Minghella puts cool back in jazz

Any director inept enough to make a film look unalluring with Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gywneth Paltrow would deserve nothing short of decapitation by clapper-board. Yet, even given a photogenic head start by his cast's gene pool, Anthony Minghella has achieved something pretty astonishing in The Talented Mr Ripley: he manages to make jazz sexy.

Why should we be surprised or impressed by this? Well, think about the last time you watched someone playing jazz. If you are under 50 and do not have a beard or pudding-bowl haircut, it was probably on The Fast Show, with that smarmy hybrid caricature of "Whispering" Bob Harris and Roger Moore smirking "Cool!" or "Groovy!" to the camera in lulls between the brass section's cacophonous honking.

Jazz buffs laugh at Jim Thomson's cringe-inducing skit because they know just how horribly on-the-beat it is, but that geeky pretentiousness is hardly going to have impressionable teenagers clamouring for trumpet lessons. TV is not solely to blame for jazz's nerdy image: film has served this connoisseur genre just as badly over the years. You can list in one finger snap the number of decent jazz movies - Round Midnight, Bird, Paris Blues. True, there are plenty of others that have used jazz - Woody Allen in virtually everything, and Miles Davis's score for Lift to the Scaffold alone make it a classic - but the music was not the essential point of these movies.

Minghella's stroke of genius is to weave the sound and style of jazz into the very fibre of his story. In the Patricia Highsmith novel, Dickie Greenleaf is an aspiring painter, but the film adaptation reinvents him as a would-be saxophonist in the Golden Age of modern jazz. As an American playboy lounging on the Italian Riviera in the late Fifties, he has fallen under the sway of a music that reflects his boho lifestyle - improvised, freeform, intense. Cue Law and Damon in a series of fabulous suits and funky shirts, to an impeccable soundtrack of classic bebop: Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and Bobby Timmons. The whole job reeks of killer style.

The only catch is that Law's character is genuinely into the scene, while Damon's is faking it to befriend him. (Who can blame him? The train-spotter tendencies entailed in being a jazz buff would be a red rag to any fraudster.) Unfortunately, Law sees straight through Damon, which is no surprise to critic Jack Massarik. "A jazz musician would never be taken in by someone who was bluffing it," he says. If only Mr Ripley had had Mr Massarik and Graham Marsh, author of The Cover Art of Blue Note Records, around to offer a few tips, he might have got away with his poseur deception. But that, of course, would have been a different film, with an upbeat, harmonious ending.