Word: tomming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ripley is different, less sure of himself, more human, and thus reduced in stature. He lies to Dickie's father when he says he went to Princeton with the boy. He believes not in inspired improvisation, as the book's Ripley does, but in studying hard. In the movie, Tom's plotting has the calculation of a Bach fugue; Dickie's avocation is playing jazz saxophone instead of painting, and he loves the dangerous freedom of Chet Baker and Charlie Parker. As played by Law, Dickie oozes a reckless sensuality, turning the beam on and off at will, indulging Marge...
...crime writers are killers, all actors are liars--Ripleys for their art and glory. Highsmith's Tom thinks of himself in moments of stress as a consummate actor thrilled by the conviction of his deceit. "If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous," he observes, "you simply had to act those things with every gesture." What is acting if not the forgery of someone else's personality in order to possess and consume...
...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...
...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 and from the profits of an art-forgery racket, Tom has an income that gives him the leisure...