Reviewed by James Withers
(1/26/00)

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Director: Anthony Minghella
Screenplay: Anthony Minghella (based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith)

Cast: Matt Damon (Tom Ripley)
Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge Sherwood)
Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf)
James Rebhorn (Herbert Greenleaf)

The Talented Mr. Ripley is a guilty pleasure in our precarious political climate. With American presidential candidates from both parties courting gay voters with sanitized rhetoric, it is almost unseemly to admire this well-structured movie. Like all sophisticated art, The Talented Mr. Ripley will be used by some to reinforce their dubious political agendas, but even if the film is unjustly used as billy club against gays and lesbians, you should not pass this film by. There is no film in recent memory that deals better with desire and the terrible feeling of alienation from the worlds we learn to covet.

Tom Ripley's life, as he says in a voice-over that opens the film, is changed irrevocably when he borrows a Princeton jacket from a friend. Tom is a piano player, and he is hired to play at the party of Herbert Greenleaf. Tom, a bathroom boy at the opera, is impressed with the life he sees at this party, a life of ease, comfort, money, and culture. He is so impressed that he decides to make this life his own. He tells Mr. Greenleaf that he is a Princeton graduate, and that he knows Mr. Greenleaf's son Dickie (Jude Law). Dickie is in Italy living with Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), but Mr. Greenleaf wants his son to return to the States. Tom is asked to go to Italy to convince Dickie that it is now time for Dickie to give up his life and become "responsible."

Tom's acceptance of the assignment, and his reconfiguration of himself at the start of the film (watch his careful, and serious, jazz education), seem out of bounds, but an examination of his life makes this desire for a "new" Tom as natural as breathing. Tom is on the fringes of the palatial life. In his job at the opera house he sees men -- who disregard his very presence -- who are at ease with the world because the world is theirs. When he goes home to his basement apartment with its leaking water and paper-thin walls, he is surrounded by neither beauty nor ease. Tom is a grunt, an anonymous foot soldier on life's stage, and an offer to elevate that status would be foolhardy to dismiss.

However, when Tom meets Dickie he realizes two things: a) he is passionately in love with Dickie; and b) he is not from Dickie's world, nor will he be accepted without a history of money. Dickie represents the best and worst of what money allows. On one hand, he is enthusiastic, caring, and energetic (look at Dickie's joy when he is at jazz clubs), but on the other hand he is cruelly dismissive. In many ways, Dickie is the film equivalent to Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby: careless, uncaring, and egotistical. When Tom is no longer entertaining (Tom's ability to mimic is uncanny), Dickie wants him gone. Tom, however, will not be denied so easily. He is committed to his love for Dickie, and his love for the world Dickie is a part of. This dual love is so compelling that Tom is willing to do anything to extend both, even if it means turning into an "ideal" Dickie (something the talented Tom pulls off with jazz-like precision).

It is here, in the combustible worlds of desire and class, that The Talented Mr. Ripley turns into a portentous tale of Tom's ascent. Tom becomes part of the class he has desired, and he becomes a "perfect" Dickie; however, he pays a price. While this price might be intolerable, as the last scene indicates, it is a price Tom is willing to pay. And it is this motif, a motif that points to the depths we are willing to go to become what we so want, that makes The Talented Mr. Ripley much larger than the small rhetoric of politicians.