Ciao, Dickie: A Review of “The Talented Mr. Ripley”

Director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella’s rendering of the 1955 Patricia Highsmith novel is at once a thoughtful character study, a faithful period piece, a subtle cautionary tale, a paean to the beauty of Italy, and an entertaining thriller. Mr. Minghella usually spends three to four years working on a film; The Talented Mr. Ripley feels like a life’s work.

Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) has great taste, but he is poor and without prospects in New York. He is indeed talented, however: Tom’s an expert in “forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody,” as well as a clever schemer and a quick thinker. And he plays a mean Johann Sebastian Bach on the piano. He uses these skills to get cozy with shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf who gives Tom a thousand dollars and a first-class ticket on a Cunard liner to sail to Italy and bring his prodigal son Dickie (Jude Law) home.

Italy is the great seductress for the likes of Dickie Greenleaf and other scions of wealthy American industrialists, including his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), an aspiring novelist. Thanks to the generous allowance regularly sent by his father, Dickie owns a beautiful sailboat, rents a luxurious Italian villa, and leads the life of a privileged bohemian, traveling regularly to Rome, taking ski trips to Cortina, and buying expensive clothes and jewellery.

Minghella has gone to great lengths to create a realistic impression of Italy a dozen years after the end of the war. “That period in Italy…was known as ‘Il Boom’, that time of change, and so I’ve tried to sit the film on this rubble of the war and then this new layer going on which has scooters – Vespas – new clothes, fashion, style, people with money….” To help him evoke this period Minghella studied Italian films of the 1950’s, especially those of Federico Fellini.

And then there is the gorgeous Italian landscape; the director and crew spent months filming all over the country capturing its unique natural and man-made beauty for the movie. Producer William Horberg says, “The film is really a celebration of Italy; Italy is a character in the film.”

In The Talented Mr. Ripley the seduced is also the seducer: the charismatic Dickie has a dangerous way with the Italian women.

Tom is also seduced by Dickie – by his tanned masculine beauty, his effortless charm, his high-flying lifestyle; there is clearly a homo-erotic element to this attraction. Ripley uses all his talents and his cunning to insinuate himself into Dickie’s life, while the heir to the Greenleaf fortune casually uses Tom as both playmate and servant.

The film also faithfully evokes the popular music of that era, “the Blue Note, cool jazz sound of the fifties.” Dickie is a jazz lover and an amateur musician – he plays the alto sax. One of the most memorable scenes in the film – and there are many, many memorable scenes – takes place in a dingy jazz club in Naples. Tom has impressed Dickie with his studiously gathered collection of jazz records and has thus been invited to one of his new idol’s favourite haunts where Dickie sometimes sits in with the band. Dickie is on stage with his sax and is singing a popular tune of the fifties, “Tu Vuo’ Fa L’Americano,” with his friend Fausto and a blazing hot band. The audience is wild with enthusiasm – for the music, for the sexy American – and Tom is infatuated; when Fausto calls him up to the stage to join in the singing, he is hooked beyond redemption.

But as Ripley becomes increasingly covetous of Dickie’s attention and Dickie’s things, the rose soon loses its blush; Dickie grows tired of Tom’s neediness and the social chasm between the two men yawns darkly. Marge has experienced the disappointment Tom now endures. She tells him: “The thing with Dickie, it’s like the sun shines on you and it’s glorious, and then he forgets you and it’s very, very cold.”

But Tom has had a taste of the life and cannot easily let it go. Dickie proposes a final trip for the two of them, to the jazz festival at San Remo, but during an outing on a small boat near the resort they get into an argument, and Dickie says the cruellest things yet to Tom. A fight ensues and Ripley ends up beating his would-be lover to death with an oar. And it is at this point that Tom gives his talents their full virtuosic rein, impersonating Dickie, forging his signature to get access to his ample funds, and finally living the life he has been dreaming of for months. He makes his way to Rome, skilfully balancing his two identities, fooling everyone except Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman, perfect), Dickie’s cynical, worldly friend. Tom ends up killing him too.

Eventually, however, Tom is pushed into a corner and escapes to Venice and into the arms of the gay British musician Peter Smith-Kingsley. I will not reveal the climax of the film; suffice it to say that it is both complex and satisfying.

What a wonderful cast Mr. Minghella has assembled. Matt Damon is clumsily charming and eerily restrained as Tom Ripley, while Jude Law oozes charm, charisma, and casual snobbishness. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a matchless upper-crust sleazeball and an emotional bully. Of Gwyneth Paltrow, Minghella says, “I feel like she’s this tormented and unheard voice in the film saying, ‘He’s lying, he’s lying! Don’t believe him’ and she does it so brilliantly. Her journey from being this sunny Gwyneth Paltrow that we know and love at the beginning of this film, gradually getting cooler and cooled and more heartbroken and drier and more brittle – it’s an amazing journey that she goes on….” And as Meredith, a character that was not actually in the Highsmith novel, Cate Blanchett beautifully evokes a kind of classy loneliness barely disguised by a self-effacing exterior.

One of the great achievements of Mr. Minghella and of The Talented Mr. Ripley is to render the character of Tom Ripley – deceiver, fraud, thief, and murderer – sympathetic to the audience throughout the movie. “Always my process has been to try and find a way of humanizing Ripley so that the audience, who is with this character for every scene of the film, can inhabit all the blessings and catastrophes that fall on Ripley.” Producer Sidney Pollack: “He’s a guy that’s done some bad things. But you do not want him to be caught.”

The detail of every scene of this film is thoughtfully and lovingly placed so that the viewer – this viewer anyway – wants to freeze each frame and linger over it awhile before moving on to the next in delighted anticipation. Mr. Minghellla has given us a complex and fascinating film, one which I will never tire of watching.

Image Credit

“Talented Mr. Ripley Poster” Wikipedia

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