S Ixteen is a great age to see a movie, there on the threshold between wide-eyed and something resembling maturity. That was the year I first laid eyes on the talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s gripping, exquisitely dark 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel. I had been a movie fan for years at that point, but something about its elegant menace, its blood-soaked beauty, gripped me in a way few had before. It’s by no means a feel-good film, this tale of queer longing and loneliness gives way to murderous action. But watching it now (as I often do, perhaps confusingly) still evokes a primal fascination with the cracking of art that reveals a new mind.
Minghella, who died in 2008, was a master of style, crafting utterly believable visions of the past. Perhaps his skill is at its best in Ripley, who takes the viewer on a grand tour of mid-20th-century Italy—both its sun-drenched coastal portals and its more troubled, cobblestone-gray city streets. Tom Ripley, a low-born scoundrel sent to Europe’s blessed boot to reclaim a prodigal shipping line at his father’s request, is as concerned about the country as we, the audience; so much so that we begin to root morbidly for Tom’s increasingly sinister campaign to stay there.
Gabriel Jared’s alternately forbidden and playful score—its seductive clarinet, its ominously rung glockenspiel—envelops as Tom sinks deeper and deeper into his own pool of lies, dragging hapless heiresses and dilettantes down with him. It’s a seriously high-stakes moment, though the film gravitates toward a sadder, deeper undertone. Just beneath the film’s varnished finish is a bittersweet and disarmingly empathetic consideration of what it is to live with an unspoken desire, to yearn for and reach for a golden world from which your true self may be shunned.
It’s no secret why I, fresh out of the closet in the summer of 1999, saw something particularly significant in this film. But it wasn’t just that. It was the electric rush of Minghella’s seamless execution, working with a cast of soon-to-be-remarkable actors—who, I believe, have never been better.
Few other young, straight male actors trying to make a name for themselves in 1990s Hollywood would have been confident enough to play this stunning queer character with anything like Matthew Damon’s precise, fearless confidence.
Judah Law, the sun god who has fallen into the picture from Mount Olympus, is a thoroughly unpleasant and attractive Dickie Greenleaf. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a mischievous hoot as the great flaneur Freddie Miles. Gwyneth Paltrow is effectively patrician and pathetic as Dickie’s fiancée Marge, whose worldly chic and easy warmth are no match for Tom’s ruthless manipulations. And of course, there’s the gorgeous Cate Blanchett, who glides through every scene as Meredith Logue, the socially awkward textile princess who unwittingly helps Tom in his deceptions, happy to be involved in a bit of intrigue while being quite carefree about her own heart.
It was all so fascinating to witness at the age of 16, when I was starting to form an idea of what I liked about actors, about movies. And perhaps as Hollywood developed a new idea of itself. The Talented Mr. Ripley might have ended up falling on the wrong side of that cultural fault line; it’s the kind of Hollywood film that’s now sorely lacking, entertaining and artistic, and, for all its period trappings and location shooting, modestly budgeted. Such things have largely disappeared in the years since Ripley’s release. But at the time, the film felt — to me, anyway — like a bridge to the future.
If the film is a relic of a lost age, what a relic it is. And how remarkably it has resonated in my head, coming back to me again and again as I have ventured into adulthood. In any of my many viewings, I certainly wasn’t seeking solace from Tom Ripley; I didn’t even mention a trip to Italy. (More than usual, anyway.) What I chase and remember instead is the sanity to realize that films like Ripley could even exist, and that I was finally ready to see and enjoy them.
That’s why the talented Mr. Ripley, in its chilling and melancholy way, has become a feelgood movie for me, and no doubt many others. It’s a representation of Hollywood’s purest ability to captivate and stir and transport. However naively, I still think that an up-and-coming director of this era could look back at Minghella’s film, now a quarter-century old, and find some inspiration in it. There’s the thoughtful construction, the deftness of Starlight, the calm insistence that literary things can also be visceral, sensual wonders. If we can’t all go to Europe to find ourselves, at least we can watch Ripley and let ourselves dream darkly.
