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MR. RIPLEY'S MANY TALENTS

AUSSIE 'RIPLEY' PREVIEW

Palace Cinemas are proud to announce that Academy Award Winning Director ANTHONY MINGHELLA and Australian Cinematographer JOHN SEALE will present a special preview screening of their acclaimed new drama THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY to Sydney's film community on Friday 4 February, in advance of Roadshow Film Distributors' national release on 24 February, 2000.

Minghella and Seale's last collaboration was the multi-award winning THE ENGLISH PATIENT, and this special preview of THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (adapted by Minghella from the novel by Patricia Highsmith) will be a unique opportunity for filmmakers and film lovers to not only view the film, but also hear about its making, in a moderated Q & A discussion following the screening.

About the screening...
THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY (M) 133 mins
5.45 for 6.00pm sharp, followed by Q & A discussion 8.30-9.15pm Friday 4 February, 2000
Palace Academy Twin Cinema, 3a Oxford Street Paddington All tickets $16.50 on sale now at the cinema - phone reservations 02 9331 3457
Presented by Palace Cinemas in association with Roadshow Film Distributors and the Australian Screen Director's Association

CUT TO THE CATE:

We tried a different critical roundup with "Pushing Tin" that proved quite popular. We provide excerpts from the myriad of reviews we discovered, offering those bits that focused on our dear Cate. So, although we do offer a number of complete rave reviews of "Ripley" in the Cate Library, for the busiest of our Cate News readers, we offer this Cliff Notes version:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Still, "Ripley" is an elegant pageant peppered with sharp performances. Law makes the strongest impression, followed by Blanchett's amusing, world-weary turn as a deb who falls for Tom-as-Dickie."

The Charlotte Observer: "Some performances are spot-on: Jack Davenport is ideal as a tender British composer who represents Tom's likeliest chance for love, and Australian actress Cate Blanchett manages not only an American accent but the indifference to money that only very rich people display."

The Chicago Tribune: "Also top-notch are Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman as two members of the supremely idle rich: Hoffman as oily, smirky Freddie Miles, Dickie's cynical pal, and Blanchett as slightly addled Meredith Logue (one of Minghella's embellishments), the first person Ripley deceives."

The Dallas Morning News: "Cate Blanchett, whom some people think should have won the Oscar for "Elizabeth" that went instead to Ms. Paltrow for "Shakespeare," plays a character not in the original Highsmith novel. Ms. Blanchett's Meredith Logue, a likable American expatriate hoping to discover herself in Europe, adds to the plot's tension by showing up at unlikely times. Even when you begin to predict her appearances, you enjoy them. Ms. Blanchett is a strong actress, who deserves to once again carry her own movie as regally as she carried "Elizabeth."

Entertainment Weekly: "Cate Blanchett fills her small role with note-perfect detail. By the end, when Ripley's talents threaten to fail him, she's the reason. Somehow, believe it or not, I think the ornery, talented mystery novelist who invented him might have been pleased by such a turnabout."

The Houston Chronicle: "Minghella is given excellent supporting performances from Cate Blanchett, who plays an American heiress who is attracted to Tom-as-Dickie; and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays one of Dickie's dissipate expatriate friends."

The Los Angeles Times: "...much of the supporting cast is well chosen and really sparkles. Law, a top young British actor, brings the right kind of savoir-faire to Dickie Greenleaf, and Cate Blanchett, last seen as "Elizabeth," is excellent as uncertain expatriate Meredith Logue."

Miami Herald: "In smaller roles, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as one of Dickie's smug blueblood pals) and Cate Blanchett (as an American tourist who befriends Tom) register strongly, adding new complications to Tom's increasingly tense dilemma."

Newsday: "Blanchett, though playing someone not in the book, may well be the most interesting person in the movie besides Tom, given that her desires are almost as desperate, if more constrained, than his."

The New York Times: "...The ruse, which Mr. Damon handles coyly and credibly, if not with the nascent Norman Bates streak that the situation warrants, is given an added complication by the presence of Meredith Logue. Meredith is a needy post-debutante played irresistibly by Cate Blanchett. Once Meredith latches onto Tom, who she thinks is Dickie, whom she regards as a bored and wealthy kindred spirit, the story has developed all the dizzying cross-currents it deserves."

