A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Date Viewed: 1/16/00

Details:

Matt Damon

Gwyneth Paltrow

Jude Law

Cate Blanchett

James Rebhorn

Director: Anthony Minghella

Score: 1/2

The Review:

Alternately charming and chilling, Matt Damon bluffs his way into playing the classmate of a late 1950's Princeton grad, whose very rich businessman father (Rebhorn) hires Damon to go to Italy and convince his ne'r-do-well son (Law) to return to America. On the way, Damon meets up with Blanchett, both of whom are masquerading as anonymous not-rich not-heirs (Damon is working two levels of mask at this point, which becomes a major turning point much later in the plot). The son is lounging on the Italian beach with an ex-patriot writer (Paltrow), occasionally sailing, visiting jazz clubs, sleeping with local girls, or slumming through a variety of Italian high-points and cities; he is manifestly uninterested in returning to a boring life state-side and seems set upon living marginally and dissolutely forever on his allowance. Damon manages to easily insinuate himself into their lives, and then the masquerade really takes off. While not really convoluted, there is an insidious undercurrent appropriate to a comedy of mistaken identities.

Damon's Ripley is more than a chameleon, less than a fraud, appealing and appalling at the same time. There is an overabundance of both identity tension (expected) and sexual tension (distracting). Whereas Law is overtly heterosexual, Damon is either ambivalent or bisexual -- the viewer is kept in doubt, but it is clear there are sparks between Damon's and Law's characters. To say the film and its situations are morally ambiguous is an understatement. Rated R for about 30 milliseconds of male frontal nudity (and its general tone of moral malaise?).

Vaguely related to Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel of the same title.

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