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American PseudoIn this age of rampant reinvention when political candidates, entrepreneurs and criminals change selves like quicksilver 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' may be Hollywood's most chilling and up-to-date portrait of our national character.
American Pseudo
By FRANK RICH
Photographs by BRIGETTE LACOMBE
LIFE'S PARTIES having passed him by, the perpetual outsider looking in, Tom Ripley (played by Matt Damon, left) is in love not just with Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) but also with the polished, socially acceptable lifestyle that is Dickie's birthright.
At this late date in the century -- the century defined by the American success story -- the two men considered most likely to succeed to the presidency are both running away from their pasts. One, brought up in a ritzy hotel by a Washington political family, has reinvented himself as a down-home Tennessean; the other, a political prince educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard, is now a man of the people in cowboy boots.
The man whose job they covet, of course, is the former Bill Blythe, son of a traveling salesman and product of the disreputable gambling town of Hot Springs, Ark., who, via Georgetown, Oxford and Yale, long ago remade himself (for a while anyway) into the Man From Hope. In the parallel private realm of America -- that of business -- the folk hero du jour is Jim Clark, Silicon Valley entrepreneur extraordinaire, who, in the words of his chronicler Michael Lewis, has "no past, only a future."
A dirt-poor kid from Plainview, Tex., who was expelled from high school, Clark acquired new wives, friends and colleagues as he reinvented himself (on his way to retooling cyberspace) at the threshold of middle age.
Our youth culture is dominated by hip-hop, which has become a means for white kids to reconfigure themselves as black. The god of adult commerce is Martha Stewart, who, like Ralph Lauren before her, instructs us all on how to be old-school white. In a country where obsession with body image is now a transgenerational religion, the metamorphoses promised by plastic surgery outnumber Baskin-Robbins flavors and are nearly as accessible to all. Those who wish to remake themselves in gender, age or biography without invasive surgery, whether for fun, profit or criminality, need merely trot out a new screen name on America Online, which in its 5.0 upgrade increases the number of possible fictive identities per subscriber from five to seven.
It's into this fluid turn-of-the-century America -- when even outlaws come in the chameleon guises of Andrew Cunanan and Martin Frankel -- that a new, nightmarish and highly apt movie called "The Talented Mr. Ripley" is being released just in time for the holidays. In what has been widely considered a strong year for adult American movies and a celebratory year for a nation riding an unprecedented boom, "Ripley" occupies its own strange niche. Neither the work of a breakout young director like David O. Russell ("Three Kings"), Spike Jonze ("Being John Malkovich") or Paul Thomas Anderson ("Magnolia") -- nor one of the season's adaptations of admired best sellers ("Angela's Ashes," "The Green Mile," "Snow Falling on Cedars") -- Ripley" is the unexpected intruder that, however compelling, is just nasty enough to threaten to sour the New Year's party.
Complicating matters further, the movie arrives subversively disguised as a glossy high-middlebrow treat. It was written and directed by Anthony Minghella, of the Oscar-anointed "English Patient"; it stars the gilded Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow; it is sumptuously set in the Technicolor 1950's in lush climes stretching from a penthouse terrace on Central Park West to Venice, Rome, San Remo and a bucolic, cliffhanging village on the Amalfi Coast. But for all those glittering trappings, "Ripley" is not a benign romantic epic, not a feel-good picture with an uplifting denouement like "Good Will Hunting" or "Shakespeare in Love."Damon and Paltrow are not a couple in the film, and they would as soon kill each other as kiss.
To put it bluntly, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" will not be 1999's most popular movie. The studio may well know this: why else blanket the country with an entertainment this black on Christmas Day except out of the hope that star power will pull in an audience before there's time for too much backlash over its creepiness, its violence, its homoerotic sexuality and its defiance of the moral closure usually provided by big-budget Hollywood entertainments. (In "Ripley," grisly crimes do not necessarily lead to punishment.) Yet like the film it sometimes consciously evokes, Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," which earned mixed reviews and unexceptional box-office returns in its initial release, "Ripley" will attract at the very least a passionate cult. It's not only a very unlikely big-studio product but also one that speaks keenly to our moment in a disturbing, haunting voice. "When you see where you live from a distance, it's like a dream, isn't it?" says the movie's title character in a late throwaway line that seems to recapitulate the movie's own startling perspective on where we live.
With appropriate fin de siècle melancholy and the relentlessness of a thriller, "Ripley" nails both the wonder that has attended our century's celebratory version of the American dream and the anxiety that is stirred up by that dream's stealthy doppelgänger, the American tragedy that befalls the Gatsbyesque dreamer who goes too far.
