Flashback, December 1999: ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ Neo-Hitchcockian Thriller, Opens

When  the psychological thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley opened in American theaters in December 1999, it seemed, on the surface, like old-fashioned entertainment out of the Fifties, with glamorous rising stars, lush on-location filming in the Mediterranean, and suspense that didn’t veer into geysers of blood.

Old-fashioned, but only up to a point. Certain aspects of the plot and characters wouldn’t have passed muster with the censors back then. Even Alfred Hitchcock, who directed an acclaimed adaptation of a prior novel by Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train, had to bow, at least to an extent, to restrictions set by the Production Code Administration.

The “Master of Suspense,” for instance, had to employ then-current Hollywood “code”—a male character’s obsession with personal appearance and a domineering mother—to suggest that one character was gay. And he could not allow a sympathetic character to resort to blackmail. But the passage of time and changes in social mores permitted a more complicated vision.

Did screenwriter-director Anthony Minghella in Ripley display the editing wizardry and offbeat humor so characteristic of Hitchcock? No. But he had the same obsession with apparel as a signifier of character, and a similar fascination with transgressiveness—in this case, a grifter-turned-serial killer.

Minghella wasn’t the first—and turned out not to be the last—to take a crack at Ripley: Rene Clement’s 1960 French version, Purple Noon, starred Alain Delon, while Netflix mounted an eight-part, black-and-white miniseries starring Andrew Scott that streamed earlier this year on Netflix.

What accounts for this material’s enduring appeal? It touches on motifs and themes that fascinate viewers: wealth, class, obsession, slippery identities, and “doubles”—characters who share traits with each other.

Binding it all together is an amoral villain so compelling that Highsmith ended up tracking his progress in five novels produced over three decades: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water.

In interviews, Highsmith refused to endorse the idea that her grifter-turned-murderer Tom Ripley was gay or bisexual.

But Ripley’s obsessive attachment to the privileged Dickie Greenleaf and his lack of feeling for any female character lend themselves to this interpretation, so Minghella wasn’t veering too far afield by rendering Tom’s sexuality more explicit.

The screenplay is at pains to increase viewers’ sympathy for and complicity in Tom’s crimes by giving him a motive besides simple avarice. 

At the same time, in contrast to the often heartless Highsmith, Minghella heightens the plight of women by making Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge less contemptuous of Tom and by inventing an entire new character in Cate Blanchette’s Meredith Logue.

The movie, while dispensing with the novel’s pointed allusion to Henry James’ The Ambassadors (another tale about an American dispatched by a wealthy family to bring their son home), retains the international setting and conflicts so characteristic of the expatriate writer.

This time, however, there’s a twist: the American venturing abroad, Ripley, is not an innocent, but an aesthete whose tastes are facilitated by his talents for mooching, forgery, impersonation, improvisation, and murder.

I can’t tell you all the articles I came across on the Web about Ripley’s sartorial style. It’s almost as if the public (and certainly the fashion industry) is as besotted by the la dolce vita lifestyle of Dickie Greenleaf as Tom Ripley was.

Ripley was nominated for five Oscars, including best supporting actor (Law), adapted screenplay (Minghella), art direction, costume design, and original score. But it should have received more nods, and it has aged well, with some of the best performances ever turned in by Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

In the mid-Fifties, Highsmith anticipated a tendency that became overwhelming within a few decades: the American susceptibility to grifters adept at reinventing themselves.

 More than four decades later, Minghella masterfully captured the utter emptiness of all this frenzied, and criminal, striving: a villain who confesses, to the only person who begins to sound his depths, why he feels so alone even now: “I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”