I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley tonight. Apologies if any
of this is repetitious to previous posts. I've been out of the
Mote for a while.
- Not only set in the 50s, but it has that Hitchcockian
world of the 50s (as many have pointed out). No real
mystery except Ripley's motivations and whether he'll get
caught in being a fake. So its a psychological tale, in
that sort of heavy way of Psycho or even more like
the television shows by Hitchcock and Serling.
- Damon is excellent at not being pretty, but its opposite,
nerdy, slightly off, a too bright fellow who is in the
phrase of the past decade, uncomfortable in his skin.
- And it is very much a morality tale. Damon's Ripley
allows a gentle deception to pass without correcting it,
and the lie leads to other lies and as talented as his Mr.
Ripley is, he can barely keep up. Without spoiling the
story, his evil actions begin to cascade. And he seems to
be suffering from what he can't seem to stop.
- I don't know much about the novelist who wrote the book
that the movie is based on, but I assume she saw class
from a British point of view. Ripley's most vile actions
seem to immediately follow the accusations that he is not
in his class. Cate Blanchard's character at one point
confesses that while she was rich and didn't like money,
she was only truly comfortable with other rich people who
didn't like money.
- Blanchard plays a character who drops in from time to
time, and in the last two times serves as a catalyst for
Ripley to make move on, a sort of reminder for the
audience that he wasn't that clever, that the loose ends
that he has deftly managed to avoid keep coming back to
untrack his fantasies.
- Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge) plays a whiney love to Judd Law's
Dickie. She tries to be nice to Ripley, but over time,
she too, intuits his fakery. Law is the object of
Ripley's desire, both physically, and also in the most
covetous way possible: Ripley wants to be Dickie, the son
of a wealthy New York ship builder. Perhaps Celler has
already pointed this out long ago, but this is the third
movie where Law has played a homoerotic love interest (Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil and Wilde. He
is a golden boy in the golden light of Italy, slumming
with the natives, in love with bebop and sailing and
sunning on the beaches.
- Frank Rich (as Celler linked) had a long essay a few
weeks ago on the need to re-invent as it has played out
in American culture. Frances FitzGerald wrote an
interesting book some time ago called Cities on a Hill.
Her thesis was that ever since the Puritan sermon about
this new land being "a city on a hill" people
have found ways to recreate themsleves, shedding previous
existence like dead skin. She looked at 4 communities in
her book (gay Castro District in 70s, the Oregon commune,
Sun City in Florida, and Jerry Falwell's church in
Virginia) and show how they were groups of adults coming
together to be completely different.
- While the settings (and characters) are quite golden, the
film is rather grainy and flat looking, as if the
director was trying to understate the beauty of the
Italian locales. I read recently that one complaint
against Angela's Ashes was that it made dirty
dismal poverty in Dublin quite visually stunning.
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