"Ripley" asks us to identify with an American man who, like so many before him, believes in the democratic ethos that says anyone can jettison the past, wipe the slate clean and with pluck and luck be whoever he or she wants to be. The earnest, upwardly mobile Tom Ripley, played by Damon, isn't particularly greedy or ambitious, but he does want to rise above his drab circumstances to grab the right, socially acceptable lifestyle, along with love and money. By the time he takes a wrong turn in pursuit of his fantasy, we're already along for the ride, rooting for his success and happiness as we might for our own, even if that means we become locked with our outlaw hero in a very dark and solitary place -- even if, to our extreme discomfort, we find ourselves, in our secret heart of hearts, rooting for him to get away with murder.
"Ripley" opens in 1958, the same year "Vertigo" was released -- a year, like our own, of extraordinary prosperity and, again perhaps like our own, the tail end of an era. When we first meet its title character, he's a pallid, immaculate young man, with Clark Kent glasses and the fastidious manners of a manservant or corporate accountant. But he lives in a mean cold-water flat in Manhattan, and his actual job is as an attendant in a concert-hall lavatory, where he brushes dandruff from rich men in tuxedos as they splash themselves with Old Spice.
Thanks to a borrowed navy blazer and a chance encounter, Tom encourages one rich man, a shipping magnate named Herbert Greenleaf, in his mistaken belief that Tom had been at Princeton with his son, Dickie, class of '56. Dickie Greenleaf -- a dazzling all-American golden boy and a role very likely to confer stardom on the British actor Jude Law -- is off idling in Italy, sybaritically pursuing a dilettante's calling as a jazz saxophonist and a romance with Marge Sherwood (Paltrow), an aspiring writer from his Park Avenue set. Dickie's disapproving dad offers Tom $1,000 to visit his son in Italy and bring him home to take his rightful place in the family business.
The America at the end of our century more than even the America at the end of the last is agog with technological change that not only encourages us to reinvent ourselves to find success or happiness or sex but also increases the tools with which we can do so.
The movie's first moments -- the Paramount logo, the warped-lullaby musical theme (by Gabriel Yared) reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann's for "Vertigo," the jagged credits in the style of Saul Bass's for "North by Northwest" -- almost explicitly recall Hitchcock's high-style movies of the 50's, in which that mercurial director sometimes took perverse delight in casting James Stewart, American Everyman, in neurotic roles far removed from his angelic Frank Capra heroes.
In "Vertigo," Stewart was John (Scottie) Ferguson, a smart, emotionally remote detective whose psyche plunges into voyeurism and sexual obsession once he is sent by a shipping magnate on a mission that tosses him into a bizarre plot of mistaken identity, murder and suicides both real and faked. In "Ripley," Damon, only recently seen as Steven Spielberg's American Everyman, Private Ryan, portrays another smart, emotionally reticent Peeping Tom, and his parallel assignment for another shipping magnate tosses him into similar horrors. The tight-lipped Tom Ripley, looking a bit like the pre-superstar Andy Warhol of the 50's, falls in love with the bronzed, self-assured Dickie Greenleaf as surely as Stewart did with his "Vertigo" quarry, Kim Novak.
But there he and his predecessor part. Where Scottie wants to remake the Novak character into his dream girl, Tom wants to remake himself into his dream boy. He wants to duplicate Dickie -- in looks, in savoir-faire, in Gucci accessories -- until he can pass as being to the manner, and perhaps even to the Greenleaf manor, born. "I always thought, Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody," Tom says, and no matter what the human cost, including the annihilation of his own self, he will not be denied. Clark Kent wills himself into Superman, but a Superman as ruthless as Macbeth.
THE STAR ACTORS, like the director (right), all committed to the risky project before their careers really took off: Damon before the release of "Good Will Hunting," Cate Blanchett, who plays an East Side expatriate socialite not in the Highsmith novel, while she was still shooting "Elizabeth."]
Damon is in every scene of the film and, with his initially bookish and wholesome presence, serves as its irresistible bait. There's much to like about Tom. He's cultured (he travels with the collected Shakespeare and Blue Guides), talented (he plays Bach at the piano) and sensitive (he seems to care for Dickie's variously ill-treated women more tenderly than Dickie does). Tom is the intelligent, poor and shy nerd who craves only to be part of the "in" crowd, and what American, from junior high school on, does not know that desperate feeling of wanting to mortgage one's soul in order to fit in?
