Dear Cinephiles,

Ever since I started watching movies – I have loved the sleight of hand that cinema produces – where we’re able to live vicariously through another person’s life and experience their adventures – their successes and their tribulations. We live in other people’s lives. Who hasn’t seen “La Dolce Vita” and dreamt they are Marcello Rubini with Sylvia on the Fontana di Trevi?

Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) takes that idea to a whole new level. Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) doesn’t just envy the fabulous life of the young heir he meets – he actually wants to take over the other man’s identity. Tom Ripley is immediately relatable. He’s young – and eager to find his footing in the world and invent himself – yet he’s poor and hasn’t gotten any breaks. So he finesses his way into the life of Dickie Greenleaf – who is everything Ripley aspires to be. As the movie progresses – you start to understand that the main character you’ve been rooting for is actually a sociopath – a monster – but by then you’re utterly seduced. There are twists and turns that should not be revealed.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley” is based on the first book of a series written by Patricia Highsmith. She wrote “Strangers on A Train” which became the famous film by Hitchcock and “The Price of Salt” which was adapted into the movie “Carol” starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. Her stories are psychological thrillers that explore repressed sexuality as well as questions of identity.

The movie matches Ripley’s seduction – it takes place in the late 50s Italy. The costumes, cinematography and music – are intoxicating. The opening credits are alluring – recalling the work of Saul Bass and Hitchcock – filled with jagged edges that cut through the face of Matt Damon who plays Ripley. Before the title card appears – we are quickly flashed many adjectives that could describe Ripley – finally settling with “talented.” Clever. Swiftly – and we’re still with credits – we are given the exposition. There is so much visual imagery in those beginning moments – blink and you miss. The introductory beats are as nimble and as seductive as our main character. “Thanks for filling in for me,” a friend tells Ripley. Clever indeed. Before we know it, Ripley is symbolically climbing up these steep stairs from where he lives – climbing into a chauffeured limo. Notice to the right of him – there is a butcher shop and there are meats hung on hooks. Perhaps a taste of things to come? Soon after – Ripley is in Italy rehearsing his Italian – learning how to say “This is my face.” Just a flash of ingenuity by director Mighella – one that he will keep throughout the film.

Minghella’s previous film was “The English Patient” which won Oscar for Best Picture in in 1996. That was as tricky an adaptation of a novel as this one. I admire this film much more. The cast is sublime. Matt Damon lost a lot of weight for the role – and he’s perfectly cast against type. This movie made a star out of Jude Law and he’s super sexy in this. I’ve never been fond of Gwyneth Paltrow yet she’s good in this. A young Cate Blanchett is unforgettable – and Philip Seymour Hoffman steals every scene he is in.

Marge Sherwood : Why is it when men play they always play at killing each other?

Love,
Roger

The Talented Mr. Ripley
Available to stream on Netflix until April 30th, and to rent on Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, Vudu and Google Play.

Directed by Anthony Minghella
Written by Patricia Highsmith (novel), Anthony Minghella (screenplay)
Starring: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman
139 minutes

Tom Ripley is a calculating young man who believes it’s better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. Opportunity knocks in the form of a wealthy U.S. shipbuilder who hires Tom to travel to Italy to bring back his playboy son, Dickie. Ripley worms his way into the idyllic lives of Dickie and his girlfriend, plunging into a daring scheme of duplicity, lies and murder.

About Writer and Director Anthony Minghella
Minghella was born January 6, 1954, in Ryde, Isle of Wight, England and was one of Britain’s most gifted and admired filmmakers; he won the Academy Award for best director for his third movie, The English Patient (1996), which also captured the best picture and seven other Oscars. After graduating from the University of Hull, Minghella taught there, contributed scripts to such television programs as Grange Hill and Inspector Morse, and wrote for the theatre. He was named most promising playwright by the London Theatre Critics Circle in 1984 and won the best new play award two years later for Made in Bangkok. In 1990 he made his directing debut with the poignant romantic comedy Truly Madly Deeply. The BAFTA-winning film was followed by Mr. Wonderful (1993), The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), which garnered five Oscar nominations, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s Play (2000), Cold Mountain (2003), which earned seven Oscar nominations, and Breaking and Entering (2006). He also was chairman (2003–08) of the British Film Institute; served as executive producer on such acclaimed films as Iris (2001), The Quiet American (2002), The Interpreter (2005), and Michael Clayton (2007); and in 2005 turned his hand to directing Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the English National Opera. Minghella, who was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2001, died in 2008 as a result of complications from neck surgery just hours before his last completed film, the made-for-TV The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (2008), was premiered.(britannica.com)

