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As Dickie and Marge, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow look right, and their behavior -- Dickie's alternating patrician reserve and boorishness, Marge's absolutely impersonal solicitude -- feel right. But the characters aren't that interesting, and the casting of Paltrow is particularly infelicitous. Paltrow has a ways to go as an actress, but she can be a charming presence. Here, though, Minghella seems to have cast her solely for her golden-girl air, and though he's made Marge smarter than Highsmith's somewhat misogynist portrait (her Marge is something of a cow), he seems -- inadvertently -- to be saying the very thing Paltrow's detractors say: that there's not much to her beyond her looks.

As a textiles heiress who becomes smitten with Tom (a role invented by Minghella), Cate Blanchett gets to kick up her heels a little more. At first she seems to be laying it on a bit thick, but her Meredith does lay it on thick, and Blanchett projects an almost girlish charm behind the artifice. As Dickie's caddish friend Freddy Miles, Philip Seymour Hoffman zooms in driving a red convertible and pretty much walks off with the movie in his pocket.

Hoffman's Freddy has a frat-boy grossness that belies his wealth, and an arrogance beyond what his brains or looks should allow for. He gets away with his bad behavior because he has the money to get away with it. It's always startling to see an actor capture a type you've encountered in life but never seen on film, and Hoffman's gusto gives the movie the dose of dirt it so desperately needs.

Patricia Highsmith's admirers have long argued that she is much more than a genre writer. I'm not convinced. In "The Talented Mr. Ripley" she wrote a damn compelling novel, but I don't find her chill, rancid misanthropy pleasurable. Still, it's easy to see why filmmakers are attracted to her combination of nastiness and swank. The trouble is that the pretty/kinky surface seems to blind potential adapters to this book's booby traps.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" isn't a mystery (we're never in doubt as to what's happened), and it's not really a thriller. It's an arm's-length dissection of the personality of a psychopath, and in movies that distance translates as coldness. The temperature didn't matter much in Réne Clément's 1959 adaptation of the novel, "Purple Noon" (featuring French cinema's great tabula rasa, Alain Delon, as Ripley) because Clément presented the life of the decadent rich with an unabashed whorishness. (It was an honestly voyeuristic version of the lifestyle Antonioni and Resnais would spend the next decade clucking over.)

But Tom isn't a psychopath who invites feelings of recognition or even protectiveness the way that a warmer though much more extreme character like Norman Bates can. Maybe because on some level Minghella recognized that, he set out to make us share in Tom's culpability. The director softens everything about the book, then ladles on prestige production values. To his credit, he seems to have little patience with the old notion -- which Highsmith subscribed to -- of repressed homosexuality as a metaphor for aberrant behavior. (And Highsmith was a lesbian.) Though Minghella is more open about Tom's sexuality, his presentation of it still feels held back; he's hesitant about making it just one more part of Tom's splintered psyche. And while he doesn't tack on the moralistic ending with which Clément closed "Purple Noon," his jiggering with Highsmith's carefully worked-out plot results in something that, in its own way, feels nearly as moralistic.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is a film made by a man who is uncomfortable with the material he has chosen to adapt. Watching this sluggish, uninvolving picture, too carefully made to be obviously bad, too steeped in quality to offer visceral thrills or sensual pleasure, recalled for me the feeling of watching "The English Patient."

Paralyzed with respect for the dried-out floweriness of Michael Ondaatje's prose, Minghella treated a soapy wartime romance (albeit one that asks you to weep over a Nazi collaborator) as a profound tragedy. Here he treats a mean, squirrelly little book as a major statement on class envy and the dissolution of personality.

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is, in a way, a predictable failure. Having earned the kind of praise he did with "The English Patient," Minghella isn't going back to the modest style and the organic emotion of "Truly, Madly, Deeply," his first and still his best film. It's even more depressing to see these glamorous young stars sealed up in a the kind of glossy prestige picture whose boring refinement works against the very idea of star power. In a weird way, Minghella has remained true to Tom Ripley's fantasies: He's made a movie that is killingly tasteful.
salon.com | Dec. 24, 1999

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