Word: damon
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...things that make the real-life Damon a star--his agreeable features, easy smile and whelpish energy--keep the audience glued to his side in The Talented Mr. Ripley despite the repulsive acts his character commits. His apple-pie qualities are essential to the moral disquiet Minghella strives to create in the audience. But they don't necessarily make Damon a good actor. If Damon has a demon, it is that he thinks the jury is still out on whether he can act. "Gwyneth [Paltrow] can walk into a scene and be talking about something else, and they say 'Action...
...seems to get the fame thing too. When the school that rejected Damon 20 years ago wrote recently asking for a photograph for its 75th-anniversary wall display, Damon and his mother talked it over for a while. What he had predicted had come to pass. "Karmically, it was big," says Damon. A pause. "Of course I'll send them something." Of course...
First question: who is Tom Ripley? He is the lead character in five novels by Patricia Highsmith and now, as incarnated by Matt Damon, a beguiling movie icon in the making. Second question: Who cares? For a start, an international coterie of readers spread across four decades. To that devoted coterie, add Anthony Minghella. "Ripley is one of the most interesting characters in postwar fiction," Minghella says, and he ought to know. The writer-director has spent three years, ever since he finished his Oscar-winning epic The English Patient, puzzling out the emotional vectors of crime fiction's most...
Observing these blessed creatures, coveting their unearned good fortune, is Damon's Ripley, more muted and awkward than they but a fast study. Ripley's outsider status is what especially appealed to Minghella, 45, a playwright and former professor whose Italian immigrant parents still make and sell ice cream on the Isle of Wight. "This sense of a man with his nose pressed up against the window, the sense that there's a better life being led by other people--to me, these feelings are familiar and pungent...
...Damon, who like Blanchett and Paltrow was cast in the film before achieving Oscar-night eminence, knows how to emit charm--of the aw-shucks variety in The Rainmaker or streetwise in Good Will Hunting. Here, though, he is a plodder. Pasty white among the bronze gods of Mongibello, striding stiffly, with nerdy glasses adorning his pinched face, Damon could more easily be mistaken for the creepy losers Hoffman usually plays (in Boogie Nights or Happiness) than for a patrician hunk like Dickie. The deglamorizing of Ripley pays off beautifully in his final meeting with Freddie, who sees through...