Upon finishing the recent film Saltburn, my wife and I made the exact same comment at the same time - "that was a lot like The Talented Mr Ripley." So we watched that earlier film the next day. We'll leave the Saltburn comparisons for another review, but the Talented Mr Ripley is the better film - more nuanced, more logically developed, better acted, and by the end more devastating. The Talented Mr R realizes the novel's vision, even as it makes several plot/character changes. Anthony Minghella, the director of the film of The Talented Mr Ripley, stressed the same thing when he wrote about the book in the Guardian:
"His actions are an extreme response to emotions all of us recognise: the sense that there is a better life being lived by somebody else, somewhere else, someone not trapped inside the hollow existence in which we find ourselves. It's one of the things which makes us human. We've all been Tom Ripley, just as we've all known a Dickie Greenleaf, the man who has everything, whose attention makes us feel special. We've all basked in the sunshine of that attention and felt the chill of losing it." The books don't just make us like a killer, they make us like his crimes. Writing in the Paris Review, her biographer Joan Schenkar says that Highsmith's novels "suck the reader into their bottomless vortex of moral relativities, transferable guilts and unstable identities".
The film is extremely well acted with a very young Jude Law, Gweneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Phylip Seymour Hoffman play their parts exquisitely, making us wince with every gesture. But Matt Damian steals the show needed to play two characters, evolving with the circumstances.
"His actions are an extreme response to emotions all of us recognise: the sense that there is a better life being lived by somebody else, somewhere else, someone not trapped inside the hollow existence in which we find ourselves. It's one of the things which makes us human. We've all been Tom Ripley, just as we've all known a Dickie Greenleaf, the man who has everything, whose attention makes us feel special. We've all basked in the sunshine of that attention and felt the chill of losing it." The books don't just make us like a killer, they make us like his crimes. Writing in the Paris Review, her biographer Joan Schenkar says that Highsmith's novels "suck the reader into their bottomless vortex of moral relativities, transferable guilts and unstable identities".
The film is extremely well acted with a very young Jude Law, Gweneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Phylip Seymour Hoffman play their parts exquisitely, making us wince with every gesture. But Matt Damian steals the show needed to play two characters, evolving with the circumstances.
