Will the Real Tom Ripley Please Stand Up
Will the Real Tom Ripley Please Stand Up
On every single onscreen Tom Ripley that every Ripley-ed.
Tom Ripley is talented in all the wrong ways. He can do valeting, baby-sitting, accounting, forgery of any kind, fly a helicopter, impersonate almost anyone, and always tell if a waiter’s cheating him on the bill. The protagonist of five Patricia Highsmith novels, published between 1955 and 1991, her Ripley is a con artist, a serial murderer and a lover of mess. He has been diagnosed alternatively as a sociopath, a psychopath and “American Psycho for gay people.” The novels featuring Ripley have been adapted into five films - Purple Noon (1960), The American Friend (1977), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Ripley’s Game (2002) and Ripley Under Ground (2005) -, two radio plays, and, now, a Netflix series titled, simply and effectively, Ripley.
Ripley, after all, is the brand. Highsmith’s unseemly, murderous little troll of a literary baby, with his European traversing and love of mess, is made for the movies. It’s a critics’s catnip to trace how one character is interpreted by different performers, and the release of Ripley (more on that series from me this weekend) is as good excuse as any to revisit the books and the films. There have been eight Tom Ripley’s so far: onscreen, Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, Jonathan Kent, John Malkovich, Barry Pepper, Matt Damon and, now, Andrew Scott; and on the radio, Ian Hart. So here I am, lapping every single Ripley1 to try and understand, like many have before me, what makes us so obsessed with this one guy.
Tom Ripley is a covetous creature. He loves beautiful things and yearns for the easy, luxurious living that’s out of reach for many. In the books, Highsmith places us squarely in Tom’s perspective. We’re seeing the world, and himself, through his eyes — and it’s a pitiful, empty existence. His talent for imitation and forgery stems, really, from this ability to become anyone else, anyone other than himself. Tommy Boy believes himself to be entirely his own creation. Clumsily, then cunningly, Tom designs a life for himself that he desires. First, by stealing and small frauds; and then, through murder and identity theft. Until, eventually, Tom Ripley becomes a mask that he has to reluctantly wear at times. “He hated becoming becoming Thomas Ripley again,” Highsmith writes in the first of the Ripley novels, “hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time.” It’s easy to connect, to sympathise, even, with this intense yearning to shed your own skin.
How to portray this unconventional emptiness on the screen? Films are often burdened with the tedious responsibility of dishing out morality lessons, punishing those who step out of line. The Ripley in the novels is freed from any moral indictments from his author, who was so enmeshed with her creation that she sometimes signed her own personal letters as “from Tom”, and in interviews expressed an admiration for her “psychopath heroes”. The onscreen Ripleys have been cold-blooded career criminals, like John Malkovich and Dennis Hopper’s takes, or leering, desperate grifters, like Alain Delon and Matt Damon.
Purple Noon, the first screen adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley novel, operates on the incongruous notion that anybody would want to be anyone other than Alain Delon in 1960. His is a Ripley obsessed with money, obscenely gazing at the giant wads of lira Dickie (here renamed Philippe) takes out of the bank. Delon’s Tom is barely interested in Phillippe himself, who is a snob and a bully, it’s Phillippe’s lifestyle (and closet) he craves. This is how Purple Noon seduces us, too. Not through Tom’s characterisation, but through the luxurious shots of a Mediterranean gorgeousness that seems too bright, too colourful, too gorgeous to exist outside of the pages of fashion magazines. This Tom is a beautiful crook, always a little bit pathetic, the butt of jokes by the rich and tasteless, like the bratty Philippe and the lecherous Freddie Myles. But, frankly, he isn’t much better. Delon’s Tom is self-absorbed and somewhat entitled, kissing his own reflection and toying with Marge, who has a crush on him. Purple Noon is a film of surfaces, rooting for Tom largely because he looks like Alain Delon. (And that is a good enough reason for some, to be quite frank.)
At the risk of ending up on the shit-list of some Highsmith truthers, the Ripley adaptations always had something of an eurotrash air to them which the sweaty gorgeousness of both Purple Noon and, later on, The Talented Mr. Ripley have glamourised. In the novels, there’s a lot of checking in and out of hotels, buying tickets and boarding trains, going to and from different European cities. There’s a lot of paperwork, bank statements and receipts and letters and telegrams2. There’s a camp dreariness to the work that goes into being Tom Ripley, and both Ripley’s Game (2002) and Ripley Under Ground (2005) get this. The former, in the beret atop John Malkovich’s head and the latter, in the casting of Barry Pepper.
Ripley Under Ground gives the 2005 treatment to the 1970 novel, the second in the Riplead. That is to say that it looks like a network teen drama, with the cast mostly standing in industrial chic rooms yelling at each other. Barry Pepper3 plays a Ripley that is very interested in lounging about, effortless charming and near devoid of any inner life or motivation, making him into a dull, achingly straight take on a character that doesn’t have a straight bone in his body. Barry Pepper’s Ripley is a low level con artist looking to marry rich, which is a noble endeavour, but is incapable of looking beyond the basic plot mechanics of the book. Ripley Under Ground is a weak, unimaginative film whose value lies entirely in how it exquisitely captures the low-rise PVC trouser trashiness of the mid-2000s.
