Untalented Mr Ripley

John Malkovich in Ripley's Game

10 April 2012

Tom Ripley's talent, in Patricia Highsmith's 1955 thriller about her " charming psychopath", was for reinventing himself - for impersonation and improvisation. Anthony Minghella honoured this. His 1999 film was a fluent riff on the theme of trading places by means of murder.

The Talented Mr Ripley, played then by Matt Damon, scraped out of each tight spot after killing his friend and stealing his identity by switching alibis, names or cities and so eluding justice in that era of dolce vita flux, late-Fifties Europe.

No such advantages of time, place or retro resonance are available to the middle-aged Tom Ripley in Liliana Cavani's blundering film version of Highsmith's third novel in the series, Ripley's Game.

Here, John Malkovich's Ripley is no longer an amoral young American Dreamer, jealously eyeing the life, style and money that other people possess. "Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody," Damon's Ripley sighed, much as Milton's Satan decided it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. But Malkovich's Ripley, living in contemporary times, is now a real somebody with no call for young Tom's envious trajectory of upward mobility.

A rich aesthete, he has married a woman with a fortune and resides in a Palladian mansion in the Veneto, still a con man at heart, but now only a half-hearted sociopath. His existential demon has departed, satisfied: he has turned into a standard baddie.

Like most sequels, the film hasn't the allure of the first encounter; only the curiosity value of a second look. The script, by Cavani and Charles McKeown, is lazy and clumsy. Unlike The Talented Mr Ripley, it lacks the Jamesian fascination that a young American might feel for the chicanery of what Donald Rumsfeld today would call "old Europe".

Unlike René Clément's 1961 version of the first Ripley novel, retitled Plein Soleil and starring Alain Delon, or Wim Wenders's first version of Ripley's Game, starring Dennis Hopper, in 1977, and retitled The American Friend, both of them exploring an outsider's quest for self, Cavani's film is a straightforward thriller.

It has one sizeable drawback. It doesn't thrill.

Malkovich's Ripley, however, will be enough compensation for some people. He not only looks the part, he sounds it: a high-pitched and supercilious voice, nearly effeminate, almost a whine, it's what dry ice would sound like. It's "gay American" in tone, but European in decadent threat. It's a voice made to seduce and torture, and extract pleasure from each of these acts. Listening to it is a perverse treat, even though the plot is a pedestrian muddle.

The film opens with Malkovich doing a deal with $5 million worth of forged Renaissance drawings that goes suddenly sour and bloodily wrong. Violence from Ripley, we can accept - it's in his past. But why is a man of his fastidious taste in partnership with a cockney thug called Reeves (Ray Winstone)?

Winstone is in the film, I guess, because of the huge European success-of Sexy Beast. But it's a colossal error of casting. Keeping company with so common a sidekick diminishes Ripley's up-market status.

When a Russian mafioso cuts himself in on the profits of Reeves's nightclub in Berlin, the Brit appeals to Ripley to rub the guy out. Why should he need to send an SOS all the way to Italy? Aren't hit men available in Berlin? Why should Ripley choose an English picture-framer, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott), who lives in his neighbourhood and is dying of cancer, to do the job? Is this wise?

IT'S his revenge, it is implied, for overhearing Trevanny insult him for the florid overdecoration of his palazzo. But professionalism is Ripley's game; to make him act out of pique at his unappreciated house-furnishings cheapens the man.

Trevanny does one contract job, then gets dispatched on another: this time to garotte a pursuing mafioso in the loo on the Berlin-to-D¸sseldorf express. Garotting is among the trickiest acts to pull off: it requires speed, precision and ruthlessness. Not an art that comes naturally to every picture framer.

Performing it in a train loo raises other problems, like elbow-room. The murder sequence crams so many victims inside one WC that it recalls the impossible crowd spilling out of a ship's cabin in the Marx Brothers comedy.

The film's final act, with Ripley and Trevanny setting bear-traps for the Mafia - tested with baguettes for their efficacy - all over the floor of the palazzo is a blundering bore.

The Talented Mr Ripley was a high-glamour film in the Hitchcock style of feline suspense: Cavani's sequel, orchestrated by Ennio Morricone's dour score, is sluggish, brutish and formulaic.