The Talented Mr Ripley

Peter Bradshaw
Friday 25 February 2000 10.13 GMT

T

he world of The Talented Mr Ripley is full of a certain type of rich young person who is "only comfortable around people who have money and despise it". The author of this gorgeous deadpan irony is Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), a highly-strung young heiress first sighted on a first-class Cunard passage to Italy.

It is from observing her that Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a clever, insecure young social climber, begins to learn the self-deprecatory tics and evasions necessary for impersonating someone really rich. A humble piano-tuner and men's washroom attendant, Ripley is mistaken for an echt Princeton man by a wealthy magnate and is charged by him with a mission to go out to Italy to find his tearaway son Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) and bring him back to America.

Ripley is delighted to oblige; his sinister, shallow knack of charm-deployment and acquaintance-scraping allows him to befriend Dickie and Dickie's girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). Eventually, Ripley's fervent identification with the exquisite Dickie attains a level of pathological creepiness comparable to Michael Redgrave and his ventriloquist dummy in Dead of Night, and his infatuation with their sumptuous lifestyle leads to an erotic obsession and murder.

Anthony Minghella's movie, based on Patricia Highsmith's thriller - itself a sort of bebop version of Henry James's The Ambassadors - is handsomely furnished and designed, its locations and set-dressings a creamy love letter to the dolce vita of 1950s Italy. There is only one big error: on the beach, Matt Damon is shown sporting a crisp set of abs, decades before these were invented. (It is part of what I have elsewhere identified as the Six-Pack Fallacy, whereby any remotely presentable male lead must always have the Pack, but is not shown doing the thousands of daily ab-crunches needed for its upkeep.)

Here, homoerotic attraction is mixed with chippy social envy, and Minghella's film efficiently bottles the consequent gamey aroma and holds it under our noses. Jude Law gives a very stylish and charismatic performance as the exquisite Dickie, all cruelty and caprice. He easily outclasses the nerdy, bucktoothed Matt Damon - the picture suffers a very noticeable voltage-drop when Law is off-screen. The women are very underwritten. Paltrow is peaky and pallid; Blanchett does her very considerable best with Meredith, though yet again I wonder if anyone is ever going to give her a role to equal Elizabeth.

Philip Seymour Hoffman blows them all away with a scene-stealing black-comic turn as Dickie's awful preppie buddy Freddy Miles - the only one to sense that something is not right with Ripley - making boorish conversation in one of the richest basso profundo voices around.

All these attractive features in Minghella's movie, however, simply go to make up a house of cards which is brought crashing down halfway through by the central plot implausibility of Ripley's getting away with passing himself off as Dickie. Would Meredith really not know what Dickie looks like, never have seen a photo?

Granted, the mass media were not as ubiquitous in the 50s as now - but a fabulously rich young American playboy's doings in Italy would have set the paparazzi bulbs a-popping and his name linked with crime would get the gossip mags working overtime. This mistaken-identity device would be all right in something like an early Shakespearian comedy, but not the modern world, and the final hour of this film is a long and tedious tangle of over-wrought plot compensations.

The Talented Mr Ripley begins as an ingenious exposition of the great truth about charming people having something to hide: namely, their utter reliance on others. It ends up as a dismayingly unthrilling thriller and bafflingly unconvincing character study. Ripley says he'd rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody - but a fake nobody is all we're offered...

THE GUARDIAN

The Brethren by John Grisham / Digest read

DIGEST READ

The Brethren by John Grisham

(Century, £16.99), digested in the style of the original 

Fri 18 Feb ‘00 03.09 GMT

Finn Yarber, Hatlee Beech and Joe Roy Spicer are ex-judges, AKA the Brethren, now incarcerated in prison. The Brethren while away their sentences making a quiet fortune through blackmail. "They were, after all, convicted felons, and if they could quietly pick up some cash on the outside then everyone would be happy." Their trick is to put an ad in the lonely hearts column of gay mag Out and About. "Ricky" and "Percy" write to secretly gay - and wealthy - older businessmen, preferably married with children, as this makes extracting cash from them a lot easier...$100,000 a pop.

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In the big outside world, the CIA have discovered one Natli Chenkov, hardline Russian communist and according to Teddy Maynard, head of the CIA, "the most dangerous man in the world". Maynard explains: "If we are unprepared, then we could well have a war. If we are strong, we avoid a war. Right now the Pentagon could not do what it did in the Gulf war in 1991."

