The Talented Mr. Ripley
Paramount/Miramax, 1999
Directed by Anthony Minghella

$$

In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a sort-of 1950s version of Andrew Cunanan: a young homosexual man who tries to pass himself off as a member of high society and whose hobbies include murder.

Ripley's talent it seems, is his supposed ability to impersonate others, both through voice and appearance and through forging their signatures, though throughout the movie, every identity he assumes simply ends up looking and sounding a lot like Matt Damon. The deception begins when shipping magnet Herbert Greenleaf mistakes Ripley, a lowly Big Apple piano tuner, for a Princeton grad. Greenleaf assumes Ripley is a friend of his playboy son, Dickie (Jude Law), who's run off to Italy to be a jazz saxophonist -- and he decides to pay Tom to sail off to Europe to talk his son into coming back. Instead of setting the rich guy straight, Ripley jumps at the chance for a free trip.

Once in Italy, Ripley befriends Dickie and his fiancee, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and manages to entwine himself in their lives. Before long, Tom develops a doomed crush on Dickie. Jealousy turns to evil doing -- and Tom decides that if he can't have Dickie, he'll bump him off and steal his life. We're supposed to be fascinated by Ripley's desire to be "a fake somebody instead of a real nobody" -- but if you could really choose to be someone else, why would you choose to be a rich, stuck-up jerk?

Director Anthony Minghella, who made the tedious The English Patient is back to bore us again: he never makes Ripley's deceptions all that clever or interesting: instead we're left to wonder how all the supposedly intelligent characters around him can be so easily fooled. He also makes a critical mistake by not giving us a Tom Ripley we can root for. If Damon's character weren't so insane, desperate and pathetic, we might have enjoyed seeing the character kill off some rich swine. Having failed at the script, the only talent Minghella seems to have is hiring top-notch technical folk who can make the people and scenery look great.

Looking good as about all the cast can do. The Talentless Ms. Paltrow plays an American for a change, but that doesn't stop her from putting on her faux British accent again anyway -- Gwynie, babe, that schtick is getting old. By contrast, Law, who is British, struggles to put on an American accent. (The role of Dickie is also an odd repeat of sorts for Law, who in the movie Gattaca, also plays an elite member of society who has his identity taken by another American heartthrob, Ethan Hawke.) The only one who manages to entertain is Philip Seymour Hoffman as a friend of Dickie's who almost gets in Tom's way.

By the way, if any of the plot details given above surprise you, it's probably because the studio -- assuming a mass audience wouldn't want to see a movie about a gay killer -- conveniently and cowardly left all references to homosexuality and murder out of the film's TV ads. But the subject matter really shouldn't bother John and Jane Public -- what should bother them is the fact that the movie is so lame.

(c) Copyright 2000