Word: ripley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TALENTED MR. RIPLEY Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) would rather "be a fake somebody than a real nobody." So he pursues a fatal game of pretense in Anthony Minghella's devious twist on the Patricia Highsmith crime novel about patrician indolence and underclass yearning. In a handsome cast, no one can touch Jude Law for golden gorgeousness with an undercoat of sadism...
...Rome. But I'm delighted that Minghella is so insistent upon bringing us Italy in ravishing color. A spoonful of Italian sugar makes the thriller go down so easy that one wonders whether the ghost of Federico Fellini wasn't smiling on this one. Why not? Thomas Ripley isn't really all that different from Fellini's heroines: like, say, Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria. They are just two lost idealists looking up at the beautiful world they can't quite enter themselves. But while Masina laughs, Ripley rends. The difference is heartbreaking...
...choice to portray Tom Ripley as a gay man is risky, and not only for Matt Damon's career. As a man capable of murder on a bad day (don't worry, I'm not really giving anything away), a gay Thomas Ripley might become some terrible variation on the mythic self-hating homosexual serial killed--a queasy Andrew Cunanan done up in old-fashioned clothes. But the change actually produces all kinds of new tensions that deepen the emotional weight of the story. Tom's confused sexuality is just another expression of his place outside the privileged world...
...Anthony Minghella weren't such a smart writer and director, the changed emphasis might have obscured the icy brilliance of Tom's amoral talents. But Minghella knows a good story when he sees one--his last triumph was the sweeping, stony The English Patient-- and he treats Tom Ripley's tale like David Lean on an epic bender. The thriller story becomes woven into a gorgeous, glorious travelogue through the high points of Italian sightseeing, circa 1957. And, I'll admit, I'm a sucker for a pretty shot of Roman sunlight...
...extravaganza Any Given Sunday starring Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz. The same day (talk about counterprogramming hitting counterprogramming, thus eliminating the point of counterprogramming), Jim Carrey does Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman's Man on the Moon. In this issue, we give you a look at The Talented Mr. Ripley, Anthony Minghella's follow-up to The English Patient that stars Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow in a wicked little tale about murder, sexual identity and Italian palazzos...