Sixteen is a great age to see a movie, there on a threshold between wide-eyed wonder and something like maturity. That’s how old I was when I first laid eyes on The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s ravishing, exquisitely grim 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s flinty 1955 novel. I’d been a movie fan for years at that point, but something about its elegant menace, its beauty flecked with blood, grabbed ahold of me like little had previously. It is by no means a feelgood film, this story of queer longing and loneliness giving way to murderous deed. But watching it now (as I do perhaps embarrassingly often) still evokes the primal thrill of art cracking open a young mind.
Minghella, who died in 2008, was a master of style, crafting wholly credible visions of the past. His prowess is perhaps best on display in Ripley, which takes the viewer on a grand tour of mid-20th-century Italy, both its sun-splashed coastal languor and its more anxious, cobble-gray city streets. Tom Ripley, a low-birth conman sent to Europe’s blessed boot to retrieve a prodigal shipping scion at his father’s behest, is in awe of the country, as are we in the audience; so much so that we begin to sickly root for Tom’s increasingly sinister campaign to stay there.
Gabriel Yared’s alternately forbidding and playful score – its seductive clarinet, its ominously plinking glockenspiel – envelops as Tom plunges ever further into his pool of lies, dragging hapless heirs and dilettantes down into the murk with him. It’s seriously high-grade suspense, though the film thrums with a sadder, more profound undertone. Just beneath the film’s lacquered finish is a bitter, and disarmingly empathetic, consideration of what it is to live with unspoken desire, to yearn and reach for a golden world from which your true self would likely be shunned.
It’s no mystery why I, having just come out of the closet in the summer of 1999, saw in this film something particularly salient. But it wasn’t just that. It was the electric rush of Minghella’s seamless execution, working with a cast of soon-to-be-enormous actors – who, I’d argue, have never been better.
Few other young, straight male actors trying to make their name in 1990s Hollywood would have been confident enough to play this shifty queer protagonist with anything matching Matt Damon’s precise, fearless conviction.
Jude Law, a sun-god beamed into the picture from Mount Olympus, is a perfectly loathsome and alluring Dickie Greenleaf. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a noxious hoot as boorish flaneur Freddie Miles. Gwyneth Paltrow is effectively patrician and pathetic as Dickie’s fiancee Marge, whose worldly chicness and easy warmth are no match for Tom’s cruel manipulations. And, of course, there is the magnificent Cate Blanchett, gliding off with each of her scenes as Meredith Logue, a socially stunted textiles princess who witlessly aids Tom in his deceptions, happy to be involved in a bit of intrigue while being rather careless with her own heart.
It was all so exciting to witness at 16, when I was beginning to form an idea of what I liked about actors, about movies. And, maybe, when Hollywood was developing a new idea of itself. The Talented Mr Ripley might ultimately have fallen on the wrong side of that cultural faultline; it is the kind of Hollywood film that is now in woefully short supply, entertaining and artful and, despite all the period trappings and on-location shooting, modestly budgeted. Such things have largely gone away in the years since Ripley’s release. But at the time, the film felt – for me, anyway – like a bridge to the future.
If the movie is a relic of a lost age, what a relic it is. And how significantly it has resounded in my head, returning to me again and again as I’ve ventured into adulthood. On any of my many rewatches, I’m certainly not seeking solace from Tom Ripley; I’m not even craving a trip to Italy. (Any more than usual, anyway.) What I am instead chasing, and remembering, is the giddiness of realizing that movies like Ripley could even exist, and that I was finally ready to see and enjoy them.
Which is why The Talented Mr Ripley has become, in its shivery and melancholic way, a feelgood movie for me, and no doubt plenty of others. It’s a representation of Hollywood’s purest capability, to enthral and stir and transport. However naively, I still hold the hope that an upstart director of this era might turn to Minghella’s film, now a quarter-century old, and find some inspiration in it. There in its thoughtful construction, its deft employment of movie-star glow, its calm insistence that literary things can also be visceral, sensual wonders. If we can’t all go to Europe to find ourselves, we can at least watch Ripley and let ourselves darkly dream.
The Talented Mr Ripley is available in the US on Paramount+ and the Criterion Channel, on Amazon Prime and Paramount+ in the UK and on Stan in Australia
