Cinema
The Talented Mr Ripley (15, selected cinemas)
The making of Law
Mark Steyn
In motion pictures, adaptation is the art of compression. The novel has too many characters, too much dialogue, too many scenes, too much backstory, too many details. So you combine characters, trim the dialogue, throw out scenes, skip the backstory, eliminate the details. Having done the conventional thing in knocking The English Patient into shape, Anthony Minghella apparently began work on his next film with his rule-book upside down: to Patricia Highsmith's lean, economical, matter-of-fact novel, Minghella has added characters, expanded speeches, complicat- ed the relationships and decorated the story with a million more details. If you've seen the previous film version of The Tal- ented Mr Ripley, Rene Clement's Purple Noon (1960), don't worry: Minghella's take is so different that watching one movie pro- vides no clue as to what will happen in the other.
Both, of course, revolve around High- smith's original premise: Tom Ripley is an impoverished outsider who comes within the orbit of the glamorous Dickie Green- leaf in 1950s Italy, and decides to steal his identity. The novel begins with Dickie's dad, a shipping magnate, following Tom into a bar, having been told by mutual acquaintances that this fellow knows his son. The film, by contrast, begins with Tom at an upscale art-song recital playing the piano • in a borrowed Princeton jacket, which leads Dickie's dad to assume the personable young accompanist was at col- lege with his son. Both openings set in motion the same train of events: Tom is hired by Mr Greenleaf to go to Italy and persuade Dickie to come home but instead ingratiates himself and joins him living la vie boheme on the beach at Mongibello. But Minghella's seems defter and more precise, and leaves Highsmith's reading like a first draft.
On the other hand, one neat detail can lead to all kinds of complications. Is it such a good idea to make Tom Ripley a recital- level classical pianist? Does it make sense to show him working in the men's room of a concert hall and sneaking on stage to tin- kle the ivories after the show's ended? Minghella's talented Mr Ripley is, indeed, talented — a poorly connected artist who can't get a break. Highsmith's talented Mr Ripley has no talents other than an effort- less ability to lie, forge, impersonate: if he could do anything else, he'd be doing it, but he can't, so he uses the only skills he has. You'd have thought it would be Tom's cool nihilism that would commend him to contemporary audiences, but the long-hair keyboard stuff is the first sign that Minghella is rebuilding and humanising Ripley, making him a working stiff and a gifted musician and a sympathetic soul, whose penchant for killing ultimately turns, very literally, into a cry for help.
The director's other musical idea is inge- nious. Instead of Dickie passing his days in Mongibello painting, he's now a jazz-crazy saxophonist. Going to Europe to paint is a postwar cliché, and so's jazz, but music is a more filmic texture than canvas. Hearing that Dickie digs the hep-cats, Tom, the classical guy, bones up on the subject. 'You can't even tell if it's a man or a woman,' he complains, as Chet Baker sings 'My Funny Valentine'. This is a marvellous pairing: 'It's a rough area, we get a lot of drive-by shootings.' Tom Ripley is the great improviser and Jazz is the great improvisatory art form. What better way to show Tom's range than to let him fake jazz? He's only just got off the boat and befriended Dickie and his girlfriend Marge when the two boys are up on stage in some smokey Italian club and Tom's singing 'Valentine' just like Chet Baker. And, by giving him a love song to sing at Dickie, the director starts to draw out the coded homoerotica of Highsmith's original. The jazz also underscores the film's sense of time and place: Minghella's updated the book from the early Fifties to the end of the decade — boom' in Italy.
Minghella's other good idea is his addi- tion to the dramatis personae: Meredith Logue, a hungry textile heiress wonderfully conjured by Cate Blanchett, is also mooching about Italy, though her role play- ing is starting out from the opposite end of the spectrum. While Tom's a nobody trying to pass himself off as a wealthy playboy, Meredith is slumming, trying to shake off the confines of society. As in The English Patient, Minghella has assembled a dandy cast, among whom Jude Law as Dickie dazzles like sunlight on the bay at Mongibello. I last saw Law on stage m Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles, where at the top of the second act he climbed out of the tub and leisurely towelled off for what seemed longer than the title song of Hello, Dolly! Nice buns, I thought. Also: what a pleasant penis. In Mr Ripley, he again gets to climb out of the tub and we and Tom get to admire his superb bottom (much better than Ralph Fiennes's), though no man- hood. But for the first time his non-eroge- nous zones have a chance to shine. Law glitters in every scene he's in: a gleeful, effortlessly charming satyr, tanned, coiffed, dressed to perfection, and shamelessly manipulative. This is a star-making role for Law. By comparison, Matt Damon's per- petually grinning, bespectacled, corduroy- clad Torn seems nerdier and gaucher than on the page. As Marge, Gwyneth Paltrow is mostly a doormat for the straights and a beard for the gays, but, in a film where so many characters are repellent or cold, she projects the only genuine sense of loss. In the second half, the film gradually runs out of steam, until its various twists come to seem arbitrary and exhausting. That's true in the book, too, but the novel has one great coup de theatre. Tom is inter- rogated as Dickie about Tom's disappear- ance; a few days later, he's interrogated as Tom about Dickie's disappearance — and, in both cases, by the same police officer! This is Ripley's triumph, the moment when he truly masters his 'talent'. In this version, he's again interrogated twice, but by differ- ent detectives. It's a small change that defines the film: Minghella has a great sureness of touch, he's assembled a hip, sexy cast, he knows how to use all kinds of music from Europop to Onegin. But he's somehow managed to make the film more ordinary than the book.
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