Word: ripley
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...book," says Minghella, "there is something so psychopathic about Ripley, and it works wonderfully as a literary experience. I wanted to talk about what was common to us, not what was distancing. To do that I had to take away the sense of premeditation and show the trouble you can get into by this accumulation of small lies and small wants...
...look at Alain Delon (the delicate stud of Purple Noon) or Dennis Hopper (who gave Ripley a cowboy swagger in the 1977 The American Friend, Wim Wenders' adaptation of Ripley's Game) and see an actor sharpening his tools: the attentiveness, the useful smile, the waiting for a cue to make his move. Ripley watches Dickie, and an actor prepares. We watch the actor playing Ripley and learn the secrets of his duplicitous craft. It's as if a famous seducer had made a how-to video...
...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 Tom's sham, quickly spotting the poseur's lapses of taste and showing a delicious upper-class contempt for a real nobody trying to be a fake somebody...
...book's two murders. Soon after, the woman whom screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) calls "our best expatriate since Henry James" left for Europe, where she was welcomed as an important novelist, not just a thriller writer. From this pleasant remove, she wrote of another ruthlessly imaginative expat, Tom Ripley...
...five novels--The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991)--trace a rake's progress from callow kid to elegant arriviste. "Wonderful to sit in a famous cafe," he thinks after his first murder, "and to think of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf!" For all his tomorrows, Tom gets to steep himself in la Dickie vita. He lives in a fine house near Paris with a handsome blond wife who is blessedly indifferent to his shadier activities. From Dickie's estate...