The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
A review of the film starring Matt Damon and a comparison to Patricia Highsmith's novel
The 1999 film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon, is a poor adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel. Tom Ripley as Highsmith’s creation is a quintessential American conman, a character following in the tradition of Melville’s “Confidence-Man” or Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, a person who knows that America is a country of liars and cheats, a man who has the temerity to erase his past and become someone else, in the process incarnating the founding of the US and embodying its true spirit. Ripley says: The past doesn’t matter. I can cut ties with everyone and everything, I can start fresh, I can be free. He’s a psychopath, but that’s the point.
Damon’s Ripley, on the other hand, is a character all too familiar. His actions have reasons. We understand why he does the things he does, and we feel empathy for him. In the film, he is good; it’s the world that’s bad, that forces him to act as he does and repress his true nature. Everything is explained and comprehensible, while the ambiguous darkness of the novel disappears.
The contrast between the novel and the movie are most clearly seen in the alterations made by the film, which serve to simplify which characters are Good and which characters are Bad, allowing the viewer to resolve any unease they might have while watching. At the beginning of the novel, Tom is approached in a seedy downtown bar by a certain Mr. Greenleaf. It seems that Greenleaf’s son, Dickie, has been in Italy too long and Greenleaf would like him to come home and “assume his responsibilities.” Greenleaf has sought out Tom because he’s heard they are friends—in reality, barely acquaintances—and he thinks Tom might be able to persuade Dickie to return home. At first, Tom is not interested, but when he realizes that Greenleaf is willing to pay him, he changes his tune. Tom is desperate for money; at the time of the meeting, his current scheme is impersonating a tax collector and persuading unsuspecting citizens to send money to his address under an assumed name. It is evident this is simply one of his many scams, and the message is clear: Tom is a swindler.
In the movie, it is no exaggeration to say that Tom is the polar opposite. He’s still poor, but he’s almost unbelievably naïve and has barely any trace of duplicity. He borrows a jacket for a concert in which he’s playing piano, and it just so happens that the jacket has a Princeton insignia on it. Mr. Greenleaf sees him and asks him if he knows Dickie, who attended Princeton. Tom is silent—he doesn’t have the social grace to understand how to move among the higher classes—but he eventually asks, “How is Dickie?”, less out of a desire to trick the Greenleafs and more because he eventually senses that this is what he’s supposed to say, and he wants to please them. The next day they meet at Mr. Greenleaf’s shipyard, and Greenleaf proposes his plan of Tom as ambassador to retrieve Dickie. As Tom begins to reject him, “Well, I have always wanted to go to Europe, sir, but—”, Mr. Greenleaf cuts him off and tells him “Good. Now you can go for a reason.” Again, Tom has not tried to deceive Mr. Greenleaf, but has simply acquiesced to someone stronger than him. The message is clear: Tom is innocent, but because of his shy and timid nature, he finds the circumstances of his life being dictated by someone else. This is a far cry from Highsmith’s Ripley, who is the first to bring up his supposed presence at Princeton and who jumps at the chance to go to Italy once he realizes money is involved.
The next change occurs with Dickie, who will be killed by Tom later in the story. Because of this fact, Dickie needs to be Bad in the movie, so that the viewer can rationalize Tom’s actions. Dickie, played by Jude Law, is charming, funny, and a bit of an asshole. He lives in Italy with Marge, his sort of girlfriend to whom he can’t commit. In the novel, this situation is understood more as one of unrequited love, whereas in the movie, Dickie and Marge are in a relationship, but Dickie is a serial cheater who has secret romantic rendezvous with a local woman. Once again, the movie is at pains to let us know this, reinforcing multiple times that Dickie is a philanderer. The Italian woman, named Silvana, does not exist in the novel. On the day of the town’s festival of the patron saint, a Madonna statue is carried out of the sea, but then—wait!—another female figure floats to the surface. It’s Silvana; she’s drowned herself because Dickie got her pregnant and wouldn’t pay for the abortion. Again, there is nothing of this in the novel.
Let’s move on to the murder scene. Tom and Dickie are on a small boat in San Remo. In the novel, Tom has created this situation with the express intention of killing Dickie. On the train ride there, Tom fantasizes about it: “He wanted to kill Dickie…if he killed him on this trip, Tom thought, he could simply say that some accident had happened. He could—He had just thought of something brilliant: he could become Dickie Greenleaf himself…he began to think of how. The water.”
In the movie, there is no suggestion that the murder is premeditated. Instead, Dickie and Tom happen to be on a boat, and Tom pitches his idea of a life together to Dickie. Far from thinking about killing him and taking his identity, he’s imagining them being in a relationship:
“And I figured—now, just for argument’s sake, say I got a place. Or say we split the rent on a house. I could get a job, or better still, if I got a place in Rome, and then when we’re there, we could be there. And when we’re here, we could be here.”
“Uh, I don’t think so,” Dickie replies, but Tom doesn’t catch on.
“See, particularly with the Marge problem. You just blame me,” Tom says.
