I Would Like to See It: The Talented Mr. Ripley

There’s something ratlike about Tom Ripley. It’s not Matt Damon’s square, all-American features, nor his ever so slightly effeminate body language, nor his eloquent but parrot-like way of speaking. It’s something about his eyes, which become panicked and flat like an animal’s whenever something threatens to penetrate the farrago of lies surrounding his identity and actions, or perhaps about the white teeth he flashes in tight, anxious smiles when confronted by a contradiction in his story. Like a rat he lives in the walls of the houses of a different species — the idle rich, in his case — and like a rat he will do anything in order to survive. This quality imbues much of Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel with a frantic, kill-or-be-killed tension its sun-drenched Italian vistas bely.

Even Tom’s actual desires are subordinate to his unthinking need to remain behind the facade of wealth he stumbles into after a crime of passion. A closeted gay man, he occupies the identity of his unrequited love, Dickie Greenleaf (a young Jude Law, looking like some kind of Nazi propaganda poster for the perfect man), as a sort of emotional proxy for possessing him. This pretense becomes so all-encompassing that he throws away bliss with another man in order to preserve it, ending the film seated in silence on the edge of his bunk while recalling the sounds his lover made while dying at his hands. It’s a futile murder, one which cannot possibly preserve his secret, but the desire to remain within the world of power, of privilege, of unquestioned belonging is by then too strong in him to be denied.

Tom is constantly reflected, obscured, and diminished within the visual language of the film. In one scene he stands in the background in the far left of the frame, enveloped in shadow, while in the foreground Dickie and his friend Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman) listen to warm jazz in a polished cedar booth lit like a hearth or a solarium, warm and golden. In another, Tom — caught wearing Dickie’s clothes — scurries to hide behind a mirror in which Dickie stands reflected. Later, Tom will crash his vespa into a gorgeous antique mirror set along a narrow alley, drawn ineluctably onto a collision course with the artifice of his own appearance. Minghella’s film is human without indulging in moralizing, empathetic without making up excuses. Like Tom himself it is a story of survival, of running and hiding for so long that you cease to be a person at all, and instead become some frenzied, frightened thing that scurries in blind terror through the lightless world between the walls.