天才雷普利 The Talented Mr. Ripley review by Maitland McDonagh

Adapted from crime novelist Patricia Highsmith's second novel (it followed Strangers on a Train, which Alfred Hitchcock turned into one of his most hauntingly twisted films), Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a lushly seductive portrait of sociopathic ambition. On the surface, it looks like a fairly psychological thriller, but it's not especially interested in conventional scares: There's no stalking, no late-night phone calls, no jumping as things leap out of the dark. Tom Ripley is the movie's bogeyman, but he's a sad little bogeyman, so lost and left out that it's hard not to feel sorry for him until it becomes clear just how conscienceless he really is.

When we first meet Ripley (Matt Damon), he's playing piano on a swank Manhattan balcony, accompanying a well-bred vocalist. It's there that he meets wealthy shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), who assumes that Ripley went to Yale with his son Dickie (Jude Law) Ripley doesn't see fit to explain that his school blazer is actually borrowed and has a proposition. Dickie, explains Mr. Greenleaf, is a bit of a reprobate; he's in Italy spending his allowance and lazing around on the beach. Greenleaf is willing to pay Ripley to try to persuade Dickie to come back to New York, and Ripley needs no convincing. He's living in a cold-water flat in the meat-packing district and working in the men's room at Carnegie Hall; an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe sounds like a hell of a deal. Once in sunny Mongibello, the small town south of Naples where Dickie has established himself, Ripley sets about insinuating himself into the younger Greenleaf's golden life. He befriends Dickie's well-bred girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), an aspiring writer; immerses himself in Dickie's favorite music, jazz; and takes to the hedonistic lifestyle as though to the manner born. Ripley wants to be Dickie's friend. He wants Dickie. He wants to be like Dickie. In fact, what he really wants is to be Dickie. And while most people are content to daydream about assuming the mantle of someone else's life, Ripley is willing to do something about it.

The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed in 1960 by French director Rene Clement as Purple Noon, and Alain Delon's stunningly handsome and amoral Ripley set the standard to which all other Ripleys must aspire. Damon does astonishingly well in this regard, hewing closer to the book (neither Damon nor Minghella shies away from its homoerotic undertones) and turning in what almost amounts to a dual role. In horn-rimmed glasses, a careless haircut and slightly nerdish clothes, Damon is believably awkward and captures the slight hesitance of the perpetual outsider, always on the alert for a veiled offense. When he makes himself over in the image of Dickie, acquiring a warm tan, tucking his glasses into a pocket, aping the style and mannerisms of the idle classes, Damon is as golden as Law, who hasn't looked this good since Gattaca (coincidentally, another tale of purloined identities and suffocating social strata). Sure, it's a variation on the spinster librarian whipping off her glasses, letting down her hair and becoming Marilyn Monroe, but in a story built on themes of mutable identity and social artifice, it's a thoroughly appropriate stunt.

In one of the film's most stunning sequences, Mongibello's annual celebration of the Virgin Mary which features a statue of the holy mother rising from the sea atop the shoulders of some brawny locals is disrupted when the body of a drowned girl floats dreamily to the water's surface. It's clear here and elsewhere that Minghella was aiming for the look of late-'50s Hitchcock films, glossy and glamorous and tainted with underlying corruption that won't stay hidden; he succeeds more often than he fails. Minghella is generally intensely faithful to Highsmith; even when he tinkers with characters and plot points, he never tampers with the cynical sympathies that make her books feel so bracing and undated. Ripley is a sociopath, ruthless and self-centered almost beyond comprehension. But because Highsmith establishes so firmly the fundamental unfairness of a world in which favors are bestowed on some and denied to others without regard to talent, personal discipline, goodness or decency, it's hard not to empathize. And unlike Clement (who was, presumably, constrained by the moral temper of his times), Minghella doesn't undermine her clear-eyed understanding that good is not always rewarded, and wickedness frequently goes unpunished.

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