The Talented Mr. Ripley (film)

The Talented Mr. Ripley is a 1999 American psychological thriller film written and directed by Anthony Minghella. An adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel of the same name, the film stars Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf, Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge Sherwood, Cate Blanchett as Meredith Logue, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie Miles.

The novel was previously filmed twice. In 1957, a one-hour version was produced for the TV anthology series Studio One, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, though no recording survives. In 1960, a full-length film version was released, titled Purple Noon (French: Plein soleil) and directed by René Clément, starring Alain Delon in his first major role. Claude Chabrol’s 1968 film Les biches uses many elements of Highsmith’s novel but switches the gender of the main characters.

The Talented Mr. Ripley was a critical and commercial success. It received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Law.

Plot

While working at a fancy party as a pianist, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is approached by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf, who believes that Ripley attended Princeton with his son, Dickie (Jude Law), because Ripley is wearing a borrowed Princeton jacket. Greenleaf gives him a tour of his shipyard and recruits Ripley to travel to Italy to persuade Dickie to return home, offering him a $1000 bonus and all expenses paid. After a first class ocean liner voyage, Ripley pretends to be Dickie in the Italian ship terminal and strikes up a friendship with an American socialite, Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett).

In the fictional sea side village of Mongibello, Ripley befriends Dickie and his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), claiming to be his former Princeton classmate. Ripley enjoys Dickie’s extravagant lifestyle, and becomes obsessed with Dickie himself. Eventually, Dickie tires of him and starts spending time with his patrician, socialite friend Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who treats Ripley with contempt. The night they return from Rome, Dickie catches Ripley dressed in his clothes and dancing in front of a mirror, which disturbs him. When Dickie impregnates a local woman, he rejects her and she drowns herself. Only Ripley knows what happened, and he promises to keep it a secret. After Dickie’s father cuts off Ripley’s travel funds, Dickie cancels a trip to Venice and tells Ripley they should part ways, but offers to take him on a final trip to San Remo. They argue on a small boat, and Dickie says he has had enough of Ripley and is going to marry Marge. Ripley insinuates that Dickie is rejecting him because he is afraid of the feelings they have developed for each other. They struggle, and Ripley kills Dickie with an oar. He takes Dickie’s belongings and scuttles the boat.

Realizing that people mistake him for Dickie, Ripley decides to assume his identity. He forges a letter to Marge, convincing her that Dickie has left her to live in Rome. He creates the illusion that Dickie is still alive by checking into one hotel as Dickie and another as himself, creating an exchange of communications between the two. Through forgery, he is able to draw on Dickie’s allowance, which allows him to live lavishly. He runs into Meredith, who still knows him as Dickie, in the Gucci shop in Rome. His ruse is threatened when Marge arrives in Rome and Tom runs into her at the opera he is attending with Meredith and her family. He rushes Meredith out on a pretext then breaks it off with her to prevent himself from being exposed. Freddie shows up at Ripley’s apartment looking for Dickie. When the landlady addresses Ripley as Dickie, Freddie realizes the fraud. Ripley bludgeons him to death and disposes of the body. Ripley is forced to create stories to avoid the police and Marge, who are looking for Dickie. Realizing that the police suspect Dickie of murdering Freddie, Ripley forges a suicide note, with “Dickie” claiming responsibility for Freddie’s death. Ripley then travels to Venice, where he reencounters Marge’s friend, Peter Smith-Kingsley (first meeting him at the Roman opera house), and they become very close. Peter acts as a translator for a meeting with the police and Ripley panics when he hears that the Roman police are coming because Inspector Roverini knew him as Dickie. He is relieved to see that it is a different officer who did not know him as Dickie.

Dickie’s father travels to Italy to meet with the police, bringing along a private detective, Alvin MacCarron. Ripley prepares to kill Marge when she discovers Dickie’s rings in his possession and begins to deduce what has been going on, but Peter interrupts them. Greenleaf dismisses Marge’s suspicions, and MacCarron reveals to Ripley that the police are convinced that Dickie, who had a history of violence, murdered Freddie before killing himself. MacCarron further indicates that out of appreciation for Ripley’s loyalty to Dickie—and to assure Ripley’s silence—Greenleaf intends to bequeath a portion of Dickie’s trust fund to him.

Free and clear of his crimes, Ripley boards a ship to Greece with Peter; it is implied that they are now lovers. Ripley is surprised to encounter Meredith, who knows him as Dickie and also knows Peter socially. He kisses her and promises to talk later. In his cabin, Peter tells Ripley he saw him kiss Meredith and Ripley makes weak excuses. Ripley realizes that he has to kill Peter, as Meredith is traveling with her family and would be missed. Ripley admits that he lied about who he is, and laments that he will always be alone because of what he has done. Sobbing, he strangles Peter and returns to his cabin, alone.