"Everybody's not been invited to the dance at one time or another," says Damon, who took on the gutsy and demanding assignment -- for which he lost weight, studied piano and modulated his vocal pitch and posture --in part because of his identification with the character's "total discomfort in his identity" and his compassion for the character's "deep, intense loneliness." Though now in constant demand, the 29-year-old actor still vividly recalls the seven-year drought of obscure roles and rejection that sent him into despair about his career.
Minghella's screenplay is particularly harrowing in its dramatization of Tom's wallflower status among the rich kids of Dickie's circle -- a poignant class-consciousness it shares with the script Damon wrote with Ben Affleck for "Good Will Hunting." When Tom is mocked for his square corduroy sport jacket or his "bourgeois" taste in furnishings or his inability to ski -- or is literally left to stand on the outside looking in through a window as Dickie and a condescending society pal or Dickie and Marge exchange intimacies he can never share -- it's hard not to feel the character's panicked sense of exclusion and isolation, of envy and rejection, his aching hunger to be chosen, to be part of the club, to be wanted, to be loved.
Tom Ripley was born in the imagination of the novelist Patricia Highsmith (1921-95), who made a life's work of her ostracization from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention. "Everyone in the book is making themselves up in some shape or form, and that's what she was doing herself," as Minghella puts it. Born to separated, soon-to-be-divorced parents as Mary Patricia Plangman (she later took her stepfather's surname), Highsmith was at first reared by a grandmother in Fort Worth, then moved at age 6 with her mother, a fashion illustrator for Women's Wear Daily, to Greenwich Village. Later, Highsmith would tell interviewers matter-of-factly of how she didn't meet her father until she was 12 and of how her mother had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine five months into pregnancy.
After graduating from Julia Richman High School and Barnard, Highsmith made a living writing scenarios for action comic books, then started her own itinerant wanderings through America. "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the second of Highsmith's 20-odd books, was written in 1955 as she uprooted herself from Massachusetts to Santa Fe. Finally, she fled to Europe, where she spent most of her adult life. "If you have an imagination that goes far afield, you can live far afield," she once said.
In a rare TV interview she granted London Weekend Television's "South Bank Show" in the early 1980's, Highsmith is a forbidding, unsmiling figure in a Burberry trench coat with a pugnacious, pouchy face framed by thick, parted black hair; she looks rather like her favorite bird, the owl. At the end she was living alone in a remote Italian village with a population of 250 perched in mountainous Switzerland. Tom Ripley -- whom she belatedly brought back in four other books; the first, 15 years after his debut -- was her favorite creation. "He could be called psychotic," she said, defending him against the charge of amorality leveled by her interviewer, Melvyn Bragg. "But I would not call him insane because his actions are rational. . . . I consider him a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to." If there's "not much to be admired" about him, she added, he was also "not entirely to be censured."
"THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY" in Minghella's hands is a riff on the Highsmith novel. "You've drunk the drink, and the taste that's left in your mouth is what you go with," the director (seated) says of the "mystery of adaptation."]
Highsmith's sympathy for her devil ran deep. Her own tastes were dark and darker. Her favorite writer was Dostoyevsky; a favorite artist was Francis Bacon (for "the way he sees mankind throwing up into a toilet"); and among her favorite American authors was the emotionally isolated, class-minded, expatriated Henry James (the plot setup of "Ripley" deliberately mirroring a late James masterpiece, "The Ambassadors"). She wasn't reader-friendly. She wrote in what Minghella astutely calls "an impatient and irritable prose," creating "an airless, claustrophobic world" in which the supporting characters often amount to stick figures.
In the literary arena, Highsmith never got the breaks of the blue-chip authors of her time. Her first novel, the 1950 "Strangers on a Train," which lays out some of the "Ripley" themes of class envy, identity switching and male-male infatuation (beta with alpha, in current lingo), was snapped up by Hitchcock and made into a classic film. But the director had kept his identity covert while pursuing the rights, thereby nabbing the book for the bargain price of $7,500, and the screenplay's famous co-writer Raymond Chandler got more credit for what was on-screen than did the obscure author of the novel that was its source. Highsmith did have her literary champions, including Truman Capote (who successfully boosted her application to the Yaddo writers' colony in 1948) and Graham Greene (who celebrated her as "the poet of apprehension" in a 1970 essay), but her books sold better in Europe than America.
"Her amoral explorations of perverse behavior have confused American readers of crime fiction" was how The Times summed up her cult status in 1988. Only in 1991 did Highsmith reveal that her own identities included "Claire Morgan," the author of "The Price of Salt," a paperback lesbian novel that sold a million copies nearly 40 years earlier. By then her career was taking on a certain bleak circularity: just as "Strangers on a Train" had been rejected by six publishers at the start, so her final novel, "Small g: A Summer Idyll," was rejected by Knopf (though published in Europe) the year she died, nearly a half-century later. As a postscript Highsmith might well find unamusing, Knopf has brought out three of the "Ripley" novels this fall in a handsome, if posthumous, Everyman's edition.
