The Talented Mr. Ripley
Review by Hank Cochrane
Archived Reviews

Written and directed by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Patrica Highsmith; Running time: 139 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Matt Damon (Tom Ripley), Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Freddy Miles), Gwneth Paltrow (Marge Sherwood), Cate Blanchett  (Meredith Logue)

Anthony Minghella’s (The English Patient) The Talented Mr. Ripley is a seductive portrait of the diabolical and unlovable social climbing chameleon, Thomas Ripley (Matt Damon).  In this adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, we meet an array of incisively drawn and well-acted characters in a seeming maze of plot turns.  The English actor Jude Law plays the handsome and narcissistic dilettante, Dickie Greenleaf, whose charisma exudes a homoerotic magnetism, and the talented Mr. Tom Ripley immediately develops a schoolboy crush on Mr. Greenleaf.  But when Dickie rejects Tom and his sexual overtures, Tom’s passion spills over into a psychological obsession of violence and despair. And so the story of the Talented Mr. Ripley begins to unfold.

Minghella is excellent at capturing the quintessence of the lives of these privileged, who seem to be simply wafting through the time and place of 1958 New York and Southern Italy. Mr. Ripley, while not a natural born member of the privileged class, is an astonishingly quick study and easily assumes the airs of wandering socialite. At every turn you think that Tom will be exposed, but his deceit so deepens and sharpens the darkness of his criminal mastermind that he confidently steers his way out of the even most suffocatingly tight situations.

 Gwyenth Paltrow plays Marge, Dickie’s upper-class fiancé and the displaced woman. She and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who plays the snobbishly repugnant Freddy, appear to be among the few who can see beyond Ripley’s handsome façade. Paltrow is terrific given her small role and is the most wholly sympathetic character in the film. Whereas, when the unsympathetic Freddy falls to Ripley’s wrath, this reviewer couldn’t have been more pleased. Cate Blanchett also appears as one of the itinerant American socialites. As she keeps crossing Ripley’s path of deceit, her presence threatens to expose him.

 The film does have one glaring problem. Though all the elements of terrific storytelling and filmmaking are present here—including the cinematography, which is unaffectedly good in parading out the seductive paradises of Italy’s landscape as simply part of the story— Minghella goes on too long in telling Mr. Ripley’s story. The final scene in the movie is overwrought and leaves little to the imagination. The violence of it seems more gratuitous than central to the story. By then, the heartache and despair of even the complicated and psychologically damaged Mr. Ripley begins to get boring. Clearly, Mr. Ripley is a man starved for affection—in fact, Matt Damon looks suspiciously lean in his portrayal of Mr. Ripley, as if to suggest just this starvation. Mr. Ripley is a man who couldn’t know love if he found it. And that point is obvious long before the movie is over. In the end, the Talented Mr. Ripley is a terrific piece of filmmaking and well worth the price of admission. But what frustrates this reviewer is how the filmmaker did not seem to realize that several times before the final scene, the story was already over.

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