The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Produced by William Horberg and Tom Sternberg; directed by Anthony Minghella; screenplay by Anthony Minghella, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith; cinematography by John Seale; production design by Roy Walker; edited by Walter Murch; costume design by Ann Roth and Gary Jones; music by Gabriel Yared; starring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jack Davenport, James Rebhorn, Sergio Rubini, Philip Baker Hall, Celia Weston, Rosario Fiorello, Stefania Rocca and Lisa Eichorn. Color, 139 mins. A Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films release.

The commercial success of Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a curious, if predictable, marvel. Who would have thought, in the late 1990s, that a film featuring a sympathetic gay psychopathic killer, structured around a fairly complicated 'thriller' plot, and peppered with what is essentially an antilove interest with Hollywood's belle de jour Gwyneth Paltrow would be a hit? Released on Christmas day 1999, Minghella's film proved that you can neither under nor overestimate the taste of American audiences. Indeed, The Talented Mr. Ripley works, for both art and commercial audiences, because Minghella understands perfectly, and can cater to, the nuances and expectations of American middle-brow taste. In a year in which most studio releases evidenced little thoughtfulness and less artistry, The Talented Mr. Ripley was taken seriously by many critics who praised it as "highly intelligent" and "art." Even the culturally staid New York Times Magazine heralded it, in a cover story, as a major artistic an d sociological event. But Minghella, through his clever screenplay with its insinuation of 'large themes' and his stunning, if recycled, visual flair, has created not so much art as the illusion of art in which, as Talullah Bankhead once quipped, "There is less here than meets the eye."

The Talented Mr. Ripley is based on Patricia Highsmith's 1955 psychological thriller of the same name. Highsmith's novel had an earlier screen life in Rene Clement's 1960 thriller Purple Noon, a film that, upon its original release on the art-house circuit, was viewed more as a sexy French thriller than a serious art film. Most general American audiences have never seen Purple Noon, nor have they read Patricia Highsmith, although they probably have heard of both. And this appearance of 'cultural insiderness' is one of the keys to the success and reputation of Minghella's film. It is a common phenomenon in marketing 'art' to middlebrow audiences. This (for lack of a more precise term) 'Masterpiece Theater syndrome' is at the heart of The Talented Mr. Ripley's commercial popularity.

Central to the marketing of The Talented Mr. Ripley is Patricia Highsmith's novel. Although she published more than thirty books--twenty-one novels, seven collections of stories, and assorted nonfiction --before her death in 1995, Highsmith, despite praise by Graham Greene, Truman Capote, and a legion of serious critics, remained, as she began, a cult figure. Highsmith's cult status was authentic, but continually threatened by the possibility of mainstream fame: between 1975 and 1995 there were no less than five attempted Highsmith revivals, each with the re-release of back titles and a flood of attendant reviews and laudatory articles. Mirroring the ironic, cantankerous tone of her work, Highsmith's reputation rests on being not simply a cult figure, but a completely well-known cult figure.

This paradoxical literary status is, to a large degree, one of the reasons behind the popularity of The Talented Mr. Ripley, for it confers on the film the artistic legitimacy of semiobscurity along with the potential of mass viewership, an eccentric mixture of intellectual snob appeal and mainstream popularity. This, of course, was one of the main ingredients that made Anthony Minghella's 1996 The English Patient such a success. Michael Ondaatje's densely literary novel was one of those culture flukes--like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose or Toni Morrison's Beloved--critically praised but probably read by only a fraction of the millions who bought copies. With its literary veneer, classy David Lean-esque photography and 'serious' actors such as Ralph Fiennes, Kirsten Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe, and Juliette Binoche, The English Patient resonated with both the high and low end of the Masterpiece Theater crowd. But at heart The English Patient is far closer to Mervyn LeRoy's sentimental, but highly praised 1942 weepy Random Harvest with Ronald Colman as a British soldier with amnesia. It looked like art and had a literary seriousness about it that made middlebrow audiences feel smart.