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" was made into a movie once before, the French "Purple Noon," which Rene Clement directed in 1960, with Alain Delon as Ripley. It tacked on a morally unambiguous ending, reversed Ripley's implicit sexuality and de-Americanized its characters. (A later Ripley novel, "Ripley's Game," was the basis for Wim Wenders's film "The American Friend" in the 70's, with Dennis Hopper as Ripley.) Minghella was hired to write the current version by its executive producer, Sydney Pollack, when "The English Patient" was in limbo; Minghella finished his first draft just as his movie went into rehearsal in Rome. He hadn't originally planned to direct "Ripley" but found himself so captivated by the material that he asked the studio to wait for him until he was free to take it on. Once "The English Patient" hit it big and other offers flooded in, he could have abandoned Highsmith for safer ground but didn't. Even so, "this film was never intended to be more than a chamber film," the director said in one of a series of conversations we had in Berkeley, Calif., while he was completing the editing of "Ripley" at the Saul Zaentz Film Center.
Like him, the star actors all committed to this risky project before their biggest career breakthroughs might have pulled them in more conventional directions: Damon before the release of "Good Will Hunting," Paltrow before she had signed on to "Shakespeare in Love," Cate Blanchett as she was still shooting "Elizabeth." Defending Ripley against the charge of amorality, Patricia Highsmith said: 'I would not call him insane because his actions are rational. . . . I consider him a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to.'
Blanchett, intriguingly, plays a character that didn't exist in Highsmith: another expatriate East Side socialite who gets caught in the Tom-Dickie web. In a witty inversion of Ripley's efforts to trade up in social class, she uses an assumed name to disguise her identity as a textile heiress. As written and acted, the role adds a shimmering Jamesian portrait of a trapped American woman to the canvas, and it is but one of many significant alterations Minghella has made to the novel.
Dickie's father, played by James Rebhorn, has been deepened into a more controlling Jamesian blueblood; two deaths and other characters have been added as well, even as some of the book's plot devices have beenstreamlined.
"You've drunk the drink, and the taste that's left in your mouth is what you go with," says Minghella of "the mystery of adaptation." (His next project is Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain.")Much as his "English Patient" found its own idiosyncratic path into creating a screen blueprint for Michael Ondaatje's diffuse novel ("A thousand stories and no narrative," as Minghella describes it), so his "Ripley" is a riff on Highsmith. Literally so: in the novel, Dickie is a would-be painter, not a sax player. By making the switch, Minghella, himself a pianist, is able to interject cuts by Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and other greats of the period, to invoke Blue Note record jackets as visual talismans and to turn Dickie and Tom's thwarted bond into an almost musical duet. The closest their relationship comes to some sort of unspoken consummation is an early nocturnal scene in a smoky Naples jazz club where Dickie's sultry sax partners with Tom's tentative piano on "My Funny Valentine." It's a cultural moment of exquisite nuance: Damon (in his own voice) precisely mimics the tragic Chet Baker's famous androgynous rendition of the song, whose lyric carries the bittersweet longing of its tragically unhappy author, Lorenz Hart, a closeted, alcoholic homosexual who saw himself as a graceless outsider among the glamorous show-biz elite. Hart's lyrics -- Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart?" -- take on a chilling double meaning.
Minghella, who is not gay, also had to figure out what to do about the book's use of Ripley's guarded sexual identity. In the novel, Marge says dismissively of Tom: "All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean." Marge speaks for the vacillating Highsmith, who once said of Tom that he's a "little bit homosexual . . . not that he's ever done anything about that." (In the later Ripley books, she none-too-convincingly marries him off.) Minghella agrees that the character is a virgin who has been left out of sex as he has been left out of life's parties, but he is more candid in displaying Tom's unspoken desire for (and tenderness toward) Dickie. In one of the movie's saddest, at times hallucinatory motifs, Damon repeatedly steals glances of Jude Law in any reflected surface he can find, expressing his affection with a terrified furtiveness that is at once sinister and heartbreaking.
But in the novel, Tom is also given a castrating aunt and a window-decorator roommate back in America, not to mention a physical attraction to a group of "fairies" he spies performing acrobatics on a Cannes beach and gratuitous loathing asides about female anatomy and undergarments. Minghella removes Highsmith's Freudian cliches, the stereotypes, the lingo of "perverts" and "sissies" -- only to find that his movie could land in another potential minefield by 1990's P.C. standards. Could the new "Ripley" be found guilty of equating homosexuality with Tom's criminal pathology? Even before he completed the film, the director was starting to receive calls from journalists raising the question.