But Maynard's plan is to field a presidential candidate with one aim - not lowering taxes, cutting the crime rate or unemployment. Instead the candidate must promise to double the defence budget. Aaron Lake is the answer to Maynard's prayers - he's a congressman with "dark blue eyes, square chin, really nice teeth". He is intelligent, but more importantly, his past is clean and Maynard knows he is electable. Lake thinks the idea is "wonderful" and starts choosing his vice-president. Maynard guarantees the campaign money and declares: "By the time November gets here, the American voters will be so terrified of Armageddon they won't care how much you've spent. It'll be a landslide."

Then the American embassy in Cairo is bombed, killing 80 people, including the ambassador and his wife. Lake makes speeches about compassion to the nation, but is as tough as hell about the defence budget. His popularity escalates.

But Maynard discovers that Lake unfortunately has a secret - he is gay and he has written to "Ricky". Maynard must prevent a scandal (he's had quite enough dealing with Clinton). Trevor, the Brethren's lawyer, is paid $2m to keep quiet about the secret, but he flees. Maynard "seethes". "His agency had toppled governments and killed kings, yet he was constantly surprised at how little things got botched." Trevor is shot. The Brethren are then also paid $2m each and released from jail on condition that they stay out of the US for at least two years.

Scare over, Maynard advises Lake to get married to better his image. Jayne Cordell, his closest adviser, "needs to drop 15 pounds" but "she'd make a fine First Lady". Lake wins a landslide victory in the presidential election. The CIA discover that the Brethren are still up to their old tricks, practising extortion in Europe: "You gotta keep busy," concludes Finn Yarber.

And if you really are pressed - The digested read, digested:A Russian communist threatens America. America elects a president who organises bombings around the world. He is blackmailed because he is gay, but then marries his assistant. It all works out fine in the end, though, and America lives happily ever after.

THE GUARDIAN

Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope / Digest read

DIGEST READ

Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope

(Bloomsbury, £14.99) digested in the style of the original 

John Crace Fri 11 Feb ‘00 14.37 GMT

Merrion Palmer had a dull childhood in Wales. She remembered her mother, Gwen, taking away a monster bar of Toblerone chocolate once, but nothing else bad happened. Except her father dying. And her grandmother. But she left them some money, so that was OK.

As Merrion grew up, she was a little wild. She grew her hair and had a butterfly tattooed on her ankle. One day she didn't come home until six in the morning and had a violent row with her mother. As she was going through a wild phase, Merrion ran away to Bristol but went home of her own accord six days later. Merrion decided to study law and went to live in London.

One day after visiting her mother, Merrion found an old book of her father's. She read it on the train home. It was called Esprit de Corps and was by Lawrence Durrell. She collapsed with laughter when she read the story of the faulty typesetting machines in Cairo that omitted all the "c"s from "canal zone" during the Suez crisis. Despite the laughter, she still noticed Guy when he got on the train.

Guy was a gentleman. He wouldn't let her eat free peanuts in bars. "Whose fingers have been in there before yours?" he said. Guy was married. With children. And grandchildren who called him "Grando". "And he's a judge," she told her mother. "I'm in love."

Guy left his wife to live with Merrion. She met Guy's son, Alan. She met Alan's wife, Carrie, in a wine bar by Victoria station. The time had been vague, so it didn't matter that she just missed a train. Carrie had a dull childhood in East Anglia. Nothing bad happened. Except her mother dying. That was hard as Carrie had loved her.

Merrion's mother, Gwen, came to London on a train. She brought her own sandwiches with her. She thought Guy was very goodlooking. "You're ruining my daughter's life," she told him. Gwen went home. She tried to keep herself busy and even took computer lessons. "Why's it called a mouse?" she asked. "Why's it called an icon?"

Guy phoned Gwen. "I'm coming to Cardiff," he said. Over tea in the Angel Hotel he told Gwen that he was not going to marry Merrion. And back in London he told his family that he was taking a job in the north, away from his wife and away from Merrion. "I'll recover," said Guy, "and Merrion will probably go on to be a very successful family law barrister and, hopefully, marry and have children, too."

And if you really are pressed: The digested read, digested:

Merrion's father died when she was young. Perhaps she was subconsciously looking for a father figure when she met Guy on a train while giggling over a rude word in her book. Guy left his wife. And then left Merrion.

THE GUARDIAN