Ripley’s Game and The American Friend (1977), meanwhile, are both adapted from the same source material4, with radically different results. John Malkovich, an actor whose considerable talents have largely been used by lesser movies5, is conceptually perfect for the role of Tom Ripley, since it involves carrying a permanent air of mocking disdain, which is Malkovich’s natural modus operandi anyways. This story sees Ripley at his cruellest, setting up a terminally ill man to become an assassin because he had "once sneered at him”. (Tom Ripley is, and always will be, a petty bitch.) Malkovich’s Ripley is a triumph in macabre condescension. In one scene, he’ll glance at a pile of corpses and comment that “it never used to be so crowded in first class”. In the next, we’ll see him sewing a silk robe in bed, or frolicking with his hot harpsichordist wife6. There is detachment to Malkovich’s Ripley which is either pure camp or pure sociopathy. When asked who he is, he quips: “I’m a creation.” Which says everything and nothing at all.
Dennis Hopper’s Ripley, meanwhile, takes a “highway cowboy”7 approach to the character, cryptically cold and impossible to pin down, prone to edgy randomness. There is no disappearing into a role for Dennis Hopper, and he must out-Hopper the character. This is not a man interested in taste or luxury, but rather in chaos. These Ripleys are professional criminals. It’s schemes, rather than obsession, what fuels them. Their crimes are no more important than a report filed on time. A job well executed.
Meanwhile, Anthony Minghella’s sun-kissed 1999 adaptation is drowning in angst. This text was many’s, myself included, introduction to Tom Ripley, and reframed him as a sympathetic anti-hero and amped up the queerness of the book. Here, Tom doesn’t know who he is at all. Preternaturally talented in forgery and imitation, this Tom is almost an unwilling participant in his own scams who gets dragged into a complicated situation. After all, the mission he is tasked with - bringing back shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf to his parents in America - is due to an innocent case of mistaken identity after Tom wears a borrowed Princeton jacket. However, once in Italy, and once he meets Dickie, Tom is consumed with yearning. Smitten, even. Dickie is effortless where Tom is laboured, alluring where he is invisible. Dickie is the sun while Tom is a black hole. The Talented Mr. Ripley captures the closeted confusion of Tom’s relationship with Dickie: does he want to be him or be with him? Maybe both?
The unmatched genius of the film’s casting has a generation of future movie stars (and one faux-wellness entrepreneur) at their most, as Roxana Hadadi writes: “Matt Damon at his most facetiously perky, Jude Law at his most beautiful, Gwyneth Paltrow at her most frigid, and Philip Seymour Hoffman at his most gloriously bitchy.” Damon, a good-to-do South Boston boy, is a limited actor who loves to challenge us: when we think he’s America’s golden boy, he takes on the role of a serial killer; when we think he’s a thinking man’s movie star, he becomes an action star.
In the hands of Jude Law - a man who in this particular moment in time was at the level of handsome where he could shit on my floor and I’d write him a thank you card signed with a kiss - Dickie embodies the easy-going, charmed living that Tom, at first, cannot comprehend. When someone looks like that in linen shorts, it’s easy to forget that he’s just a rich kid funded by Daddy Greenleaf. But his Dickie is also cruel and callous, discarding the affections of both Marge and Tom with little afterthought. His interests, whether jazz or people, are always fleeting and superficial. Alone at sea with Tom, Dickie insults him so viciously I’d be annoyed if Tom hadn’t bludgeoned him with that oar. That first murder is a crime of passion; the rest are merely the requirements of a cover-up. This adaptation constitutionally departs from the Ripley of the books and previous iterations, reconfiguring his fraudulent activities as a wrong-footed search for love and connection that, ultimately, trap Tom in a web of his own lies.
Ripley Under Ground, The American Friend and Ripley’s Game focus on the cons, the convoluted criminal schemes that often include dress-up, fake facial hair and, if absolutely necessary, some murder. They’re gray and functional, serving up plot and, in the case of Malkovich, a dash of cunt. Meanwhile, Purple Noon and The Talented Mr. Ripley have become totems of beauty and la dolce vita. They have become, each in their own way, images of peak European hotness divorced from the leering darkness of the character himself. In both films, Ripley is an intruder in the world of beauty. Delon’s Ripley thinks himself to be more deserving of the bon vivant lifestyle Phillippe enjoys so coolly. Meanwhile, Damon’s Ripley is a character torn apart - even his reflection is distorted and cracked - by his confused pursuit of love and beauty. Tom is always looking at himself in the mirror, trying to find something he likes, or anything at all. Sometimes, he thinks he sees it in Dickie’s eyes, but then he realises that he’s not there at all. There is no real Tom Ripley. He is just a borrowed reflection of other people.
With apologies to Ian Hart, I haven’t listened in full to his version, and I couldn’t find the 1982 episode of “The South Bank Show” featuring Jonathan Kent, a personal friend of Highsmith’s, as Ripley.
Honestly, who knew that being a full-time grifter involved so much admin.
I will use his full name every time because if you are blessed to be called Barry Pepper, that’s simply what’s going to happen.
Although in a 1988 interview given to Sight & Sound, Highsmith jokingly chastised director Wim Wenders for using the plot line of a Ripley book he didn’t buy.
Has talent like this ever been so wasted? Seriously, outside of Dangerous Liaisons, Being John Malkovich and Con Air, what else has he done that is truly great?
Now there’s a sentence no one’s ever written before.
In Highsmith’s own words.