The talent of Tom Ripley.
Watching this talk between Charlie Rose and director Anthony Minghella (RIP) about his movie The Talented Mr Ripley, brings back all of my old frustrations with the adaptation. Especially when Minghella says that he wished Patricia Highsmith had been alive still when he was working on the script and the film, because he would have loved her input at every step of the way. As someone who has read the novel and its four sequels, I expect Highsmith would have fought Minghella's interpretation at every turn.
It isn't that I think it was a terrible - or even bad - movie (and how can it be, when Jude Law and Matt Damon give such tremendous performances, and Jack Davenport is there to charm the pants of everybody, and you have that precious scene between Tom and the Venice police) so much as there are some serious issues I take with Minghella's film as an adaptation of Highsmith's novel, and his general depiction of Tom Ripley, who happens one of my favourite literary characters ever.
Minghella, in the discussion with Charlie Rose, talks about Tom as a young man yearning for the acceptance and admiration of others which he thinks must come at the cost of hiding his true self, which is where the key line of the film comes from, "Is it better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody?"; the unvoiced opinion being that it's Tom's pretending and acting that leads him into this dark, tortured, self-hating place which he can't get out of. Tom, by the end of the film, is trapped in every way, psychologically and physically: he isn't being "true" to himself, he is compelled to kill again (Peter this time, the one person who could potentially love Tom for who he really is), his whole masquerade of Dickie Greenleaf is still in danger because of the inescapable situation that Minghella has placed him in (on a ship with Meredith and her family), and Tom is miserable, torn apart by conflicting desires, fear, and necessity.
If you have some familiarity with the novel, you'll know that Tom's paranoia in the story is matched by a genuine sense of release, even after he kills Dickie in cold blood - the freedom of wealth and of being an American in Italy, and, more central to the character, the freedom and self confidence he gathers from having a role, any role, to immerse himself in. The book, whilst being written in the third person, is nevertheless told from Tom's point of view, and whatever the opinion a detached observer might form of Tom Ripley's psychological condition or murderous acts, it is Tom's complete lack of remorse, and his dizzied exultation in his freedom, that dominates the ending.
There is a strong sense in the novel that it is directly through becoming Dickie Greenleaf - through living the life Dickie lives, adopting the postures that Dickie has - that Tom learns to become comfortable in himself.
'Hadn't he learnt something from these last months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.'
- The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
Through playing the role, Tom brings the qualities of the role into himself, absorbs the role; and instead of suppressing and repressing his "true self" in the course of playacting, his psyche (nervous, over-sensitive, shaky and undetermined) expands and develops to fulfill that role, and his protean personality takes on the solidity and definition of those accoutrements. In the process of acting, Tom discovers who he could be, which is only one possible expression of who he was, and he finds that he likes his new self. (It is a theme about the interrelation between actor and part that I think Ang Lee, after his last film Lust, Caution, would have a lot of sympthy for. How much more interesting and challenging a film the novel could have made in Lee's hands.)
The Talented Mr Ripley, Minghella notes, is a novel with three main features: it is about a young American's experience of Europe; it is about someone who commits murder and gets away with it (and gets away with it time and time again, in the sequels); and it is about a man's complete obsession with somebody else - wanting to be him, to have what he has, to devour him, to possess him.
The first point is undeniable, as is the second - although I think Minghella basically contradicts his own reading of the novel by placing Matt Damon's Tom in such an unsustainable and uneviable position as I've described at the ending of the film. Tom in the film might have escaped the immediate threat of the police, but his future is far from rosy. At the novel's end, Highsmith's Tom Ripley is not only free from the law and justice, he is free of guilt and self-loathing, freed from society's expectations because of his new money. Tom is totally unconflicted in his own mind about what he has done. He is the very opposite of the weeping figure, trapped in his own web of lies, that we see at the end of Minghella's film. Much as Minghella says that Ripley is an unconventional thriller because the killer gets away with it, the film is nowhere near as morally confounding as the novel that Highsmith wrote.
And as for Tom's obsession with Dickie, I think Minghella overstates its importance for Tom. In the novel, Tom's view of Dickie is much less golden and adoring, and more critical of Dickie's flaws. He secretly ridicules Dickie's vain dreams of becoming a professional painter, he looks unfavourably on Dickie's choices of friends. Tom sees in Dickie Greenleaf a rough template of the things which he desires. He loves the idea of Dickie Greenleaf, envies his confidence and air of entitlement, but he also thinks that he could live Dickie's life much better than Dickie does himself. And like a hermit crab, Tom doesn't stay in Dickie's life for long, and not simply because the police were closing in. Dickie was Tom's means of escape from the dreariness and loneliness of his old life. He takes the best, most useful, parts of Dickie and moves on, without much sentimentality, to build for himself a new identity.
'Most of us have dreamt about what it would be like to shed our selves and become a different person. Ripley does more than imagine. His reinvention of himself is spectacularly successful and the murder serves as a passport out of his humdrum existence and into a new glamorous lifestyle. "In the first Ripley he was quite green and young," said Highsmith of her favourite character, "just learning about Europe, about what he thought was culture and sightseeing... He decided to lift himself in his own eyes."'