Cast

Casting

The Guardian reported in 2000 that Leonardo DiCaprio declined the offer to play Ripley before Damon was cast in the role. Minghella cast Matt Damon after seeing his performance in Good Will Hunting, because he felt the actor had the right mix of “credibility and warmth and generosity” to engage the audience and help them understand how Ripley “thinks and operates”. The character of Meredith Logue, not present in the novel, was added by Minghella with Cate Blanchett in mind. He was “entranced” with Blanchett after meeting with her and surprised that she was actually interested in playing the small part; Minghella went on to write more scenes for the character to expand her role.

Minghella happened to see the dailies from a film his wife Caroline Choa was producing at the time, The Wisdom of Crocodiles (1998), starring Jude Law. The director was impressed with Law’s performance and offered him the role of Dickie; in his “insane arrogance”, as Law put it, he initially refused, because he did not wish to play a “pretty boy”. After learning of the cast Minghella was assembling and coming to understand that he would be “in safe hands” with the director, Law later accepted the part.

Production

Apart from the beginning scenes filmed in New York City, the movie was shot entirely on location in Italy. The cliffside resort town of Positano and various villages on the islands of Ischia and Procida, near Naples, were used to represent the fictional town of “Mongibello”. Frequent and unpredictable rain hampered the production, with Minghella stating that “we had to deliver this gorgeous Mediterranean world, this beautiful world of Southern Italy, and we could never get Italy to turn beautiful…We would divide the scenes up, often into words, and go out and get two or three words and then it would start to rain and we’d have to go back in again.” The scenes taking place in San Remo were actually filmed in Anzio, a resort town near Rome. Famous locations included the Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps and Piazza di Spagna in Rome, and the Caffè Florian in the Piazza San Marco, Venice.

To prepare for the role of Ripley, Damon lost 30 pounds and learned to play the piano. Jude Law gained weight and learned to play the saxophone for his character; he also broke a rib when he fell backward while filming the murder scene in the boat.

Music

Reception

Critical response

The Talented Mr. Ripley received generally positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 83%, based on reviews from 132 critics, with an average rating of 7.33/10. The consensus reads, “With Matt Damon’s unsettling performance offering a darkly twisted counterpoint to Anthony Minghella’s glossy direction, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a suspense thriller that lingers.” On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 76/100 based on reviews from 35 critics, indicating “generally favorable” reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a “C+” grade.

Roger Ebert gave the film four-out-of-four stars, calling it “an intelligent thriller” that is “insidious in the way it leads us to identify with Tom Ripley … He’s a monster, but we want him to get away with it”. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Law’s performance: “This is a star-making role for the preternaturally talented English actor Jude Law. Beyond being devastatingly good-looking, Mr. Law gives Dickie the manic, teasing powers of manipulation that make him ardently courted by every man or woman he knows”. Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-” rating, and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote: “Damon is at once an obvious choice for the part and a hard sell to audiences soothed by his amiable boyishness … the facade works surprisingly well when Damon holds that gleaming smile just a few seconds too long, his Eagle Scout eyes fixed just a blink more than the calm gaze of any non-murdering young man. And in that opacity we see horror”.

Charlotte O’Sullivan of Sight & Sound wrote, “A tense, troubling thriller, marred only by problems of pacing (the middle section drags) and some implausible characterisation (Meredith’s obsession with Ripley never convinces), it’s full of vivid, miserable life”. Time named it one of the ten best films of the year and called it a “devious twist on the Patricia Highsmith crime novel”. James Berardinelli gave the film two and a half stars out of four, calling it “a solid adaptation” that “will hold a viewer’s attention”, but criticized “Damon’s weak performance” and “a running time that’s about 15 minutes too long.” Berardinelli compared the film unfavorably with the previous adaptation, Purple Noon, which he gave four stars. He wrote, “The remake went back to the source material, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. The result, while arguably truer to the events of Highsmith’s book, is vastly inferior. To say it suffers by comparison to Purple Noon is an understatement. Almost every aspect of René Clément’s 1960 motion picture is superior to that of Minghella’s 1999 version, from the cinematography to the acting to the screenplay. Matt Damon might make a credible Tom Ripley, but only for those who never experienced Alain Delon’s portrayal.”

In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “On balance, The Talented Mr. Ripley is worth seeing more for its undeniably delightful journey than its final destination. Perhaps wall-to-wall amorality and triumphant evil leave too sour an aftertaste even for the most sophisticated anti-Hollywood palate”. In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, “The Talented Mr. Ripley begins as an ingenious exposition of the great truth about charming people having something to hide: namely, their utter reliance on others. It ends up as a dismayingly unthrilling thriller and bafflingly unconvincing character study”. In her review for The Village Voice, Amy Taubin criticized Minghella as a “would-be art film director who never takes his eye off the box office, doesn’t allow himself to become embroiled in such complexity. He turns The Talented Mr. Ripley into a splashy tourist trap of a movie. The effect is rather like reading the National Enquirer in a café overlooking the Adriatic”.

Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has cited The Talented Mr. Ripley as one of his favorite films of all time. He hired its composer, Gabriel Yared, to write a theme for his own film, The Lives of Others, and its cinematographer, John Seale, to work on his second feature, The Tourist.

Accolades

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)