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Movie Review: 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' Believe it or not: Matt Damon is a first-rate conniver in 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' Friday, December 24, 1999 By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor
Who among us hasn't wanted to be someone else -- someone smarter, wealthier, better looking, more famous, less troubled, at peace?
Be careful what you wish for. No one is perfect. If you're smart, are you considered a geek? Are the rich loved for themselves or their money? Can famous folks have a private life? What happens when beauty fades? Everyone has problems. Only dead people have no worries -- so far as we know.
In "The Talented Mr. Ripley," we can't even be sure of that. It's the story of a man who believes that "it's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody." So he attaches himself to the people after whom he aspires -- rich, pretty, free of obligation to anyone or anything. If he notices they are also vacuous, he doesn't let on. These people are all surface -- fake humans.
But for all his talents, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) doesn't contemplate life so deeply. He just reacts to his environment, insinuating himself into other people's lives with a patina of charm like that of a favorite pet. People don't catch on to the calculation beneath the seeming callowness. Maybe it's so instinctive that he barely realizes it himself -- until it is too late, and his survival depends on it.
Damon fits the role as if it were written for him. With that shock of blond hair, dazzling smile and boyish face (here made even more adolescent with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses), he comes off as an all-American type. But his characters are seldom that simple: the working-class prodigy of "Good Will Hunting," the poker wizard of "Rounders," the one-for-all soldier of "Saving Private Ryan," the irreverent angel of death of "Dogma."
And who is Tom Ripley? It's a case of mistaken identity even early on, when he's playing piano at a society function wearing a borrowed Princeton jacket that catches the eye of Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn), a wealthy shipbuilder. He assumes Tom knows his son, Dickie (Jude Law), who also went to Princeton. Sure I do, Tom lies. Herbert asks Tom to go to Italy (expenses paid, of course) and bring wastrel Dickie back home. Who wouldn't say yes?
But who would go to the lengths that Ripley does? Among other things, he makes himself a jazz expert because Dickie loves jazz. Making himself something he's not appears to be Mr. Ripley's chief talent. When he first meets the well-tanned Dickie and his blond beauty Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) on a beach in Italy, they remark how bleached white he looks. Good thing he took that cram course in jazz.
But even Tom can't fake it any longer than Dickie's attention span will allow. And then what? The table is set when Tom first arrives in Italy. For no good reason, he introduces himself as Dickie to an American girl named Meredith (Cate Blanchett). It won't be the last time he assumes the other man's identity.
The fun comes in watching Tom burrow deeper into the spider's web in which he appears to have trapped himself and then marveling at his ability to escape. We have no reason to be rooting for him. Dickie may be a frivolous cad but Tom turns out to be something much worse. Yet we come to admire the sheer artistry of his deception, his ability to play two roles at once and to change on the fly. And we get a chill at just how far he must go in the end.
Screenwriter-director Anthony Minghella, adapting the novel by Patricia Highsmith, excels at creating the allure of Dickie's world, which seems almost to be tinged with a golden hue. It's a richly textured, almost classical type of filmmaking that feeds off the era in which it is set, the late 1950s, and echoes a certain type of Hitchcock film. Highsmith wrote the novel "Strangers on a Train," and that movie shares a few themes with "The Talented Mr. Ripley."
As Dickie, Jude Law exudes the character's allure -- charming, seemingly carefree, certainly handsome enough but also capable of leaving you out in the cold. As Marge, Paltrow is to a large degree little more than arm candy -- enough so that her realization of what has happened becomes the icing on the irony. Blanchett's Meredith is more of a plot device than a character, but this astonishing actress all but succeeds in imbuing her with flesh and blood. And Phillip Seymour Hoffman cuts like a stiletto as the cynic who sees through Ripley in a flash.
It's a cast of real somebodies in a movie that, like its title character, takes on substance mostly through its style.
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Rating: R, for violence, language and brief nudity.