The Birth of a Character
Early one morning in the summer of 1952, Patricia Highsmith awoke in a room at the Albergo Miramare hotel in Positano, Italy. The 31-year-old author had been traveling through Europe with her girlfriend, Ellen Blumenthal Hill, and the two weren’t getting along. Leaving Hill in bed, Highsmith walked to the end of a balcony overlooking the beach. It’s not as if things weren’t going well for her—her novel Strangers on a Train had just been adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock. But the tumultuous relationship was taking a toll. As she gazed out at the sand, pulling on a cigarette, she watched “a solitary young man in shorts and sandals, with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach. There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease,” she recalled in a 1989 issue of Granta magazine. She started to wonder: “Had he quarreled with someone? What was on his mind?”

The intrigue stuck with her. Two years later, while living in a cottage rented from an undertaker in Lenox, Mass., Highsmith drew from that image as she began a new novel, about a man named Tom Ripley. Even then, she sensed that she was onto something special. “She considered [The Talented Mr. Ripley] ‘healthier’ and ‘handsomer’ than her other books at its ‘birth,’” Joan Schenkar writes in her excellent biography The Talented Miss Highsmith.

Highsmith’s instincts were correct: With the charming sociopath Ripley, she’d created a new type of character entirely. In five novels over the next four decades, he’d become not only her most acclaimed and memorable creation but the prototype for a new kind of antihero: the unlikable, immoral, cold-blooded killer we can’t help but like anyway. Ripley was a character so fully realized, so simultaneously compelling and disturbing, it seemed as if he were based on someone Highsmith knew intimately. In a sense, he was.(mentalfloss.com)

Italian Allure
The film’s lush and glam setting in ’50s-era Italy became an essential character, with the cast and crew filming on location in several cities to achieve the fictional (and idyllic) Italian seaside town of Mongibello, including Rome, Sicily and Naples. But it wasn’t an easy shoot, with production often only having one day at each location to get their shot, which were sometimes hundreds of miles apart. We drew a map and from one street to another I think it was [a distance of] three hundred miles,” Minghella once explained.

The coastal weather also didn’t cooperate, seemingly wanting to rain on the crew’s Italian parade at every opportunity. “One of the things that tormented us as filmmakers on the movie was we had to deliver this gorgeous Mediterranean world, this beautiful world of Southern Italy, and we could never get Italy to turn beautiful,” said Minghella. “We would divide the scenes up, often into words, and go out and get two or three words and then it would start to rain and we’d have to go back in again”

Alas, all of the work paid off, as the film leaves you dreaming of a European holiday.
(eonline.com)

Heartstrings
“Music is at the heart of the film. In adapting Particia Highsmiths marvelous and profoundly disturbing novel, it struck me that sound would more pungently and dynamically evoke the period in a film than the motif of painting that Highsmith uses in her book.”

Continues Minghella: “I thought about what was particular to the period, existentialism and jazz, and tried to construct an argument in the film between classicism and jazz. I love jazz but I like Bach a great deal as well, and I sort of parceled out these polarized positions to Ripley, who hates jazz, and to Dickie, who loathes classical music. When we say jazz we think of people improvising, whereas with classical music everything seems formal. Yet Bach was the great improviser.”

“I’ve played with the idea of who is the great improviser in the story. Dickie identifies himself as an improviser, someone who spends his day on a whim, while Ripley is characterized as stiff, formal. Eventually the film demonstrates that it’s Dickie who has the more conservative nature and that Ripley is the one who can genuinely, almost pathologically, improvise. That is his talent. Ripley is a master at it, the real anarchist and subverter.”

In effect, Minghella says the argument he constructed gave him an architecture, a structure in which the intricate ins and outs of the plot could unfold. (cinemareviw.com)