathic.
One of the most interesting lines uttered in the film by Ripley '…I'd rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody…' can be seen as him trying to describe people's attitude to homosexuality in the 1950s. He'd rather be seen as a heterosexual upstanding member of society than an unrecognized homosexual. This is one of the instances in the film where you get to understand people's attitude sexuality and why a lot of gat people would rather pretend to be something or someone else. Ripley's words echo desperation he had reached a low point battered by rejection and like many people today he would rather be someone else.
His words also have a resonance of someone who is prepared to achieve recognition at all cost maybe that way he will be able to hide his true sexuality under a life of luxury especially with all the female attention, a scenario not uncommon in any day and age, research has shown that quite a few king and queens in the earlier centuries were either gay or bisexual, even Shakespeare acknowledged this fact in his book/film The Merchant of Venice (starring Anthony Hopkins) where the merchant isn't out rightly gay but rather leaning towards more bisexual tendencies.
Lots of Social issues are dealt with in this film there is the parents' relationship with the kids. In the story Dickie's father tells Tom Ripley 'You don't choose your children', which leads to the question, if parents were allowed to pick their kids would they pick kids totally different to the ones they have already?
We can all relate to the desire to become someone; some of us more than others and we can sympathize with the lowly toilet attendant who feels the need to change himself in order to conform to society's whim.
Talented Mr. Ripley is worth a look even if it is just for the few good scenes and the chance to see two great actors triumph over a poorly written screen play.
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Production Year: 2002 - Thriller - Director: Bharat Nalluri, Rob Bailey, Andy Wilson - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Matthew MacFadyen, Keeley Hawes, David Oyelowo, Peter Firth, Jenny Agutter, Lisa Faulkner
Thriller - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Timothy West, Neil Morrissey, Tara Fitzgerald, Annette Crosbie, Pauline Quirke, Rob Brydon, Denise Van Outen, John Thomson, Kevin Whately, David Suchet
Production Year: 2002 - Thriller - Director: K.C. Bascombe - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring: Jesse James, Rachel Skarsten, Charles Powell, Linda Purl, Kevin Zegars
Gave you a VH rating. Shame you didn't enjoy the film much; I like it a lot. Ah well.
torr 26.06.2005 19:59
A most thorough and interesting review. I don't know if you've read the book or seen earlier film versions. My view is that Minghella, in trying to update the story for more contemporary resonances actually overcomplicates it and loses some of the sinister and stark simplicity of Highsmith's original concept. Homosexuality, for instance; although it is possible to read homosexual overtones into the original (and Highsmith herself was a Lesbian, of course) it is certainly not an overt let alone an important theme. Plein Soleil, with Alain Delon as Ripley, is in my view the best movie interpretation. Ripley's Game, with John Malkovich, is also an interesting take on Ripley, although again somewhat removed from the original. Duncan
Andy.mack 11.06.2005 11:12
I've still not seen this just yet, although it is quite high up my list of films to see
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Advantages: Great actors given meaty roles and plenty of screen-time, Mann's trademark visual style, intensely dramatic in parts Disadvantages: Altering the outcome to the opposite of what really happened was a strange move, the 151-minute running time
EnglishPatient 01.02.2001 (01.02.2001)
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Jun 10th, 2005
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