The Orange County Register: "As Meredith, Cate Blanchett delivers what may be the best performance in a movie that has only excellent ones and even she gets competition from Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays one of Dickie's more decadent, expatriate friends with fiendish pleasure."

The Portland Oregonian: "Law ("Gattaca," "eXistenZ") plays Dickie well as an irresistible pixie with a mean streak. Hoffman is a lascivious, hung-over delight. Paltrow and Cate Blanchett have less vivid roles to play, but fill them admirably, with no sense of showiness or vanity."

Salon: "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."

San Francisco Bay Guardian: "The Talented Mr. Ripley hasn't met a mirror that it can't turn into a psychological symbol. Minghella's script also adds a female-double motif, à la Vertigo, to Patricia Highsmith's book, though in this case the imitation (smoky-voiced Cate Blanchett) outshines the original (Gwyneth Paltry, er, Paltrow)."

San Francisco Examiner: "Accordingly, Minghella has surrounded Damon with Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jack Davenport playing a handful of alluringly subtle young actors, each in prime form. ...Tom does this while being accosted by a wily Minghella creation not in Highsmith's book. She's a flighty American debutante named Meredith Logue (Blanchett, whose breathless Yak-cent alone deserves an Oscar)."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "He has allowed each, including Oscar winners and nominees Paltrow, Damon and Cate Blanchett, to tackle complex character roles. As a result, they bring depth and humanity to their roles of people desperate to reinvent themselves."

Variety: "Performances are aces top to bottom. Damon outstandingly conveys his character's slide from innocent enthusiasm into cold calculation, Law is the picture of indolent, effortlessly alluring youth, and Paltrow increasingly reveals deeper layers to a character that seems rather straightforward at the outset. The wondrous Blanchett exactly captures a particular sort of flighty American aristocrat..."

THE RIPLEY ARTICLE ROUND-UP

Our good friend Paula Nechak, who writes for the Seattle Post Intelligencer and whom gave us an exclusive interview with Cate last year (which may be read in the Cate Library) recently interviewed Anthony Minghella. An excerpt:

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is a seductive guilty pleasure, visually gorgeous and brimming with beautiful talent: Jude Law as Dickie, Gwyneth Paltrow as fiancée Marge Sherwood, Matt Damon as Ripley and Cate Blanchett in a role that Minghella specifically added as a "moral harbinger" of Ripley's transgressions.

"I love her character," Minghella says. "Every time I went back to the screenplay, I wrote a bit more for her. She's so funny and I know it's absurd, but I kept thinking of Lucille Ball. Giddy is the perfect word; she's like an armada, all elbows and knees and very gauche, and I think the character writes a journal entry every time something happens to her. I told that to Cate who said, 'I know, I know,' and it was the only clue she needed. After that she was free and she flew."

Another fascinating Ripley-related article recently appeared in The Houston Chronicle. An excerpt:

"Similarly, Ripley's Cate Blanchett, who plays a trusting American heiress, sticks close to her roots in Sydney, Australia. She's also willing to take smaller parts, even after earning an Oscar nomination for Elizabeth.

"I just want a good script," said Blanchett, 30, wearing an olive pantsuit. "It doesn't matter how many lines you have, and I don't measure my success like stocks. People judge a film by its box office, but Citizen Kane was a flop."

Blanchett had already traveled in Italy, "and, as with Meredith (her character), I fell in love there and had my heart broken. "But the guy had very little to do with it," she said with an amazed self-amusement. "I think I just wanted to throw myself on my bed in my hotel and scream, `I can´t believe it!". She threw back her head and arms with a melodramatic flourish, then laughed. "There´s something incredibly romantic about that."

Blanchett didn't know any of her Ripley co-stars, but she and Paltrow became friends. Shortly after the shoot, Paltrow won the best actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love.

Upon hearing that Paltrow said she almost hoped her friend Blanchett would win, Blanchett laughed. "I don't think anyone truly hopes someone else will win," she said. "Those scratch marks on the back of her neck? Nothing to do with me." As Affleck once asserted, "Anyone who says there's no such thing as professional jealousy is either a liar or a fool."

The article may be read in its entirety in the Cate Library under Shooting Stars.

