{"id":23071,"date":"2024-04-03T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-03T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=23071"},"modified":"2024-04-02T18:47:56","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T01:47:56","slug":"the-many-onscreen-talents-of-tom-ripley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-many-onscreen-talents-of-tom-ripley\/","title":{"rendered":"The Many Onscreen Talents of Tom Ripley"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tom Ripley is a chameleon. The character introduced by author Patricia Highsmith in her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em> is especially adept at shifting his personality and appearance to appease the particular people he\u2019s interacting with, in order to extract whatever he needs from them. So it\u2019s fitting that Ripley has been portrayed in film by five strikingly different actors, in five films that take remarkably different approaches to telling his story. There\u2019s every reason to believe that the upcoming Netflix series Ripley<\/em>, from creator Steven Zaillian, will offer another entirely new angle on this malleable character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even so, there\u2019s a core to Ripley that is captured in each screen adaptation, beginning with French director Ren\u00e9 Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s 1960 film Purple Noon<\/em>, which was made before Highsmith had written any further Ripley novels. As played by international sex symbol Alain Delon, Purple Noon<\/em>\u2019s Ripley is suave and magnetic, making his jealousy and competition with the wealthy Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) into a more balanced rivalry, both treating each other with some amount of cruel manipulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em>, made under its own title in 1999 by writer-director Anthony Minghella, has become the dominant pop-culture image of Ripley, and Matt Damon\u2019s take on the character exhibits more insecurity and self-loathing than Delon\u2019s. Damon\u2019s eager Ripley is desperate for the attention of the handsome, arrogant Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), whose approval initially seems unattainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Ripleys are hired by Philippe\/Dickie\u2019s business-tycoon father to bring his wayward son home from Italy, where he\u2019s been living a life of leisure with his girlfriend Marge (Marie Lafor\u00eat in 1960; Gwyneth Paltrow in 1999). Purple Noon<\/em> opens with Tom and Philippe already spending time together in Italy, teaming up for a prank on a blind man and a later deception with a pretty woman they meet on the street. Minghella spends more time examining Ripley\u2019s motivations, showing his life of poverty and artifice in New York City, the way he yearns for the glamour that the Greenleafs can provide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Purple Noon<\/em>, when Ripley puts on Philippe\u2019s clothes and playacts as the confident, sophisticated expat, kissing his own reflection in the mirror, it\u2019s an act of narcissism, not sexual attraction. Minghella plays up the homoerotic tension between Ripley and Dickie, with Damon adding an extra undercurrent of self-doubt to his portrayal. In both cases, though, Ripley\u2019s toxic jealousy ultimately leads to murder, as he resorts to increasing violence to maintain the position he\u2019s established for himself within high society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purple Noon<\/em> focuses more on logistics, with multiple bravura sequences of Ripley going to elaborate lengths to hide dead bodies and cover up his crimes. Minghella\u2019s focus is more internal, as Ripley finds resources of deception and malice in himself that seemed previously hidden. Delon\u2019s Ripley is the same debonair charmer at the beginning of the movie as he is at the end, after all the terrible acts he\u2019s committed, but Damon\u2019s Ripley seems like a new person \u2014 or perhaps his true self, finally allowed to run free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took much longer for Highsmith\u2019s second Ripley novel, 1970\u2019s Ripley Under Ground<\/em>, to make it to the screen, and then only in a weak adaptation lacking the intrigue and complexity the character warrants. In director Roger Spottiswoode\u2019s 2005 film, Barry Pepper plays a petulant, horny version of Ripley, with floppy hair and ill-fitting suits, who\u2019s the mastermind of an art forgery scheme involving his late painter friend Philip Derwatt (Douglas Henshall).