This piece revisits the 1999 film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, exploring its departure from previous versions and its lasting impact on viewers. It highlights the film's transformation of Tom Ripley into a tragic figure and its success as a prestige thriller.
The big turning point of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a brutal act of violence on the water — the moment when conniving con man Tom Ripley claims the charmed life that he wants. But that’s not exactly how the scene plays out in the second and still finest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 bestseller. Highsmith presented Tom’s actions as entirely calculated, even as they seemed to occur to him rather casually, like a solution to a problem he hadn’t acknowledged.
But there’s no premeditation to what happens on that boat in the 1999 movie made from The Talented Mr. Ripley. Here, a dark plot becomes a crime of passion, an impulse. We’re watching a Ripley more warm- than cold-blooded, but no less dangerous for it. You could call the film a warm-blooded Ripley, too. Written and directed by the late Anthony Minghella, it transformed literature’s most devious charlatan into a tragic figure — an approach that vexed some Highsmith heads in ’99. (An earlier adaptation, the 1960 Purple Noon, cast French movie star Alain Delon as a much more characteristically blank Ripley.) Today, the film might startle a whole new generation of viewers, those whose only exposure to this iconic character is Netflix’s recent Ripley. That black-and-white, eight-episode limited series plays the same song in a much different key. It’s the starkly reptilian yin to the sunny, anguished yang of Minghella’s less reverently faithful version. The Talented Mr. Ripley, which hit theaters 25 years ago this month, now looks like one of the great prestige productions of its decade — a dazzling suspense thriller that deepens its source material rather than merely replicating it. Minghella was coming off the success of The English Patient, another literary adaptation and period piece that won a bunch of Oscars (including Best Picture) but also inspired a whole Seinfeld episode about how boring it was
THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY ANTHONY MINGHELLA PATRICIA HIGHSMITH FILM ADAPTATION SUSPENSE THRILLER
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