Time Magazine jumped into the fray with a revealing piece on the authoress of "Ripley":

December 27, 1999
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
RIPLEY'S CREATOR

BY RICHARD CORLISS

If your father walked out before you were born and your mother says she tried to abort you by guzzling turpentine, you may grow up with a sour view of humanity. Mary Patricia Plangman Highsmith--born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921--had murder on her mind from the first of her 23 novels, the 1950 Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock made a film of it a year later, though he dared include only one of the book's two murders.

Soon after, the woman whom screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) calls "our best expatriate since Henry James" left for Europe, where she was welcomed as an important novelist, not just a thriller writer. From this pleasant remove, she wrote of another ruthlessly imaginative expat, Tom Ripley.

The five novels--The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991)--trace a rake's progress from callow kid to elegant arriviste. "Wonderful to sit in a famous cafe," he thinks after his first murder, "and to think of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf!"

For all his tomorrows, Tom gets to steep himself in la Dickie vita. He lives in a fine house near Paris with a handsome blond wife who is blessedly indifferent to his shadier activities. From Dickie's estate and from the profits of an art-forgery racket, Tom has an income that gives him the leisure to paint, garden and commit the odd homicide. His whole life is a consummate forgery. He's become a counterfeit Dickie, better than the original.

The last two Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival.

In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon, who shows up to help but Ripley? Good deeds or bad, they're just caprices for a gentleman rogue. "I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial," Highsmith wrote, "for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not."

But she cared for Ripley, her alter ego or attractive opposite. She attributed the first book's popularity to "the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself... I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing." In gratitude, she kept him forever young. The novels span 36 years, and each is set in the present; yet Tom ages only about a decade. He is the Dorian Gray of crime.

His creator's life was less charmed. A recluse with a prison matron's visage, she had several lovers, of both sexes, but was alone at the end with her cats and pet snails. Did this adopted doyenne of Europe resent being neglected back home? At her death, in 1995, she had no U.S. publisher for her last work. And though nearly a score of films were made from her novels and short stories, most of them were European. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the first Hollywood-studio production of a Highsmith novel since Strangers on a Train.

And finally, just for the sake of posterity, we dragged this article up out of the Archives, just to give one and all a sense of the time continuim involved from conception of a project to realisation. Submitted for your approval:

Law, Blanchett near deal for 'Ripley' Minghella skeds lensing around thesps

By ANDREW HINDES, CHRIS PETRIKIN, February 5, 1998 VARIETY EXCLUSIVE

Budding stars Jude Law and Cate Blanchett are close to deals to join Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" for Paramount and Miramax.

Academy Award-winner Anthony Minghella will direct from his own adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's mystery novel (Daily Variety, Oct. 30, 1997). Sydney Pollack and Bill Horberg of Mirage Enterprises, and Tom Sternberg will produce.

Paramount will handle domestic distribution and Miramax has international rights to the film.
The story revolves around Tom Ripley (Damon), a young con artist who has been commissioned by a wealthy American to retrieve his prodigal son, Dickie Greenleaf (Law), from Italy. However, on arrival, Ripley is smitten with Greenleaf's charmed existence - and his girlfriend, the fellow expatriate played by Paltrow. Determined to preserve his newfound way of life, he murders Greenleaf and assumes his identity.

In order to accommodate Law's shooting schedule, Minghella asked that the production be pushed back to August from its original May start date. Equally impressed with Blanchett's talents, the director is understood to be doing a rewrite to expand her role as Meredith Logue, a friend of Tom Ripley.

The film takes place in - and will be shot in - Rome, Venice and Naples, Italy. After making her debut in Fox Searchlight's "Paradise Road," Blanchett stepped into the spotlight with her third film role, "Oscar and Lucinda," opposite Ralph Fiennes, also for Searchlight. She preceded that pic (and won the 1997 Australian Film Institute Best Supporting Actress Award) for her role in the Australian comedy "Thank God He Met Lizzie." Blanchett recently wrapped the leading role of the Tudor queen in "Elizabeth I," opposite Geoffrey Rush for Working Title Films. She begins production later this month on "Pushing Tin," directed by Mike Newell for Fox 2000. Blanchett is repped by the William Morris Agency's Peter Levine and Hylda Queally; and by Robin Gardiner in Australia.