Minghella says of Tom's attraction to Dickie: "The studio would have been thrilled if it was transmogrified into a love for Marge -- he wants the life, so he wants the girl! Having not done that, you lay yourself open to criticism for dramatizing a man with ambivalent sexuality who kills people. I'm desperate that no one infer a connection between his actions in the film and his sexuality. But it's a sorry state of affairs if you can only write about a homosexual character who behaves well --that's another kind of tyranny, I think. The minute you try to pull back from what's sensual and erotic, you're losing your nerve, and I just didn't want to shrink away from the romance of it; it's very tender to me. It seems to me so much the fabric of the story -- not so much that Tom was gay but that he was in love with Dickie and with Dickie's life."
As balance, and to provide a stunning plot twist not in Highsmith, Minghella has expanded a character who appears in only a few lines in the novel, Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport), into an important player, "a gay person who is centered and comfortable with himself." Without making a case out of it, the movie also generates sympathy for Tom as a closeted homosexual with a boldness that wouldn't have been ventured by Highsmith in the 50's. Tom is mocked by Dickie's snottiest upper-crust pal, Freddie Miles (another dead-on character turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman), not just for his lack of Princetonian wealth and breeding but also for his unmentionable sexuality, the meanest cut of all to an odd man out desperate to fit in with Dickie's clique. or all his alterations, Minghella has contradicted the book's intentions in only one substantive way: his Ripley has the stirrings of a conscience (if, say, Stewart in "Vertigo" can be said to have a conscience).
The director is willing to risk criticisms from Highsmith purists. "There's so much nihilism in film right now," he explains. "If I'm going to tell a story that's so bleak and so much a journey of a soul, if in the end Ripley was just going to go about his business, what's the journey?" In Minghella's view, to do so "is a cynical statement, and a very easy one." Just the same, the ending of "Ripley" is about as upbeat and sentimental as, say, the final glimpse of Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in "Godfather II" -- with which "Ripley" shares its editor, Walter Murch, as close a collaborator to Minghella as he has been to Francis Ford Coppola. During their final weeks on the film, the director and editor kept tinkering subtly with the closing footage of Damon so that Minghella could land the cathartic blow he wanted, in which the audience is left alone with Ripley in an inky psychological no man's land.Everywhere else the film enhances the novel rather than challenges it.
A soft-spoken Englishman reared on the Isle of Wight by working-class parents of Italian immigrant stock who ran an ice-cream business and morning-to-midnight cafe, the 45-year-old Minghella relates intensely to Ripley's and Highsmith's outsider status. "Every English person was a Dickie Greenleaf to me," he says of his childhood, and he drew heavily on his adolescent longings in the script, his memories "of being behind the glass of an ice-cream van" serving better-off neighbors, of delivering his parents' wares through the tradesmen's entrance of the Isle of Wight's moneyed Royal Yacht Squadron.
But he has also deepened the movie's reach as a totemic American fable. A serious student of American culture since he arrived as a young man at the University of Hull, where he ultimately became a lecturer in drama before beginning his writing career in theater and television, Minghella gets the bigger picture right. From the vantage point of the century's end -- and the perspective of an outsider -- he has set Highsmith's story within a historical context that wouldn't have been possible at midcentury.
GWYNETH PALTROW plays Marge Sherwood, an aspiring writer from the Park Avenue set who is manipulated and patronized by every man on-screen. It is a ''thankless role,'' which in the 50's could have been a Grace Kelly glamour turn.]
Advancing the novel's time frame from the early to the late 50's, Minghella has been able to capitalize on the voluptuous Italy of "il boom" -- a belated postwar prosperity as giddy as America's. The wealthy, sexually liberated Rome of the movie's key sequences is right out of the 1959 "La Dolce Vita," a backdrop in contrast to the relatively strait-laced Americans in the foreground. Even in their Continental idyll, where they try to reinvent themselves as slumming bohemian artistes and Camus-caffeinated existentialists, Dickie and Marge covet kitchen appliances and sports cars; they nominally maintain separate residences rather than shacking up, as befits the conventions of their social class and the pre-60's, pre-birth-control-pill culture.
