Ripley ends up infatuated with Dickie and his lifestyle and decides he literally wants Dickie's life, which is when things take a murderous turn. Like Hannibal Lecter or Donald Westlake's Parker, Tom Ripley is an amoral anti-hero who despite committing despicable acts, remains oddly likable.
This is one reason the character has received five movie adaptations over the decades, with Andrew Scott Sherlock currently attached to play Ripley in a Showtime adaptation. One thing to note is that every Tom Ripley film stands on its own, with no official connection to each other.
With that in mind, let's rank all five of The Talented Mr. Ripley movies, from worst to best. Based on Patricia Highsmith's second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground is the most obscure of the films, despite being the most recent. The story sees Ripley and his accomplices covering up the death of an acclaimed painter and having another artist produce similiar works to cash in. It is, most potently, a study of loneliness — that great taboo of a disease over which so much shame hangs, and that we still struggle as a society to address.
Ripley is both very overtly in love — and lust — with Dickie: this comes to a head in a candlelit, smoulderingly erotic scene in which a fully-clothed Ripley plays chess with an unclothed Dickie as he lounges in the bath, before asking if he can get in. Rewatching it now, it remains an exquisitely assembled and appointed piece of work. Then there is the casting.
Back then, after all, they represented the most gilded princelings of modern celebrity. Law, on the other side of the Atlantic, was one of the key players in the so-called Primrose Hill set. Law, especially, exudes a kind of privileged unselfconsciousness: on the flipside, as the Ripley-Dickie friendship disintegrates, he gives brilliant scowl, that captures the very essence of elitist contempt.
Damon, meanwhile, is revelatory. At the time, he was riding high off the back of Good Will Hunting as a Hollywood golden boy himself. Yet as Ripley, he manages to transform himself into someone both totally ordinary looking and painfully uncomfortable in his own skin, from his gummy, toothy grin onwards. It becomes a tale not just of loneliness, but much more obviously of queer loneliness — and one with a tragic arc. Minghella expanded a relatively minor character from the book, Peter Smith-Kingsley played by Jack Davenport , to make him into a love interest for Tom—everyone can tell, from the moment they make eye contact, that this affair is not going to end well for either of them, though we already know Tom makes it out alive.
Dickie is not given much of a neutral stance. When Dickie brushes off her attempts to talk, Silvana kills herself. In the book, it is Dickie who cautions Tom about being careful with other people. The pull of looking good is what Minghella understands. When Freddie finds the apartment Tom has been renting as Dickie, he immediately clocks it as one that Tom has decorated himself, insulting his bourgeois choices.
Whatever effort made, we hurt the people we love. We love the people who hurt us. Nobody answer that. His highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of them. Whether or not he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact—for any one else—explained. One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.
The desire to understand everything that makes a person compel our attention will ruin our capacity to experience it. This fact is often ignored in our endless conversations about what makes a protagonist different from a hero, and why we would want to watch people—be they con men, mob bosses, distant husbands, or terrible friends—do bad things. Asking why is a distraction from respecting charisma, an unexplainable phenomena that commands us to look regardless of morality, and often in direct defiance of it.
Tom knows this about Dickie, and we know this about Tom. Highsmith knew this about us, and Minghella knew what we needed to see.
Many of the most important scenes in Ripley are colored with natural light or its reflection. When Dickie and Tom take a small boat out, the sun high and bright, they squint at each other as much out of contempt as to protect their pupils. The impact of Tom Ripley, in style and character, has recently become a little more present. In real life, however, the resurgence of Ripley is most surprising when it is most obvious.
In February , The New Yorker published a long profile of the author and literary agent Dan Mallory, a man who wrote a commercially successful novel about assumed identities and suspicious neighbors; good-looking, charismatic, manipulative, and totally fraudulent, it seems he could not resist the most on-the-nose deceptions.
One of his most frequent lies was to say he had received a doctorate from Oxford, studying Patricia Highsmith and The Talented Mr. Other people have also captured our imaginations in their scams, which seemed to mostly revolve around proximity to people with more money and presumably better taste.
Despite some of what makes these scammers so funny or captivating, I am often left cold by their purported crimes. I still look for a certain level of elegance in their manner and marks. Most of our contemporary scammers lack the glamour of a Highsmith antihero. Maybe future generations will find that to be as charming as forging signatures or steaming stolen suits. Through deep, complex characters and situations rich with double meaning, Anthony Minghella has turned Patricia Highsmith's original novel into a cinematic masterpiece.
What follows is a complex, disturbing and fascinating expose of a man ingratiating himself into the lives of Dickie, his girlfriend Marge and high society on the whole The main reason why The Talented Mr. Ripley works so well is that it's central characters are deep labyrinths that beg to explored and analysed.
Every scene is rich with double meaning and character interactions that exist under the surface of the drama we are seeing on screen. The character of Tom Ripley is a true masterpiece of characterisation indeed. This sociopath, that would rather be "a pretend somebody than a real nobody" is a myriad of contradictions and muddled personalities.
His actions are always amoral and through his lies and deception, it is obvious that he doesn't care at all for anyone around him. However, despite this; we are still able to feel for him through his tribulations.
The story is told in such a way that it is difficult to feel for any of the other characters and all of our sympathies lie with the talented Tom Ripley. This puts the audience in a strange situation, as we're used to hating the antagonist and feeling for the protagonist, but this film turns that on it's head, and to great effect.
The film is helped implicitly by the fact that it's one of the most professionally made films ever to make it onto the screen. Every scene, every action, every line uttered is done with the greatest assurance and nothing at all in the film appears to be there by accident or out of place. The way that the characters interact with each other and their surroundings is always believable and we never question anything that is shown on screen. Anthony Minghella's direction is more than solid, and this is helped by the stunning photography, courtesy of 's Italy.
Many a film has benefited from Italy's landscape, and this is one of them. This is all great, but it's the performances that put the final finishing touch on this amazing masterclass of film-making.
As mentioned, the talented Mr Damon takes the lead role and completely makes it his own. He often gets coupled with his friend, Ben Afleck, when it comes to acting; but this is very unfair as Damon is one of today's brightest stars. Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow make up the other two leads.
I'm not the biggest fan of either of these two stars, but both, like Damon, give performances here that will always be associated with their personalities. Cate Blanchett has a small role, but the real plaudits for the smaller performances go to the brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who steals every scene he's in.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is one stunning piece of film.
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