Since I’m in Ischia, let’s talk about Tom Ripley, since the two film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” were filmed there some forty years apart.
I have already mentioned here “Purple Noon”, the film by René Clément which dates from 1960, let’s now mention the movie adaptation directed by Anthony Minghella, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” which dates from 1999.
The talented Mr. Ripley? I would rather say the elusive Mr. Ripley.
Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is a poor and orphaned young man who lives in New York in the late 1950s. Following a misunderstanding, he is sent all expenses paid to Italy by the wealthy shipping industry magnate Herbert Greenleaf to persuade Greenleaf’s son, Dickie to abandon the dolce vita that the family fortune allows him and join the family business in the US.
Here is Ripley arriving in Mongibello, a typical Italian coastal village (which does not exist in our reality, the scenes were filmed in Capri and Ischia).
Ripley contrives to meet Dickie (Jude Law) and his girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and soon lives in the sublime villa of the prodigal Dickie.
The latter is aptly named – in English, “being a dick” is rarely a compliment: he is snobbish, contemptuous, unfaithful and focused only on himself. He is often condescending towards Ripley who did not receive the same privileged upbringing as him.
This hardly prevents Ripley from devoting boundless admiration to Dickie and from insinuating himself into the daily lives of the two lovers.
From admiration to love, there is only one step. And Ripley, it seems, would like to be with Dickie as much as he would like to be Dickie. Ripley’s emotional dependence on him begins to greatly annoy Dickie, who makes him understand that their paths must separate.
Dickie’s mistake is probably to announce the separation on a small boat far from the coast. Going into a fit of rage, Ripley murders him and decides – to disguise his crime, to assume the identity of Dickie by fleeing through Italy and Sicily. Dickie is officially alive, settling in Rome and Palermo and Ripley will soon disappear into the wild.
Mr. Ripley is talented precisely because he is elusive.
Dickie: “Everybody should have one talent. What’s yours?”
Tom: “Forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody.”
Dickie: “That’s three. Nobody should have more than one talent.”
Having obviously never succeeded in building his own personality, Ripley is nobody, and can therefore be anyone. He is one of those parasites that annihilate their hosts to take their shells. And in fact, the clumsy Tom is transformed under the identity of Dickie into a confident man.
Ripley seems to get away with his crime. But that’s without considering Marge’s questions and the suspicions of Freddie – Dickie’s friend. One crime leading to another, the suspicions of the Italian police will soon have to be allayed under the identity of Dickie – then under that of Ripley. Solitude accompanies the anti-hero who constantly navigates between two personae.
This duality is not foreign to Patricia Highsmith, the author who brought Tom Ripley to life.
Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 in Texas to a mother who attempted to abort her at an advanced stage of pregnancy by swallowing turpentine, and who divorced her father nine days before her birth. She was raised on the family ranch by a puritanical and traditional grandmother and shared her childhood games with her beloved cousin whom she persisted in calling her brother until she moved to New York at the age of six with a mother she barely knows and a stepfather she heartily hates.
She is obsessed with her mother whose unconditional love she seeks and has fun imagining how to murder her stepfather. Sad childhood, sad adolescence. She struggles to find her sexuality and probably already suffers from anorexia nervosa.
Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train” is released in 1950 and becomes successful because Alfred Hitchcock adapts it for the big screen.
She ends up, after a few heterosexual relationships, by accepting her attraction to women, which is not an easy thing in an America that considers homosexuality a sexual perversion.
Her second novel, “Carol” (also adapted for the cinema), is published in 1952 under an assumed name, Claire Morgan, because it describes a happy lesbian love story, something that puritan America of the years cannot tolerate.
Tired of this societal and moral straitjacket, she cuts off all relationships with her mother, renounces her inheritance in advance and flees to Europe where she will live almost permanently until her death. She visits Europe, frantically looking for love in each country and lives a passionate and secret love affair with a married woman, whose name we will never know. She will put a painful end to it.
But that’s a bit of anticipation.
The idea for Ripley is born in 1952 in Positano. Patricia Highsmith, who is leaning on the window of her hotel room in the early morning, sees a solitary young man walking on the beach who seems troubled. She will never meet him but will invent the intrigue of Mr. Ripley.
Highsmith puts a lot of herself into Tom Ripley.