When Tom sees two Italian men being physically affectionate with each other -- an image inspired by a Cartier-Bresson photo of the period -- he recoils as if mortified, even though it's an intimacy he craves. To Minghella, an important aspect of his movie, which could be teased out of the novel only with the advantage of 1990's hindsight, is "the collusion of men during a period in American social history when it was at its zenith" -- that is, in the years just before the dawn of "The Feminine Mystique." In this sense, he feels Paltrow won't get enough credit for a performance that in the 50's could have been a Grace Kelly glamour turn ("Hitchcock would have cast Gwyneth in everything"), but when refracted through a 90's lens is in service of "a thankless role."
Though Marge is the character who sees most clearly through Ripley's game, she is manipulated or patronized by every man on-screen, straight or gay, including Dickie's father -- each of whom is intent on keeping her in her place and in the dark. For the film's narcissistic straight men, she's a good egg (rather like Midge, Scottie's doormat of a sometime girlfriend, played by Barbara Bel Geddes, in "Vertigo"); for the closeted gay characters, she's an unwitting beard. Marge at times seems a particularly cruel variation on Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) of Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot" (1959), who is humiliated for farcical but selfish purposes by two men who have reinvented themselves as women.
Marge could also pass as a grim revisionist replay of Doris Day being strung along by Rock Hudson in "Pillow Talk" (also '59): in the retrospectively bizarre environment of that "light comedy," Hudson, a gay man in real life, plays a straight playboy who, at one point, pretends to be gay to hoodwink Day.
Minghella says that in addition to looking again at "Vertigo" and contemporaneous Fellini movies (particularly his favorite, "I Vitelloni") in preparing "Ripley," he helped nail down the young American characters' cultural and sexual milieu by reading memoirs by Paul Goodman and Paul Monette. He also consulted Calvin Trillin's remorseful "Remembering Denny," about Trillin's Yale '57 classmate Denny Hansen, a closeted gay varsity athlete, an "all-American hero" with a "million-dollar smile," who traveled to Europe as a Rhodes scholar (and much later committed suicide).
Yet the larger American themes of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," sounded by Ripley's relentless mission to reinvent himself along the lines of his gaudiest dreams, transcend the movie's particular time and place. Both as written initially by Highsmith and then expanded by Minghella, what might have been a narrow thriller seems like a mordant recap of a classic, perhaps the classic, strain in American literature and social history.
The writer and psychoanalyst Robert Jay Lifton summed up this durable strain in his 1993 book, "The Protean Self." Calling America "the protean nation," he traces our infatuation with the legends of self-invented men from the multilived Benjamin Franklin ("America's quintessential 'self-made man"') through to such less benign, mythical con men as James Fenimore Cooper's Richard Jones (in "The Pioneers," 1823) and Melville's nameless "Confidence Man" with his "shell-game of identity" (1857) to our century's foremost embodiment of the archetype, Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby of 1925 ("a crook as well as a dreamer").
As one modern master of the theme, Ralph Ellison, put it, America's capacity for the protean reflects the country's "rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom" and yet also "illusion which must be challenged, as Menelaus did in seizing Proteus." Only in 1991 did Patricia Highsmith reveal that her own identities included 'Claire Morgan,' the author of 'The Price of Salt,' a paperback lesbian novel that sold a million copies nearly 40 years earlier. Minghella talks affectionately about American writers from Wharton and James to Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver.
But the biggest influence on his "Ripley" screenplay seems to be one he didn't mention: Fitzgerald. In Minghella's screenplay, whether intentionally or not, the continuity between "Ripley" and "The Great Gatsby" is pronounced. The screenplay gives Dickie Greenleaf a more callous present and a violent past not in Highsmith, to the point where this scion of a wealthy family seems a stand-in for Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan, the rich Yale football hero, and his wife, Daisy, who famously "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." As the aristocratic Tom Buchanan is less appealing in the end than the parvenu racketeer Gatsby, so the aristocratic Dickie, a reckless man without the saving grace of romantic ambition, seems in some ways less admirable than the impostor Tom Ripley.
And Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that "penniless young man without a past" who will stop at nothing to will his romantic idol, Daisy, into believing he is of her class. ("I didn't want you to think I was just some nobody," Gatsby says at one point, sounding like Ripley in his pursuit of Dickie.) By making Ripley not just a fraudulent Princetonian but also a men's room menial -- a detail not in Highsmith's book -- Minghella heightens the parallel to Gatsby, who invoked an Oxford pedigree to cloak his humble past as James Gatz, once a janitor.
For much of the way, especially given the empathy and intelligence with which Damon laces (and yet never sentimentalizes) a spooky role, it is possible to admire Ripley as "talented" in the way that Fitzgerald saw Gatsby as "great" -- as a grand dreamer with the creative vision to make something of himself. They might have been the kind of dreamers who have always built America, had they not overreached. he brilliance of Highsmith's conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist -- thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby (even allowing for the rumors that Gatsby had "killed a man once").