- The Independent, "Mr Ripley: 21st century hero"
It isn't that I think it was a terrible - or even bad - movie (and how can it be, when Jude Law and Matt Damon give such tremendous performances, and Jack Davenport is there to charm the pants of everybody, and you have that precious scene between Tom and the Venice police) so much as there are some serious issues I take with Minghella's film as an adaptation of Highsmith's novel, and his general depiction of Tom Ripley, who happens one of my favourite literary characters ever.
Minghella, in the discussion with Charlie Rose, talks about Tom as a young man yearning for the acceptance and admiration of others which he thinks must come at the cost of hiding his true self, which is where the key line of the film comes from, "Is it better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody?"; the unvoiced opinion being that it's Tom's pretending and acting that leads him into this dark, tortured, self-hating place which he can't get out of. Tom, by the end of the film, is trapped in every way, psychologically and physically: he isn't being "true" to himself, he is compelled to kill again (Peter this time, the one person who could potentially love Tom for who he really is), his whole masquerade of Dickie Greenleaf is still in danger because of the inescapable situation that Minghella has placed him in (on a ship with Meredith and her family), and Tom is miserable, torn apart by conflicting desires, fear, and necessity.
If you have some familiarity with the novel, you'll know that Tom's paranoia in the story is matched by a genuine sense of release, even after he kills Dickie in cold blood - the freedom of wealth and of being an American in Italy, and, more central to the character, the freedom and self confidence he gathers from having a role, any role, to immerse himself in. The book, whilst being written in the third person, is nevertheless told from Tom's point of view, and whatever the opinion a detached observer might form of Tom Ripley's psychological condition or murderous acts, it is Tom's complete lack of remorse, and his dizzied exultation in his freedom, that dominates the ending.
There is a strong sense in the novel that it is directly through becoming Dickie Greenleaf - through living the life Dickie lives, adopting the postures that Dickie has - that Tom learns to become comfortable in himself.
'Hadn't he learnt something from these last months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.'
- The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
Through playing the role, Tom brings the qualities of the role into himself, absorbs the role; and instead of suppressing and repressing his "true self" in the course of playacting, his psyche (nervous, over-sensitive, shaky and undetermined) expands and develops to fulfill that role, and his protean personality takes on the solidity and definition of those accoutrements. In the process of acting, Tom discovers who he could be, which is only one possible expression of who he was, and he finds that he likes his new self. (It is a theme about the interrelation between actor and part that I think Ang Lee, after his last film Lust, Caution, would have a lot of sympthy for. How much more interesting and challenging a film the novel could have made in Lee's hands.)
The Talented Mr Ripley, Minghella notes, is a novel with three main features: it is about a young American's experience of Europe; it is about someone who commits murder and gets away with it (and gets away with it time and time again, in the sequels); and it is about a man's complete obsession with somebody else - wanting to be him, to have what he has, to devour him, to possess him.
The first point is undeniable, as is the second - although I think Minghella basically contradicts his own reading of the novel by placing Matt Damon's Tom in such an unsustainable and uneviable position as I've described at the ending of the film. Tom in the film might have escaped the immediate threat of the police, but his future is far from rosy. At the novel's end, Highsmith's Tom Ripley is not only free from the law and justice, he is free of guilt and self-loathing, freed from society's expectations because of his new money. Tom is totally unconflicted in his own mind about what he has done. He is the very opposite of the weeping figure, trapped in his own web of lies, that we see at the end of Minghella's film. Much as Minghella says that Ripley is an unconventional thriller because the killer gets away with it, the film is nowhere near as morally confounding as the novel that Highsmith wrote.
And as for Tom's obsession with Dickie, I think Minghella overstates its importance for Tom. In the novel, Tom's view of Dickie is much less golden and adoring, and more critical of Dickie's flaws. He secretly ridicules Dickie's vain dreams of becoming a professional painter, he looks unfavourably on Dickie's choices of friends. Tom sees in Dickie Greenleaf a rough template of the things which he desires. He loves the idea of Dickie Greenleaf, envies his confidence and air of entitlement, but he also thinks that he could live Dickie's life much better than Dickie does himself. And like a hermit crab, Tom doesn't stay in Dickie's life for long, and not simply because the police were closing in. Dickie was Tom's means of escape from the dreariness and loneliness of his old life. He takes the best, most useful, parts of Dickie and moves on, without much sentimentality, to build for himself a new identity.
'Most of us have dreamt about what it would be like to shed our selves and become a different person. Ripley does more than imagine. His reinvention of himself is spectacularly successful and the murder serves as a passport out of his humdrum existence and into a new glamorous lifestyle. "In the first Ripley he was quite green and young," said Highsmith of her favourite character, "just learning about Europe, about what he thought was culture and sightseeing... He decided to lift himself in his own eyes."'
- The Independent, "Mr Ripley: 21st century hero"