Following last week’s “Americans in Italy” pick of Summertime for Hit Me with Your Best Shot, Nathaniel at The Film Experience has doubled-down, and assigned The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s glamorously nasty evocation of ’50s period cool in making an especially plush adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s thoroughly vicious thriller. It’s a film I loved to pieces when I last saw it, which some quick, and quite unbelievable calculations tell me had to be more than 10 years ago now. And something awfully crucial happened in that decade-long gap: I read the book. And boy, is the movie not as good as the book.
But this is a game of choosing a favorite shot, not describing the heartbreak of finding that experience has caused one to significantly downgrade a film that one had previously thought quite highly of (and please, Minghella partisans, understand that I’m speaking relatively: we’re talking about the drop from a 9/10 to a 7/10, maybe an 8/10 when I get my bearings back). So let’s not dwell on it.
Luckily, Minghella and cinematographer John Seale make the task of picking a shot, if not “easy” – in fact, the very opposite of easy – then at least, extravagantly pleasurable. The films is paralysingly beautiful: beautiful sets, beautiful locations, beautiful actors, beautiful lighting. Picking something based totally on its beauty, while appropriate in its own way, quickly proved to be totally impossible, so I shifted gears a little bit, and this is where I ended up:
Point #1: it’s still awfully fucking pretty. The soft light, the gentle colors, that amazing reflection. But it’s nowhere near the prettiest shot in the film, and it’s not just pretty. In fact, I’m tempted to say that this is the moment where the plot announces itself, which it does almost solely through the visuals and the music, composed by Gabriel Yared. The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I’m giving away very little if you haven’t read it or seen any of the adaptations, is about obsession: specifically, working class Tom Ripley’s (Matt Damon) obsession with son of privilege Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), which takes on both a sexual and a classist overtone throughout. The story that starts out as a bright but oddball tale of a young con artist enjoying the luxuries of Italy with two rich people he’s tricked into being his friends, gets darker and darker till you wonder if it can get any darker yet; then it does so.
In a very literal way, this shot dramatises the gulf between those two states: Tom stands looking down at Dickie and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow, in what remains my favorite performance of her career), and the outside, where they are, is light and beautiful and soft; the inside, where he stands, is dark and gloomy. It’s a touch foreboding, in a noir sort of way, and Damon’s posture adds to it: a certain tenseness despite his casual pose, with that little tiny detail of his right foot ready to move, like he’s anxious to dart forward and swallow the couple up right now, but he’s restraining himself.
And then there’s the weird balance of the shot: by every classical rule, Damon should be much farther to the left, given his eyeline. What the simple gesture of putting him on the “wrong” side of the frame, the filmmakers quietly suggest that he’s abnormal in some way (many ways, some of which we’ve already seen by this point). This composition also serves to emphasise the room, stuffed with various objects and pieces of furniture, none of it Tom’s – he’s Dickie’s guest, staying in a spare room – but all of it standing in his figurative shadow, belonging to him now: it is the first part of Dickie’s life that he has colonised, and by showing the room in the same instant that we’re given our first hint that Tom is much darker than just an easy liar, the film engages in some foreshadowing. Here are the tools that Tom will use to rebuild his identity; here is the base from which all his future evils will spread. Lavish, but also a touch disconcerting and creepy, and a perfect note with which to begin the film’s spiral into psychosis.