Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 11-January-09
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Purple Noon (1960), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Murder.
Cunning.
Italy's beauty.
The high life.

These aspects of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley have enticed filmmakers in multiple countries over multiple decades. What fascinates when comparing this pair of French and British-American movie adaptations is how distinct they are. Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley showcase diverse actors in the same role of a schemer behaving badly. Both performances and the movies they dominate are fine, but they appeal to different moods and elicit vastly different emotions.

Highsmith's antihero Tom Ripley is a killer. That is the central fact about the character. In the stylish thriller Purple Noon his motive can best be described as covetous opportunism. French heartthrob Alain Delon (whom, incidentally, Zac Efron strongly resembles) gives Ripley an impish quality as he pals around Italy with wayward heir Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) and Philippe's girlfriend Marge (Marie Laforêt). Tom is as poor as Philippe is rich, but he has been commissioned by Greenleaf père to convince the son to abandon hedonism and return to the States. Philippe knows this, but since Tom admires his hedonism and makes an amusing playmate, he keeps him around. Tom can be creepy, though, dressing in Philippe's clothes on the sly, bragging about his ability to forge signatures, and joking that he could easily bump off Philippe and assume his identity.

The thrust of this film is that once Tom takes the plunge and steals Philippe's life, each lie leads to another and another until he is like a juggler with several razor-sharp knives in the air. Can he sustain the act without getting injured? Leaving a corpse on the beautiful coast near Naples, he passes himself off as Philippe in Rome, enjoying the luxury he has always craved. Delon, dripping with idol's glamour, allows no remorse to muddy his pleasure. If you root for him, it's because he is having fun. His problems are that Marge needs to be kept at bay and Philippe's obnoxious frat brother Freddy comes sniffing around. And Freddy's misfortune brings the police.

In The Talented Mr. Ripley Tom is threatened by a worse fate than getting arrested. Director Anthony Minghella (late and lamented) creates a haunting drama by portraying Tom's motive as a tragic yearning similar to Montgomery Clift's in A Place in the Sun. Here the viewer is compelled to root for Tom out of pity, a response enabled by Matt Damon's flawless, astonishing performance. Damon does not call upon movie star wiles. His Ripley is a sad, awkward soul whose literal poverty takes a back seat to his emotional starvation. He has never been loved by family or friends or sweethearts. Equally unfortunate for a young man eager to infiltrate the 1950s elite, he is gay. When he finagles the job of going to Italy as an amateur bounty hunter, he does not just fall for Dickie Greenleaf's demigod insouciance and plush lifestyle. (It's Dickie here instead of Philippe, and he is well played by Jude Law.) He falls for Dickie himself, so that Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Freddy (a juicily wicked Philip Seymour Hoffman) are both rivals and inconveniences. He also has a third obstacle to overcome, a smitten heiress (Cate Blanchett) who bumps into him at all the wrong moments.

In Minghella's telling Tom is tormented by the ghosts of his victims (in Venice as well as Rome), and his palpable pain increases the more he gets tangled in his crimes. His only desire is to "get out of the basement," a dark, frightening place which signifies both social inconsequence and mounting guilt (and, perhaps, repressed sexuality). Like Delon's Ripley, he comes tantalizingly close to reaching an oasis. But the final necessity of covering up his actions brings a horrible price. Purple Noon entertains with a clever and roguish protagonist. The Talented Mr. Ripley pierces your heart with a lost and suffering one.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.