Anthony Minghella dissects an American patient
by Ray Pride
Tom Ripley won't be found out.
At least, not according to the late novelist Patricia Highsmith, who put Ripley at the center of four of her austerely amoral, uncentered novels. (Highsmith famously once said, Tom never killed anybody—he didn't have to.) Anthony Minghella's first movie since "The English Patient," his adaptation of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," is a tricky, slick-seeming thing that may be as haunting (and haunted) as any movie around: a play of surfaces that seems glassy and superficial but is filled with all manner of fretful treachery. It is a thriller that chills then ices: a sure-footed dance of thwarting expectation.
Are any of us who we pretend we are? What will we do when—once—we're found out? How many secrets can we keep from ourselves? Whether it's apples or oranges to compare this year's dozens of strong and perhaps even great movies, Minghella and his collaborators (including the gifted sound and picture editor Walter Murch) keep everything up, up in the air.
First comes the casting, dripping with Oscars past: It's the late 1950s; Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, the nerdish cypher who browns and blooms in the glow of Italian sunlight and the reflected companionship of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), an untroubled shipping heir with movie-star dazzle, and his willowy arm candy (and distracted writer) Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). Ripley meets up with this starry but soon to be star-crossed pair in Mongibello, a fictional Italian seaside town given, Minghella says, a local name for the simmering Mt. Aetna.
Then the performance: Minghella has made a movie that is insinuating and insolently seductive, a gorgeously minted movie about a blank who will take your very skin as his own. But much is in the calibration of performance and look as in the plotting. "Often, there's something that's more pungent in a look than in half a page of screenplay," the 45-year-old writer-director says. "You learn that film can tell its story with a whole armory of weapons, not only dialogue, or even action, but how the frame is working and what information is there, and who has the power in the frame and how you cut." A first assembly ran over four hours. "Walter Murch and I spent a year on post-production to see what was the most rigorous version of the story but one where you are allowed to see surface and then see past the surface to something else, some other series of secrets, however they're formed." Minghella offers sound as an example. "We tried to use sound in the film as a way to guide the eye to what's important in the frame. So there's a lot of extremely thorough work done to take the film as far as we can to get as much out of each frame as we can, because I'm interested, ultimately, in making movies which are like the films that I'd love to see myself, which always repay more than one visit, where there's always more than one thing going on at one time, a complexity which is the reason to do it."
There are several small roles rich in eccentric specificity. "In a way you hope that every person who walks into the film could be the leading character," Minghella says. "I feel that's a wonderful discovery in films, that even in glimpses, you know that whole films could be made about each character." Is there ever a temptation to be even more ravishing with all the good-looking faces in such gorgeous surroundings? Does he have to pull back? "Constantly. I felt like our job [in editing] was to beat the side of the film and see how much we could get to drop off. In the way I use music, it's to make something tart which might otherwise be sweet, to make something unsettling that might otherwise be comfortable. There's a musical argument in this movie, from the first note to the last. It's possible to hear your way through this film as watch your way through it."
We talk about several differences between the novel and the film, and Minghella notes the difference between "the secret relationship you have with a novel as a reader and the very public one you have with an actor when he's on the screen." But he insists that the shifts were necessary to make the character seduce an audience the way he seduces the on-screen characters. "I suppose that I tried to humanize Ripley. For the film journey I don't want the audience to adjudicate Ripley. Highsmith doesn't adjudicate Ripley. Ripley holds the pages, he's writing the pages of the novel. I wanted to make a little more tender to make that work on screen, more human, so that the audience goes farther down the road and doesn't get into that position where they're looking across the room and finding him distasteful. I tried to find what was familiar about him, not what was strange. What I understood, rather than what I couldn't understand, the places I couldn't go to with him."
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" opens Saturday.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.