Like her younger self, Ripley has an ambiguous sexuality with homosexual tendencies that he must hide because he cannot accept it.
Like her who suffered from her mother’s lack of love, Ripley – an orphan – is lonely and in search of a family, of a brother, of unconditional love – an unsuccessful search which explains why love and death are intimately linked in the psyche of the author and the character.
Like her whose love for her mother bordered on obsession, Ripley develops a feeling that turns into an obsession with Dickie. Ripley’s emotional immaturity – his narcissism perhaps – leads him towards exclusive and passionate relationships which exclude any third party (Marge, Freddie) and which end in the annihilation of the loved one (if we can speak of love in this case).
Like her who suffers from depression, Ripley is deeply sad and seems inhabited by boredom and inner emptiness when it is not the explosion of feelings and emotions that he is incapable of managing, which consumes him.
It is probably for all these reasons that Tom Ripley, more than any other of her characters, is the alter ego, the döppleganger of Patricia Highsmith. By allowing him to kill, to take on another personality, to play with the police and those close to Dickie, the author seems to live vicariously the dark, repressed and violent aspects of her own personality, by offering herself, in a meta effect, a paper character to whom she offers a new life. Tom Ripley may be a murderer, but the reader cannot help but take up his cause and wish him to escape the clutches of justice.
Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life I cannot live, am unable to live.”
Patricia Highsmith – Carnets intimes
Duality and contradiction permeate her life and writing is perhaps a way of bringing a little harmony to it. The Texan woman she is who hates Texas dresses in Europe as a… cowboy. She calls herself left-wing but is outrageously reactionary, anti-Semitic and racist. She fears illness and death but consumes her health in alcohol and cigarettes. She is a solitary, homosexual and independent woman but her novels only offer minor and unflattering roles to women, whom she sees as dependent beings and always in relationship with men.
Europe will bring success to Patricia Highsmith, and almost all of her novels will be adapted for the cinema.
She refuted the term “detective novel” or “thriller” applied to her work, because she simply believed that she wrote novels in which love and death were inextricably linked and in which, well, murders occurred. I rather agree with her since it is the psychological dimension which makes her work interesting. I am therefore enraged, when going to my bookshop, to see that her novels are in the “Police Novel” section and that the title of “Mister Ripley” was changed to “Ripley”, to keep up with the times.
Because there is indeed a zeitgeist, and it’s called Netflix.
In 2024, director Steve Zaillian produced a mini-series dedicated to our anti-hero, simply titled “Ripley”.
The platform and the chosen format make it possible to unfold Tom Ripley’s story over eight episodes, perfectly conveying the slowness, the silence and the weight of the innocuous moments which carry the germ of the boredom of a daily life or the potential danger faced by someone on the run – it’s all a question of point of view.
The mini-series is in black and white, maybe to avoid any distraction for the viewers, so that they can concentrate on the psychology of the characters – and I must say that this mini-series includes a shot worthy of a photograph every thirty seconds, thanks to the talent of cinematographer Robert Elswit.
The use of black and white also illustrates Ripley’s inability to immerse himself in the life around him. Italy is usually synonymous with vibrant colors, but it is through the sad and uprooted prism – both geographically and emotionally – of Ripley that we discover a joyless Italy.
The chiaroscuro also perfectly transcribes the ambivalence of the character and the atmosphere of the noir novel that is “Mister Ripley”.
It’s sleek, it’s elegant and it’s… chilling.
The treatment of the plot differs depending on whether we are talking about the novel or each of its filmed adaptations. In the novel, in “Purple Noon” and in “Ripley”, Tom Ripley coldly premeditates Dickie’s murder while this is only the result of his rage in “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, which is generally more sensitive than the novel and other adaptations.
The endings of the novel, “Purple Noon”, “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Ripley” are all different.
Patricia Highsmith hardly appreciated the end of “Purple Noon”, which, it is true, is heretical if we relate it to the Highsmithian canon, even if she remained bewitched by the beauty of Alain Delon – probably too handsome for the role, in my humble opinion – and we’ll never know what she would have thought of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Ripley.”
A pointless question, that being said: a poor film buff, she felt that directors could do what they wanted with her books once she had sold the rights to them.
It is therefore up to us, cinema lovers, to savor all the filmed variations of Tom Ripley.
August 9, 2024
