METAMORPHOSIS MAN.

'The Talented Mr. Ripley'

We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being...enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it "the protean self," after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms.

robert jay lifton 

The Protean Self

Certainly, Professor Lifton didn't have the hero of The Talented Mr. Ripley in mind when he wrote the words above, but Proteus himself (or is it themselves?) would have sent Tom Ripley, as played by Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella's adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel, straight to the head of the shape-shifting class.

The young man is an impecunious music student eking out a living by tuning pianos and accompanying singers when the wealthy father of Dicky Greenleaf sends him to Italy to bring his playboy son back to the States. Approaching Dicky and his fiancee on an Italian beach, Tom is wearing bathing trunks and eyeglasses, and this combination, plus the paleness of his torso among so many sunbathed bodies, makes him look a classic geek. But he is a geek Proteus eager to darken his skin, shed his poverty and his past and even his personality, the last so nebulous that it seems not so much the expression of character as its stopgap. Ripley becomes the companion of the lordly Dicky (whose passions always turn out to be whim-whams): his stooge, pet, unofficial valet, sounding board, male Galatea. Then the situation becomes more intense as Tom witnesses Dicky's betrayal of his fiancee with an Italian girl, a seduction which leads to the latter's suicide. Now the geek becomes the playboy's scapegoat, ineffectual conscience, would-be lover, would-be doppelganger. Then a boat vanishes, along with a bloodstained oar and a body. A distraught Tom Ripley shows up at his hotel's front desk to claim his key and the desk clerk mistakes him for Dicky. Tom hesitates, smiles, and acknowledges the clerk's salutation. Proteus has found a new shape.

In both Highsmith's novel and its French film adaptation, Purple Noon (1959, directed by Rene Clement), the hero is a conscienceless predator moving relentlessly toward his goal of living the good life. Alain Delon's pretense of being an American was risible but he captured Ripley's nervelessness so well, too well, that you felt he had planned Dick's demise from the very start. Consequently, though the film was diverting, you never gave a hang about Ripley's fate because, in a sense, he never had a truly human destiny, only a biological destination. A snake has to shed its skin; a snake has to devour its prey.

Minghella's film and Damon's performance have created a very different entity. This new Ripley has no strategy, only tactics. The killing of Dicky is no cold-blooded murder but an impulse of rage. When that desk clerk makes his error and Tom slips into Dicky's shoes, the impersonation takes on an improvisatory, let's-try-this-out-and-see- how-it-fits quality that makes the story suspenseful. Not only do we keep wondering if each ruse will succeed but also if Ripley will want to succeed. At one point, when Tom well knows how ruinous it would be to reencounter Dicky's fiancee, he shrugs and tells the police to show her into his apartment. An instant later, he pleads nerves and a headache and could she please come back later? This Ripley always has his wiles; it's his will that fluctuates.

Nor is this Proteus a complete sociopath, for he remains capable of fear, remorse, affection, self-hatred. Watching the opera Eugene Onegin, Tom weeps with recognition as the baritone slays his best friend in an excess of fury. Minghella isn't sentimentalizing the character: Ripley has to follow his initial manslaughter with two cover-up murders, and the last is so wrenching that we long for Ripley to be put away. We know he is a menace but he is a menace watching himself with shock and regret. Does this arouse our sympathy? Maybe not, but moral deterioration is nearly always more dramatic than complete amorality.

What also keeps Ripley compelling is that Minghella is tapping into the sort of fantasy that even the most firm-souled of us have had from time to time. Contemplating the colorful but self-destructive doings of some famous person, we may think, "If I were he, I would be so much better at being he than he is." Couldn't one be Dylan Thomas without the binges or Sylvia Plath without the suicide or Hillary Clinton without the husband? When Tom, trying to cover up Dicky's murder, pens a suicide note purportedly by the dead man, he writes, "I've made a mess of being Dicky Greenleaf, haven't I?" Tom is determined to do better.

Minghella's script abounds in clever adumbrations and echoes. Boarding the ship to Italy, Tom strikes up a friendship with a fellow traveler who remarks admiringly: "I have so much luggage but you're so streamlined. " Yes, our hero carries little baggage of any kind, physical or psychological, and it is this freedom from the past that will later make him so nimble and so dangerous. Listening to a recording of jazzman Chet Baker's rather feminine voice singing "My Funny Valentine, " Ripley complains, "I can't tell if this is a man or a woman." But he himself, ostensibly heterosexual, will become sexually ambidextrous in the course of his imposture, and it is his homosexual fling with a nice music teacher aboard a luxury cruise ship that will lead to the movie's harrowing climax.

Minghella sets the story in the Italy of the early 1960s, the period of Anita Ekberg kissing Marcello Mastroianni in the Trevi fountain in La Dolce Vita, of Jackie Kennedy's triumphant tour of Europe, of the great days of the Paris Review, of international junkets that took American writers to Europe and French existentialists to New York. In short, it is the last period in which Americans walked like gods in the old world, spreading the gospel of jazz and action painting and William Faulkner and Humphrey Bogart. (Of course, we still influence Europe, but back then we were loved on the cultural level even by those-like Sartre-who hated America as a superpower.) Dicky, with his money, good looks, and fecklessness, is one of these American deities and Ripley is his votary, until the votary decides to become a god himself. Minghella and his cinematographer John Seale give us the paradisal Italy we saw in touristy romantic movies of the fifties and early sixties, such as Three Coins in the Fountain and Rome Adventure and, sure enough, this film has been accused of being too much of a travelogue to be a proper thriller. But the physical beauty that surrounds Dicky, Tom, and their various playmates not only contrasts with the ugliness of deceit and murder, it also fuels the criminality. All this luxe is to die for...and to kill for, too.

Matt Damon makes Ripley both innocent and devourer. Glasses on and grinning, he seems homely and gauche; glasses off and unsmiling, he is a dangerous pretty boy. As Dicky, Jude Law does an American update of his Lord Alfred Douglas from Wilde, which works because both characters are unstable, magnetic sybarites. The role of Dicky's fiancee comfortably draws upon Gwyneth Paltrow's ability to portray high-strung sensibilities. As a rich oaf who must come across as eminently killable, Philip Seymour Hoffmann, reprising his hot-potato-in-the- mouth Wasp accent from Scent of a Woman, is juicily obnoxious. Jack Davenport gives the gay music teacher appropriate reticence but fails to supply enough charm behind the reserve. Best of all, Cate Blanchett, as an American heiress who falls for Ripley, endows a relatively small part with two layers. She immediately projects the insecurity of a woman just past her first youth in a period when it wasn't yet chic for a female to stay single too long. But under that tremulousness, Blanchett reveals the inalienable confidence of a woman who may see lovers come and go but will always have the money and class connections that cushion life's little ironies.

The Talented Mr. Ripley itself is a unusually layered thriller. Its surface is all bustle and sunlight and glamour, but through the physical splendor moves Tom Ripley carrying a void inside him. The glimpses we're allowed of that void mark the little corner of hell reserved for Proteus.