The big turning point of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a brutal act of violence on the water — the moment when conniving con man Tom Ripley claims the charmed life that he wants. But that’s not exactly how the scene plays out in the second and still finest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 bestseller. Highsmith presented Tom’s actions as entirely calculated, even as they seemed to occur to him rather casually, like a solution to a problem he hadn’t acknowledged. But there’s no premeditation to what happens on that boat in the 1999 movie made from The Talented Mr. Ripley. Here, a dark plot becomes a crime of passion, an impulse. We’re watching a Ripley more warm- than cold-blooded, but no less dangerous for it.
You could call the film a warm-blooded Ripley, too. Written and directed by the late Anthony Minghella, it transformed literature’s most devious charlatan into a tragic figure — an approach that vexed some Highsmith heads in ’99. (An earlier adaptation, the 1960 Purple Noon, cast French movie star Alain Delon as a much more characteristically blank Ripley.) Today, the film might startle a whole new generation of viewers, those whose only exposure to this iconic character is Netflix’s recent Ripley. That black-and-white, eight-episode limited series plays the same song in a much different key. It’s the starkly reptilian yin to the sunny, anguished yang of Minghella’s less reverently faithful version.
The Talented Mr. Ripley, which hit theaters 25 years ago this month, now looks like one of the great prestige productions of its decade — a dazzling suspense thriller that deepens its source material rather than merely replicating it. Minghella was coming off the success of The English Patient, another literary adaptation and period piece that won a bunch of Oscars (including Best Picture) but also inspired a whole Seinfeld episode about how boring it was. His Ripley is just as lavish — it drinks in the luxury Tom covets, the brilliant splendor of mid-century, seaside Italy — and considerably more lively. It also boasts a murderers’ row of glamorous, Miramax-era awards darlings, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Jude Law, and a hilariously catty Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The setup is straight out of Highsmith: Two-bit New York fraud Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is hired to go overseas and bring home erstwhile playboy Dickie Greenleaf (Law), whose shipping-magnate father confuses our anti-hero for a prep-school confidante of his irresponsible son. But for as close as Minghella hews to the basic shape of the original story, he also tweaks it in significant ways, including retelling it against the backdrop of a burgeoning 1950s jazz scene and complicating Tom’s eventual subterfuge — his juggling of two identities — through the introduction of a socialite (Blanchett) who confuses him for Dickie.
The most meaningful deviation is the characterization of Ripley, who doesn’t much resemble the empty vessel Highsmith described. As played by a young Matt Damon, the character is needier and perhaps more disturbingly human, an eager-to-please nerd too besotted with Dickie (and his life of leisure) to recognize that he’s fast overstaying his welcome and losing his fickle new companion’s interest. Damon, coming off his Oscar-nominated turn in Good Will Hunting, weaponizes his boyishness, planting a simmering resentment — and a ruthless intelligence — behind the puppy-dog ingratiation. Turning Ripley into a clingy, lovelorn misfit is a bold gamble, but the star pulls it off.
Tom’s sexuality was something of a question mark in the Ripley novels. Highsmith shrugged it off in interviews. Like everything else about the character, it seemed fluid, maybe arbitrary, discardable: If he pursued men as well as women, it was as a creature of opportunity, recognizing any potential fulfillment of his appetites. Minghella clarifies the matter, turning queer subtext into text by making Ripley explicitly closeted and self-loathing. This version of the character aches not just for Dickie’s status and wealth and privilege but also for Dickie himself — and how could he not, with Law in the role, at the height of his charm, smarm, and sex appeal?
The choice lends The Talented Mr. Ripley a devastating new emotional dimension, even before Minghella introduces a love interest (Jack Davenport) that Highsmith didn’t, a chance at real happiness that must be sacrificed — in a very literal sense — before Tom can complete his climb up the ladder. On the page, the saga of Tom Ripley is an amoral awakening: a tale of self-actualization through violence and identity theft, where pulling yourself up by the bootstraps means pulling someone else down under the waves. On the screen, it becomes something sadder, a drama about the desperate loneliness of pretending to be someone or something you’re not — of playing straight and rich, as this Ripley does.
It’s Damon who gives Minghella’s soulful reworking of a classic its, well, soul. He’s never been better, or scarier: The scene where a bathrobed Tom approaches the suspicious Marge (Paltrow), disguising menace as cloying concern, could make a corpse’s skin crawl. One might say that upward mobility is the throughline of the star’s whole career; many of his most memorable roles, from Will Hunting to the mole gangster of The Departed, are working-class guys circling a class promotion. Perhaps that resonates with Damon and his mythologized backstory as an ordinary dude from Boston who made good. As Ripley, a nobody faking his way into the life of a somebody, the actor supplies new complexity to a character usually defined by little more than his cold-eyed aspiration and duplicity.
The ’99 Ripley won’t satisfy any stickler for fidelity. The Netflix version comes much closer to capturing the spirit of Highsmith’s novel, both in the inclusion of subplots only a TV runtime could accommodate and in the icier portrayal of the title character. (Despite being in his mid-40s, Andrew Scott really nails the author’s conception of a go-getter unburdened by conscience.) But Minghella and Damon tap a richer vein of drama in the material by giving us a more sympathetic Ripley, one whose hurt feelings — the envy and dejection and raw pining that drives him — are more relatable than a non-homicidal viewer might care to confess. In that respect, the film gets at the true, discomforting appeal of this story: You stare at Tom Ripley and recognize yourself in the black hole of his murderous machinations.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is currently streaming on Paramount+ and is available to rent or purchase through major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