The fact of Tom being gay, something hinted at in the novel but not characterized as the driving force of his actions, is ramped up in the movie; it serves to clarify Tom’s ambiguous actions so that everything he does is seen as a result of the oppression he suffers in conversative, 1950’s America as a closeted gay man.
Dickie then tells Tom: “Marge and I are getting married.”
“How?” responds Tom.
“How?” Dickie says incredulously.
“Yesterday, you’re ogling girls on the terrace. Today you’re getting married? That’s absurd” says Tom.
This line is said with complete sincerity. Far from Highsmith’s deceptive conman, Tom comes off as an innocent child, someone with no understanding of the ways of the world. Compare this to the opening scene of Purple Noon, a French adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley from 1960, when Tom and Dickie act like complete scoundrels on a night out in Rome: they steal a blind man’s cane, pretend to be blind, pick up a woman, then abandon her and steal her jewelry. This scene isn’t in the book, but this is the real Tom Ripley.
The murder scene from the 1999 film continues with Dickie rejecting Tom, causing Tom’s anger to rise and his sense of injustice to come to the fore.
“I love Marge,” says Dickie.
“You love me. You’re not marrying me,” replies Tom.
“Tom, I don’t love you,” replies Dickie dismissively. Tom has badly miscalculated here, projecting his own feelings onto Dickie and misunderstanding Dickie’s need for attention as affection. At this point, Tom begins to berate Dickie, accusing him of repressing his own feelings, which causes Dickie to blow up:
“Who are you? Some third-class mooch? Who are you? Who are you to say anything to me? Who are you to tell me anything?” Dickie slaps Tom and stands over him, crucially being the one to turn the fight into a physical argument. As Dickie rips the motor, he continues to insult Tom (“It gives me the creeps. You give me the creeps”) while Tom’s anger and shame begin to overtake him. He continues to mutter “Shut up. Shut up,” while tears come to his eyes. Finally, Dickie imitates Tom and calls him “a little girl” which is the last straw for Tom: he impulsively picks up an oar and strikes Dickie in the face. When he realizes what he’s done, he tries to help Dickie, but Dickie attacks him, and Tom is seemingly forced to kill him in what could almost be seen as an act of self-defense. In this scene, the viewer empathizes with Tom. He’s not a cold-blooded killer, and he doesn’t want to kill Dickie. The film does everything possible to make us feel sorry for Tom. In the novel, there is no argument. Tom simply kills Dickie so that he can have his money and live his extravagant lifestyle.
At this point, the events of the film begin to track those of the novel more closely, although the film still makes two crucial changes to make it abundantly clear to us why Tom does what he does. It introduces the character of Meredith Logue, played by Cate Blanchett, a wealthy socialite who’s romantically interested in Tom, and it expands the role of Peter Smith-Kingsley, who becomes Tom’s male love interest. Caught between these two poles, Tom’s story goes from being that of a conman on the run to a man caught between what society expects of him and his own desire. In the end, society wins. The film ends with a rather shocking twist, and we see Tom alone in his room, devastated by what he’s done and with the awareness that he’s destined to live a closeted existence. His life is a lie, and this pains him deeply. While different in content, this is thematically similar to the ending of Purple Noon. In the 1960 film, Ripley is apprehended by the police for his murders. In both cases, he will be forced to live in a cell, one literal and one metaphorical.
This is not, however, the ending of the novel. An adaptation of a novel does not, and indeed cannot, follow the plot of the novel exactly. They are two different mediums, calling for two different techniques. Nevertheless, an adaptation, to my mind, should try to capture the spirit of the novel, and should strive to achieve the same effect as the novel but through different means. Neither The Talented Mr. Ripley nor Purple Noon does this, although Purple Noon comes closer. The 1999 film version, when not compared to the novel, could still have been a decent film in its own right. When viewed as, say, inspired by the novel, it could have been an interesting interpretation that chooses to show Ripley in a different light. It does this to a certain extent, but it fails in its need to make us empathize with the character of Ripley. The addition of Silvana’s story, the portrayal of Dickie’s murder as an accident, and the overarching feeling that Tom is forced into his all his decisions, rather than consciously choosing them, simplify the mystery that is Tom Ripley. Ultimately, both films are conservative while Highsmith’s novel is radical.
At the end of the novel, Tom discovers that he’s been let off scot free. He’s no longer suspected of multiple murders, and he’s secured Dickie’s inheritance. He has a twinge of guilt—“He grew suddenly tense, and his vision vanished. Was he going to see policeman waiting for him on every pier that he ever approached?”—but he forces this out of his mind (“No use spoiling his trip worrying about imaginary policeman”) and instructs his taxi driver to a hotel, crying out “Il meglio albergo. Il meglio, il meglio!” (The best hotel. The best, the best!). Highsmith’s invention, which has yet to be realized on screen, is to say that actions might not have consequences. Ripley isn’t borne back into the past, he moves on into the future with impunity and with no concern for tradition or history. He can be who he wants to be; he can reinvent himself. He is the Ur-American.