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Derwatt kills himself on the eve of his biggest-ever opening, Ripley convinces Derwatt\u2019s agent Jeff Constant (Alan Cumming), girlfriend Cynthia (Claire Forlani), and fellow artist Bernard Sayles (Ian Hart) to hide the body and pass Derwatt off as a living recluse, to continue bringing in money from his existing paintings as well as new forged works by Bernard. Although the scheme is largely the same as in Highsmith\u2019s novel, it comes off as paltry and cheap in Spottiswoode\u2019s hands, with the setting awkwardly moved to the present day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Willem Dafoe is miscast as the earnest American art collector who starts to suspect the forgeries, and Australian actress Jacinda Barrett is even more grossly miscast as Ripley\u2019s sultry French love interest H\u00e9lo\u00efse Plisson. Pepper struggles to express Ripley\u2019s cold, sociopathic stare, and the movie\u2019s aggressively heterosexual version of the character, complete with multiple uncomfortable sex scenes, seems like a misguided attempt to refute the fluid sexuality in Minghella\u2019s film. Only Tom Wilkinson, as a British police detective who doesn\u2019t buy any of Ripley\u2019s bullshit, comes off well, because he could just as easily be calling out the movie\u2019s own sloppiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em>, Highsmith\u2019s third Ripley novel, 1974\u2019s Ripley\u2019s Game<\/em>, has been adapted twice, with markedly divergent results. Neither film is entirely successful, but both offer the artistic ambition that\u2019s completely absent in Ripley Under Ground<\/em>. German filmmaker Wim Wenders landed the rights to the novel before it was even published, and his take on it in 1977\u2019s The American Friend<\/em> often plays like an abstraction of both the Ripley character and the thriller genre. The plot elements of Highsmith\u2019s book are present, but they\u2019re buried under layers of obtuse existential musings and deliberately distancing aesthetic choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the second actor to play Ripley, Dennis Hopper could not be further from Alain Delon, playing the character as a Hopperian twitchy weirdo in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. Wenders resurrects the artist Derwatt (played by filmmaker Nicholas Ray) as a forger who\u2019s essentially copying himself, after faking his own death. Ripley is his fence, traveling from New York City to Europe to auction off new \u201crediscovered\u201d Derwatt works. That\u2019s where he meets unassuming picture framer Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), who makes a slightly rude comment at Ripley\u2019s expense when they\u2019re introduced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s not easy to discern Ripley\u2019s motives in Wenders\u2019 elliptical presentation, but Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani makes things clearer in her 2002 adaptation under the novel\u2019s original title. Her Ripley (John Malkovich) is more in line with the Damon version, and he\u2019s clearly insulted by his neighbor Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott) at a dinner party. Hopper\u2019s Ripley expresses uncharacteristic distaste for murder when he\u2019s approached by gangster Raoul Minot (G\u00e9rard Blain) with a demand to carry out an underworld hit as payment for a debt. Malkovich\u2019s Ripley instead sees the offer from his former associate Reeves (Ray Winstone) as an opportunity to play a sadistic trick on the unwitting Jonathan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Jonathans are terminally ill, although in The American Friend<\/em>, Minot deceives Jonathan into believing his condition is worse than it is. Wenders spends more time with Jonathan than he does with Ripley, who\u2019s more of a sporadic, chaotic presence in Jonathan\u2019s life as he\u2019s pressured into carrying out contract killings for Minot. \u201cYou are too sensitive, Tom,\u201d Minot says, an accusation that no one would make to any other version of Ripley. Hopper\u2019s Ripley comes to Jonathan\u2019s aid out of a sense of guilt and regret, while for Malkovich\u2019s Ripley, it\u2019s just a matter of staying in control of the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Ripley\u2019s Game<\/em>, Ripley has blossomed into a confident, amoral serial killer, although he\u2019s still insecure enough to let an overheard insult launch him into an intricate revenge plot. Malkovich gives Ripley a serpentine charisma, and when he ravishes his much younger Italian girlfriend Luisa Harari (Chiara Caselli), it feels like the result of his predatory attitude to all of life\u2019s pleasures, rather than the clumsy overcompensating of Ripley Under Ground<\/em>. Hopper\u2019s Ripley barely registers as a real person, while Wenders devotes his time to Jonathan\u2019s mental unraveling. Cavani, however, never loses track of her devious title character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like James Bond or Batman, Ripley is a character who can withstand many interpretations without losing his essence. He\u2019s an embodiment of masculine pride, a man who gets away with anything because he never considers the idea that he won\u2019t. Highsmith understood that allure in 1955, and filmmakers and actors continue to be fascinated by its seductive power. Ripley draws in artists and audiences just as effortlessly as he draws in his victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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