The Talented Mr. Ripley. (how great is this movie?).

[Stefen]

How great is this movie? I just re-watched it for the first time in eight or nine years and I was even more blown away than I was when I first saw it.

I'm calling Masterpiece. Everything about it is just amazing.

SPOILERS.

Real Dickie Greenleaf is such a pompous privileged ass. You can't help but be happy when he meets his brutal demise.

Matt Damon is so good in this. So is everyone. It's just a really great film in all facets. It's so beautiful and creepy.

It's a shame Minghella is dead. I'm coming around to the fact that he was underrated.

[picolas]

oh total masterpiece. i've always thought of it as mrs. doubtfire with murder. in the greatest possible way.

[Alexandro]

weird, I just saw it today again, although i've seen it a good six or seven times in the ten years since it first came out. probably more times. hands down minghella's best movie and damon's best performance (probably law's too). it is an astonishingly beautiful film to experience, a virtuoso directing work from frame one. I don't think it misses one single chance to show how cool it is. The film got lost in between a lot of other fantastic movies in 1999, but at least is another masterpiece from that strange year.

[Pas]

Always remembered it as a great film too, it's strange because I've never heard that much praise for it before so I often forget about it.

Thought I was alone in this. I just checked out the imdb rating and it's 7.2 ... this weekend I was talking to a friend about our high school film watching enthusiasm and we would always pick out something from IMDB's top 250, rent it and check it off the list of those we've seen. We were, without saying it, both believing that once we would've seen these 250 movies we would've seen every really good movies that exist, and more because we figured the last 50 or so would probably suck. We talked about this and the fact that somehow since a couple of years all the best films we are seeing are rated like 7.2 ... whatever just some digression I wanted to make.

About the film though, I remember when I saw it, some sunday morning when I must have been 15, I didn't understand the story or the ending at all. But I still have clear images of the whole italian setting, Jude Law's little bike, stuff like that. I should rent it again.

I remember liking the sequel too, but my memory is a lot less vivid (Ripley's game with Malkovich I mean, not really a sequel but whatever)

[RegularKarate]

Loved it.  One of the first DVDs I ever bought when the players were first getting popular.

Read the book too.

Haven't seen it in a few years... thanks for this reminder... going to watch it again soon.

[Ravi]

I remember liking the sequel too, but my memory is a lot less vivid (Ripley's game with Malkovich I mean, not really a sequel but whatever)

Malkovich was the perfect Ripley in Ripley's Game.  It deserved a wider release, because its a fantastic film as well.

[Gamblour.]

I've been doing a bit of movie rewatching myself, but this is one I'll definitely add. Haven't seen it since high school, but loved it then. Can't wait to see what I consider Matt Damon's greatest performance, and another great one by PSH. I'll sit down with this maybe tomorrow or over the weekend.

[MacGuffin]

As great as this movie is, and it truly is great, I still have to recommend Purple Noon and Alian Delon's performance of Ripley. A more Hitchcockian take on the story.

[Gamblour.]

As great as this movie is, and it truly is great, I still have to recommend Purple Noon and Alian Delon's performance of Ripley. A more Hitchcockian take on the story.

It's funny you should say that, because as I was watching The Talented Mr. Ripley, I really did feel Hitchcock's influence on the film. The music more than anything but really the performances -- Gwyneth Paltrow's stone-faced disdain for Ripley and Cate Blanchett's timelessness especially -- really make the film feel like Hitchcock with upfront and explored homosexuality. Jude Law is absolutely perfect, and Matt Damon, I think, reached his peak with this role, playing someone so splintered and torn and uncomfortable with an ease one would think unfathomable after seeing his Bourne films. Minghella, and with Murch editing, creates the film with perfect precision and has some amazing and inventive shots (like Ripley "splitting" into two with his reflection in the piano). This is absolutely an overlooked masterpiece.

[Gold Trumpet]

I have to go back to an old role and dissent. It's not a very good film. While the execution of the story (as is) is fine, actors are all fine, and the film is accurately filled with all the Hitchcock references and subthemes, the plot is too convoluted and lengthy for its own good. It takes a basic Hitchcockian story and the only update is a denser and longer story with more references to all the normal Hitchcock markers. When Hitchcock was at his best, it was when he was able to pare down a story to its essence and extract all of his intended themes out of it. Because Hitchcock structured himself in the thriller genre, a shorter story worked to his advantage because a typical story for Hitchcock was best when housed in a 80-90 minute story. The Talented Mr. Ripley is 20 minutes over two hours. The only thing the extra length does is make the film get repetitive with the standard references and themes.

When the film was originally released, I remember Roger Ebert made a comment about how Hitchcock could have adapted the original novel because it was written in the 1950s. Since it was written during Hitchcock's time, it also had a story that was as interesting (or not interesting) as most of Hitchcock's thriller stories. The subject matter not does not go beyond any Hitchcock story, but it's dedication to an archaic time period makes it specifically suited to something Hitchcock himself should have filmed in his own time. Making it 40 years later in pure homage style is a bore because Brian De Palma and Todd Haynes have found ways to post-modernize Hitchcock and add on to his style and characterization with greater length and substance without feeling the need to retroactively go back.

Like I said, The Talent Mr. Ripley is fine in many ways, but once you get used to the norms of a Hitchcock film being made in the 90s, the film just languishes itself over a typical story that wasn't being made in robust fashion like it was in the 40s or 50s.

[pete]

it's really not that standard of a hitchcock film.  for one, it fully empathizes with mr. ripley, while indulging in remorseless.  hitchcock's easy plot always gives his characters a way out, or to their deaths, but mr. ripley is mired in his own desires and the complications that ensue.  actually, in that way, it's not very similar to a hitchcock film.  they share the same setting, but the Talented Mr. Ripley really has no interest in delivering a thriller, it's much more interested in seeing a boy, "gifted" with remorseless, snowballing his sins to the point of no return.  the comparison to Hitchcock is only superficial. 

[Gold Trumpet]

It only emphasizes with him to a point. It gives him more screen time and shows him dealing with embarassments, but it does not make him a full fledged character. The minor trifles he deals with in the film do not explain how he became a psychotic killer. They just explain how he was able to crack under a new situation with new people. Psycho also does this, but it does it retroactively after the murder. Beforehand, we're given Norman Bates vantage point in admiring and fondling over Janet Leigh, but more time is spent after the murder in Bates trying to cover up the murder and protect the cloistered life he leads from investigators. Those moments are details to Bates' character. One could argue that Damon's Ripley is given more time and yes he is because of the film's screentime, but the only psychology about him that is learned has to do with his behavior. The same could be said with Bates.

[Stefen]

This conversation is why I love xixax.

[pete]

but what was interesting about ripley wasn't the cause of his upbringing, and it wasn't even a mystery in Ripley, which would've suffered if he was worshiping his mother's bones.  The fun or the meat or the whatever you call it of the film doesn't lie in the mystery or the explanation - it lies in the detailed progression of an insecure young man who feels like he must sin his way through life, and gets pretty good at it.  It's not about psychology, but the thrill of being there with him.  and the difference between him and the other movie anti-heroes or heroes is that he doesn't seem to have a clear, visual goal.  He just follows his instinct, which happens to be evil, and compels him to commit acts he knows are wrong but feels entitled to at the same time.  all of this might be buried in psycho, and psycho is a great film, one that people can't knock, but Ripley is interested in things Psycho buries. 

[MacGuffin]

My Hitchcock reference was to Purple Noon, where Ripley is examined like Norman Bates. And the homosexuality is more subtle; Delon's Ripley is more bisexual.