QUICK HIT: The Talented Mr. Ripley [1999]

Rating: R | Runtime: 139 minutes
Release Date: December 25th, 1999 (USA)
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director(s): Anthony Minghella
Writer(s): Anthony Minghella / Patricia Highsmith (novel)

I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.

This was a lot better than I remembered. Not that I didn’t like it the first time around. I think I just wasn’t paying attention. Possibly just that I watched it with friends and thus wasn’t quite dialed in.

Tom Ripley is such an intriguing character. He has the charm and charisma to really be someone these people can love; he just doesn’t have the money or status necessary for them to realize he might be worth getting to know. Matt Damon effortlessly portrays the quiet pain of isolation bubbling below the surface with both his disarming smile and menacing grimace.

Anthony Minghella (and presumably Patricia Highsmith, unless he went far off-book with his adaptation) crafts an intricate plot of unfortunate events propelled by Ripley’s penchant to lie in order to fit in. One lie to meet Dickie (Jude Law). Another to remain in Italy. Another to try beating a murder accusation of which he is definitely guilty. It’s the truth that actually gets him into trouble by angering those he’s tricked and forcing him to kill as a means of covering up a previous crime. The lies don’t therefore just protect him. They protect them too.

And what a perfectly dark and tragic end. To force Ripley to choose between the life his lies have afforded him and the one person who could truly love him for who he is removed from all the artifice. Tom is a gay man using toxic masculinity as his password into a world filled with horrible people he longs to equal. And of whom he can so easily mimic—ultimately massaging their egos to become a member of their boy’s club and thus a recipient of the protection its influence affords.

Ripley has tasted the spoils that being everything he’s not supplies, and he finds it impossible to turn back. Even as the walls continue to close-in considering the world he’s infiltrated is incestuous to the point of everyone knowing everyone who truly belongs, he survives knowing the power a name can possess and how confidence can make it his to use against his victims while they help him do it.

It’s not therefore about Tom Ripley ever finding happiness. Tom Ripley is as much an alias now as any other. Everything is about the security and freedom to never go back.