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Talented Mr. Ripley, The
Directed by Anthony Minghella; based on the novel by Patricia Highamith; with Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwenyth Paltrow.
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What a curious book The Talented Mr. Ripley must have seemed when Patricia Highsmith published it in 1955. World War II had been over for a decade, the US was in the middle of its biggest economic boom since the 1920s, and the country was about to pitch forth into anti-Communist hysteria. On the surface America was pretending that Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best were everyday life, but outside of TV-land things were quite different. African-Americans were pressing ever more boldly for civil rights. The Beats captured the public imagination by mocking work and the nuclear family. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was being written. Rock and roll was seen by many adults as wrecking havoc with traditional social, racial, moral, and musical norms. The tabloid and mainstream press were obsessed with the threat of the juvenile delinquent. And to make things worse, homosexuals were becoming more public. Nothing was what it seemed, and who knew what unspoken terror lay in waiting around the corner.

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Enter Tom Ripley, a petty thief and con artist who stumbles into a grift of a lifetime. Dicky Greenleaf, a casual friend of a friend, is a ne'er-do-well rich boy living in Italy, halfheartedly pursuing a career as an artist. His father, a shipping magnate, finances Ripley to visit his son and convince him to return home to the family business. Ripley goes to Italy, becomes obsessed with Dickey-- a mixture of wanting him sexually and wanting to be him-- and ends up murdering his quarry. He then takes on Dicky's identity (as well as his bank accounts) and ends up killing one of Dicky's friends when he is about to be found out. Successfully juggling identities, he manages to blame the second murder on Dicky, fake the dead-man's suicide, forge a will, and leave everything to himself.

What Highsmith brought to this character was cool, detached elegance. "Ripley's not that bad," she once told an interviewer. "He only kills when he has to." What she also brought was the notion-- fundamental to post-war modernism-- that Tom Ripley is no more guilty than anyone else in the world. This is the obverse of the truth she hammered home in her first novel, the 1949 Strangers on a Train, in which everyone was guilty of something. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, guilt has become so common, so equitably shared, as to be negligible.

The Ripley of Highsmith's novel is the embodiment of every 1950s fear: a socially-climbing, sociopathic homosexual who looks like a nice young man. His own identity is so shaky and unbounded that he has no trouble taking on other people's. He does dead-accurate impersonations. He is never who or what he seems to be. And he is the hero of Highsmith novel. If Tom Ripley is evil-- and Highsmith would admit to as much-- he does not represent what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil," but rather its allure and charm. If anything, Highsmith considers the boring, humdrum conventionality of the 1950s the true "banality of evil," and Ripley is her answer and ultimate threat. In the novel-- and Anthony Minghella's new film version-- we, as readers and viewers, root for Tom Ripley to get away with his crimes. But there is a telling difference between Highsmith's unsettlingly straightforward and amoral novel and Minghella's sentimentalized and sanitized film version that features Matt Damon as the talented Mr. R.

Minghella's handling is capable enough-- The Talented Mr. Ripley is as neat a catch-your-breath thriller as could be imagined. But as compelling as the film is, it diverges sharply from its original source. The director softens Tom Ripley, makes him less of a psychopath and more of a confused gay man who is at a social disadvantage in a world peopled with folk who are not his equals and who are mean to him. Matt Damon's Ripley is more guilty of looking for love in all the wrong places and being rejected than of cold-blooded murder. In the film, Ripley kills Dickey in a fit of anger after being humiliated and rejected; in Highsmith's version, Ripley simply sees a chance and makes his move. The on-screen Ripley is even capable of love-- something that Highsmith could never have countenanced. Minghella has also coarsened Dicky Greenleaf-- in an attempt to make Tom Ripley more sympathetic. In Highsmith's novel Tom Ripley hates Marge Sherwood, Dickey's sometimes girlfriend with a misogynistic fervor, but here Minghella creates a close bond between the two, and the effect is that, once again, Tom Ripley is not that bad a fellow.

It probably would have been a hard sell for Minghella to bring Highsmith's Talented Mr. Ripley to the screen. There is a big difference between confused gay con-men and unfeeling sociopaths. Movie audiences may have rejected a Ripley-- and a Matt Damon-- who lacked a certain basic sympathy. He may also have worried about presenting a gay character who had no redeeming qualities aside from cool charm and cold calculation. If Minghella had remained true to Highsmith, this Talented Mr. Ripley would have been quite a different film: nastier, more archly witty, unsettling. But as it is, we have a Tom Ripley-- and a sort of homosexual hero-- for the new millennium: a killer kinder, gentler, and far less threatening.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com