The attractive Gatsby side of Tom, so well augmented by Minghella and Damon, fights to a standoff with the darker Tom, who seems almost to have been yanked from the Theodore Dreiser novel published the same year as "Gatsby," "An American Tragedy." Dreiser's striving Horatio Alger-style hero, Clyde Griffiths, is so determined to wipe out his past -- and to win the society girl that is his equivalent to Daisy and Dickie -- that he literally jettisons his human baggage, his working-class mistress, in a lake. One of the most shocking scenes in "Ripley" (novel and film) is a variation on that incident, which Dreiser had in fact borrowed from a notorious real-life American murder of 1906.
Whether Highsmith was thinking of Dreiser in writing either "Strangers on a Train" (which also echoes "An American Tragedy") or "Ripley" is unknown. She might also, one imagines, have read Willa Cather's early story "Paul's Case," an uncanny literary antecedent of "Ripley" also dating back to the beginning of the century (1905), in which a dreamy boy who works as an usher at Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh aspires to a life he has gleaned from "the supper-party pictures of The Sunday World supplement." With ill-gotten gains, he runs away to New York, where, much as Ripley hightails it to Gucci and the Grand Hotel in Rome, he shops at Tiffany and ogles the "bewildering radiance" of the fixtures at the grand hotel where he obtains a room.
"He was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be," wrote Cather of her reinvented hero. "This was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past" -- especially "now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, 'dress the part."' But the only way Paul can really wipe out his past, in Cather's moral scheme, is to kill himself. By Ripley's debut in 1955, suicide, like the electrocution of Clyde Griffiths or the shooting of Jay Gatsby, was no longer the inevitable outcome for a man (or woman) who went to extremes in pursuit of erasing the past for a new life. It was the era of the Beats and anti-heroes and also of a new mainstream critique of the American "success" story, typified by nonfiction books like "The Affluent Society" (1958), by John Kenneth Galbraith, and "The Status Seekers" (1959), by Vance Packard, which raised questions about the postwar boom's version of the American dream not unlike those Dreiser did a half-century earlier, in the aftermath of the Gilded Age. Typical of the mood was Joseph L. Mankiewicz's uncompromisingly cynical screenplay for the hit 1950 movie "All About Eve," in which the self-made young actress Eve Harrington turns out not to be the poor, nave war widow of her self-generated publicity but a back-stabbing sexual predator and compulsive liar whose real name is Gertrude Slescynski. Her unmasking, however, does not impede her meteoric rise to stardom.
A half-century later still, Ripleys seem almost a constant on the national landscape -- the real-life landscape as well as that of our culture. Outlaw protean Americans have always thrived in prosperous times like Fitzgerald's 20's and Highsmith's 50's -- and in the gold-rush frontier before that -- when success seems to be everywhere and in such tantalizing reach. Our twin economic peaks of the 80's and 90's have produced a share of characters who could have walked right out of the pages of a Highsmith novel.
In the early 80's, a young man named David Hampton bamboozled some of the toniest households on the Upper East Side into believing he was Sidney Poitier's son -- in part by persuading them that he had been a classmate of their children's at various elite schools. (In John Guare's fictionalized stage version of the story, "Six Degrees of Separation," the impostor learns how to fake his identity by having an affair with a male Ivy League undergrad -- a tactic that Ripley also uses, in bowdlerized form, in Highsmith's novel.)
The 80's also brought us newly minted masters of the universe, Gatsbys who, if not caught, might have become Ripleys: the inside trader Ivan Boesky, who used his membership in the Harvard Club to trick business colleagues into believing he was from a highfalutin background (he actually drifted through several undistinguished colleges in Michigan), and Jeffrey P. Beck, the Drexel mergers-and-acquisitions maniac known as Mad Dog. Beck was so convincing that he befriended Michael Douglas and served as an adviser and bit player for the Oliver Stone film "Wall Street." Only after the crash was it discovered that Beck's legendary tales of derring-do in the Vietnam War and clandestine adventures with the C.I.A. were fiction.
Our current boom has created not just self-invented New Economy pinups like Jim Clark but also the likes of Martin Frankel, who, with the right lies, Greenwich, Conn., estate and impressive computer consoles, passed himself off as a financial genius while supposedly stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from U.S. insurance companies. Though he was a gawky, bespectacled high-school dropout and so neurotic that he suffered from "traders' block," he somehow convinced his prey, as well as the many women he attracted to his harem, that he was a brilliant stock speculator and world-class sybarite. Even when he was on the run in Europe, fleeing an international manhunt, he traveled first-class, with luggage tonnage to match. Once he was finally apprehended, one of his gal pals, Cynthia Allison, told Time that Frankel only wanted to live the American dream.
