F-0260

Title:

The Talented Mr. Ripley
The Mysterious Yearning Secretive Sad Lonely Troubled Confused Loving Musical Gifted Intelligent Beautiful Tender Sensitive Haunted Passionate Talented Mr. Ripley (USA) (complete title)

Category:

S

Produced:

1999

Country:

USA

Released:

Film: Dec 1999 (USA)
DVD: Jun 2000; Feb 2008 (2-DVD)
VHS: Jun 2000; Nov 2000
Soundtrack: Nov 1999 (CD)

Director:

Anthony Minghella

Writer:

Patricia Highsmith (novel); Anthony Minghella (screenplay)

Actors:

Matt Damon (Tom Ripley); Gwyneth Paltrow (Marge Sherwood); Jude Law (Dickie Greenleaf); Cate Blanchett (Meredith Logue); Philip Seymour Hoffman (Freddie Miles); Jack Davenport (Peter Smith-Kingsley); James Rebhorn (Herbert Greenleaf); Sergio Rubini (Inspector Roverini); Philip Baker Hall (Alvin MacCarron); Celia Weston (Aunt Joan); Fiorello (Fausto - as Rosario Fiorello); Stefania Rocca (Silvana); Ivano Marescotti (Colonnello Verrecchia); Anna Longhi (Signora Buffi); Alessandro Fabrizi (Sergeant Baggio)

Description:

In late 1950's New York, Tom Ripley, a young underachiever, is sent to Europe to retrieve a rich and spoiled millionaire playboy, named Dickie Greenleaf. But when the errand fails, Ripley kills the playboy and begins to assume his life.

The 1950s. Manhattan lavatory attendant, Tom Ripley, borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party. When the wealthy father of a recent Princeton grad chats Tom up, Tom pretends to know the son and is soon offered $1,000 to go to Italy to convince Dickie Greenleaf to return home. In Italy, Tom attaches himself to Dickie and to Marge, Dickie's cultured fiancée, pretending to love jazz and harboring homoerotic hopes as he soaks in luxury. Besides lying, Tom's talents include impressions and forgery, so when the handsome and confident Dickie tires of Tom, dismissing him as a bore, Tom goes to extreme lengths to make Greenleaf's privileges his own. (J. Hailey)

"I feel like I've been handed a new life," says Tom Ripley at a crucial turning point of this well-cast, stylishly crafted psychological thriller. And indeed he has, because the devious, impoverished Ripley (played with subtle depth by Matt Damon) has just traded his own identity for that of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), the playboy heir to a shipping fortune who has become Ripley's model for a life worth living. Having been sent by Dickie's father to retrieve the errant son from Italy, Ripley has smoothly ingratiated himself with Dickey and his lovely, unsuspecting fiancée, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). In due course, the sheer evil of Ripley's amoral scheme will be revealed.
Superbly adapted from the acclaimed novel by Patricia Highsmith (also the basis of the acclaimed French version, Purple Noon), The Talented Mr. Ripley is writer-director Anthony Minghella's impressive follow-up to his Oscar-winning triumph The English Patient. Re-creating late-1950s Italy in exacting detail, the film captures the sensuousness of la dolce vita while suspensefully developing the fracturing of Ripley's mind as his crimes grow increasingly desperate. And where Hitchcock was necessarily discreet with the homosexual subtext of Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, Minghella brings it out of the closet, increasing the dramatic tension and complexity of Ripley's psychological breakdown. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett are excellent in pivotal supporting roles, and the film's final image is utterly effective: Ripley's talents have gone too far, and this study of class distinction, obsession, and deadly desire reaches a disturbing yet richly appropriate conclusion. (Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com)

For his first outing since "The English Patient," the writer and director Anthony Minghella has returned to the roasted light of Italy; this is a less passionate project-or, rather, the passions are directed toward less salubrious ends. The source is Patricia Highsmith's spooky, misanthropic novel of 1955; Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, her murderous hero, although he probably lacks the quicksilver elusiveness that the role demands. He is outshone by Jude Law, whose violent disappearance, halfway through the picture, is a grievous wound. Law is sunny, slippery, and pansexual; he might have made a better Ripley himself. In the female roles, Gwyneth Paltrow struggles to find anything much in the stony Marge, whom Highsmith so loftily scorned; more rewarding is the dreamy Cate Blanchett as an heiress named Meredith Logue-a part invented by Minghella. Her fine features are like a flawless period detail in themselves. The film feels warm but unsettled, as if hinting at approaching storms; the score, too, flits from lugubrious to manic. With Philip Seymour Hoffman, perfectly cast once again, this time as another of Tom's victims. (Anthony Lane, Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker)

Language:

English, Italian

TT:

139 min (Film, VHS) / 138 min (DVD) / 245 min (2-DVD)

J.S. Bach's Music:

Allegro (Mvt. 1) from Italian Concerto in F major, BWV 971
Sally Heath

Recitative for Bass Mache dich, mein Hernxe rein (Mvt. 65) from Matthäus-Passion BWV 244
Karl Richter / Münchener Bach-Orchester
Bass: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
From: J.S. Bach: Matthäus-Passion (Archiv Produktion) [V-7]
Courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft GmbH, Hamburg; under license from Universal Music Special Markets

Format:

Film: Color (DeLuxe), DTS / Dolby Digital
DVD: See below.
VHS: See below.
Soundtrack: CD

Company:

Film: Mirage Enterprises; Miramax Films; Paramount Pictures; Timnick Films
DVD: Paramount
VHS: Paramount; Paramount Home Video
Soundtrack: Sony [CD]

Comments:

2-DVD Set includes: The Talented Mr. Ripley / School Ties (Double Feature)

Watch selections:

Buy movie at:

DVD: Amazon.com [Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Widescreen, NTSC, Region 1] | Amazon.com [Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Widescreen, NTSC, Region 1] | Amazon.com [PAL, Region 2] | Amazon.com [Anamorphic, NTSC, Region 2] | Amazon.com [Anamorphic, Full Screen, NTSC, Region 2]
2-DVD: Amazon.com [Color, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC, All Regions]
VHS: Amazon.com [Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC] | Amazon.com [NTSC] | Amazon.com [Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC] | Amazon.com [Color, NTSC]
Soundtrack: Amazon.com [CD]

DVD>
2-DVD>
VHS>
CD>

Source/Links: IMDB
Contributor: Aryeh Oron (November 2007)