THE TALENTED MR

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999) **

Reviewed 12/27/99

Writer-director Anthony Minghella's follow-up to The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley suffers from turning Patricia Highsmith's B-noir source material into a stuffy, respectable, Academy Award-type picture. This is Psycho as made by David Lean. Despite the lush Italian backdrops and stultifying metaphors, Minghella cannot quite hide the lark that the film is (most notably when Minghella spells out the ending).

Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a great liar and impersonator, is about to embark on his career as a serial killer. Through a chance meeting, Ripley is sent by tycoon Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn) to retrieve his spoiled son, Dickie (Jude Law), from Italy. As played by Damon and written by Minghella however, Ripley is not the totally amoral, astute character of Highsmith's novel but someone who bumbles about so much, it's a miracle (okay, really just literary conceit) that he isn't caught again and again throughout the film. The real fatal flaw though is that the character of Ripley simply isn't charismatic enough to sustain interest. He never suffers enough to elicit sympathy, his psychotic obsession for Dickie isn't made to seem familiar to the non-psychotic among us, and his Inspector Clouseau-like luck makes you want him to get caught.

Minghella employs such obvious symbolism as mirrors to signify Ripley's wanting to be Dickie. Also, his direction and the editing by Walter Murch are both so overwrought that they use three or four cuts just to show us a character sitting down. It is as if they were afraid of simplicity. Law's British accent fades in and out as the American Dickie, but Australian Cate Blanchett fakes a marvelous American one as Meredith Logue, a plot device who appears whenever convenient. The tawdry subject matter of Ripley, which would have been enjoyable fodder in the hands of a David Lynch, becomes a self-important, seriously overlong 2-1/4 hour affair with Minghella.