The same could be said of Andrew Cunanan, a young man who apparently struck many as no less charming than Ripley. He convinced a variety of well-educated prey that he was an intelligence officer, a graduate of Choate and Yale and the son of Philippine plantation owners as he traded socially upward, reinventing himself at each step, in his long and bloody path toward a rendezvous with Gianni Versace. Once Cunanan killed himself, the Miami Beach police found a well-thumbed library of tasteful self-improvement that he had left behind: H.W. Janson's "History of Art," a Francis Bacon coffee-table book and biographies of Conde Nast, Slim Keith and William Paley. This could have been Ripley's upwardly mobile reading list -- or items on the self-improvement checklist kept by the young James Gatz. (Martin Frankel also kept a list, found after his capture, the first item on which was "launder money.")
Minghella calls "The Talented Mr. Ripley" a "mischievous morality tale" because it's designed to force the audience to wonder how far it might take reinvention in pursuit of some prize, whether it be success or love or simply an antidote to an acute loneliness. The movie is meant to instill "the queasy recognition that this plausible misfit is not so far from one version of ourselves," Minghella writes in an introduction to the soon-to-be-published version of his screenplay. The filmmaker wants each of us "to inhabit each step of Ripley's journey until, like a child in the sea who has forgotten the tide, we look back and see how perilously far we are from the shore."
By then, blood is washing up with the tide, and how many will want to take that journey is anybody's guess. Damon applauds Minghella's decision to make Ripley a realistic, human, at times touching character rather than a Hannibal Lecter sort of psychopath, even though Minghella knew going in that, commercially, a Lecter approach "would have been better -- it's not rocket science." Like his star, Minghella wouldn't have had it any other way, but he knows he could pay a price. "I feel as shameless as Ripley," he told me as he was completing his final cut. "When you're making a film, you want it to be as unique and distinctive and resonant as you can make it.
When you're out in the cinema, you want it to be like every film that is working -- faster, funnier, more romantic. You become the biggest slut in the world. I thought 10 people would show up for 'The English Patient' -- it was about this man who's severely burned and he's in bed and telling stories to a French-Canadian nurse! I think 10 other people will show up for 'Ripley.' I have no acumen about the movie business. I hope I'm wrong again. I can't imagine the film sustaining that number of screens" -- it opens at more than 2,000 theaters -- but I know there's a huge audience out there for Gwyneth and Matt. I hope they're surprised and delighted, not surprised and dismayed."
But dismayed isn't necessarily a bad thing. In a year when even Hollywood movies that offer critiques of America tend to congratulate the audience on its superiority to the characters on-screen -- witness the pitiful suburban couples of "American Beauty" -- The Talented Mr. Ripley" implicates the moviegoer. There's something about Ripley, in both his desire for a better life and his eagerness to discard the unhappy past, that is built into the American character, most alluringly so, and we live in a time when, more than ever, a new life is plausible.
The America at the end of our century -- more than even the America at the end of the last, another fast-moving time of industrial revolution and melting-pot immigration -- is agog with technological change that not only encourages us to reinvent ourselves to find success or happiness or sex but also increases the tools with which we can do so and the social mobility that encourages us to go for it. "Reinvent Yourself" instructs a story in a telephone-directory-thick issue of Fast Company, the wildly successful booster magazine of the new economy, as it preaches the lessons in metamorphosis gleaned from, among others, a prosecutor who became a video-game producer and a jazz musician who remade himself into a management consultant.
We don't even have to show our faces to reinvent ourselves. In a chat room, anyone can be a Ripley -- or whoever. It's a liberating time in the history of a protean nation, and also a conflicting one. "The American is always on the way to someplace else," Lewis Lapham once wrote, but perhaps never as quickly or universally as in the high-velocity world of right now. While Ripley has to laboriously scratch out a passport photo to trade in an identity, we can do it in a digital click. But where do we want to go today? Who do we want to be? How much of ourselves (and family and friends and values) are we willing to trade away, in the name of self-improvement and ambition of one kind or another, to get there?
No one, it seems, is immune to these questions. In the library rotunda of the $100 million mansion he built near Seattle, Bill Gates has inscribed not a triumphal captain-of-industry epigram but a yearning quotation from, of all books, "The Great Gatsby." At the turn of our century, even the man by whom most Americans measure success finds romance in a mythic charlatan who rubbed out his past, then built a fortune and a mansion, all in the mistaken faith that he could find happiness by being someone else.
The New York Times. December 19, 1999.