This, in many regards, is the formula that made The Talented Mr. Ripley click at the box office. Minghella has a shrewd and successful ability to shape and market his films as high-tone cultural artifacts. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, as in The English Patient, he has packaged respected actors Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gate Blanchett, has written a witty, literate, intelligent script from Highsmith's novel, and has photographed it in the elegant, Technicolor, high-kitsch style of late 1950s-early 1960s Hollywood. As a commercial package, it looks and feels great but falls short of anything resembling art, of provoking us the way that great art can and does.

Minghella effectively 'Masterpiece Theaterized' The Talented Mr. Ripley by making subtle, but substantiative changes in adapting Highsmith's novel. In the original, Tom Ripley is a near homeless petty thief and chronic liar with sociopathic tendencies. Through a coincidence, he meets Herbert Greenleaf, a wealthy man who believes that Ripley is friends with his son Dickie. The younger Greenleaf is bumming around Italy with his casual girlfriend Marge Sherwood. At the father's behest, and on his money, Ripley travels to Italy to persuade Dickie to return. Once there, Ripley becomes accustomed to Dickie's ne'er-do-well life and begins both to fall in love with, and want to be him. He murders Dickie and assumes his identity. This leads to another murder, which Ripley convincingly blames on the dead Dickie. Ripley then forges Dickie's will and fakes the already murdered man's suicide. At the novel's end, Ripley inherits a comfortable income. Highsmith's Ripley is not a charming grifter who gets away with a crime, but a psychopathic, deeply disturbed homosexual whose need to bolster his fragile ego disallows him the nicety of a conscience. But Highsmith's genius is in making him the hero, with whom we completely identify.

Minghella has made his Ripley far more palatable. As played by the engaging Matt Damon, Ripley is softened, now more a confused gay man who is at a social disadvantage in a world in which his social betters are often mean to him. More guilty of looking for love in all the wrong places--and being rejected--than of being an amoral killer, this Ripley is far more palatable to middle-class audiences. Minghella has made smaller changes in his hero's rehabilitation: he is now a down-on-his-luck musician not a scam artist; he is less a misogynist and seems truly to like Marge; his killing of Dickie is not premeditated but brought on in anger by the latter's cruelly rejecting and insulting him. And to make Ripley even more sympathetic, Minghella has coarsened Dickie Greenleaf, making him less a shallow, spoiled rich kid and more a callous womanizer responsible for the death of his Italian mistress, as well as a murderous hothead. But the most radical change here is that Ripley now is capable of love--and by the end of the film, he has a boyfriend. This is completely at odds with Highsmith's conceptualization of Ripley, who would not have been a crowd pleaser. There's a big difference between a confused gay con man and a charming, unfeeling sociopath. Movie audiences may have rejected a Ripley--and a Matt Damon--who lacked certain conventional elements of sympathy. In his introduction to the published screenplay, Minghella is quite clear that, despite the novel's "uninflected brilliance.., its disavowal of moral consequences, Ripley's solipsism, [and] the author's acerbic judgement of everybody other than Ripley...do not sit easily within the context of film." We're talking box office here.

Ironically, this is not the first time that Highsmith's morally sophisticated, frightening vision was muffled and distorted by Hollywood's need for box office. Screenwriters Raymond Chandler and Czenzi Ormonde adapted her first novel, Strangers on a Train, for Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1951 film revitalized his flagging career. Hitchcock's film, an effective thriller, departed from Highsmith's story in one significant detail: in the film Guy (Farley Granger), the innocent dupe of the psychopathic Bruno (Robert Walker), attempts to warn the latter's father of his son's murderous intentions; in the book Guy, feeling trapped by Bruno's threats, actually murders the old man. In Hitchcock's dark vision, Guy is 'guilty' because he wishes his wife were dead; in Highsmith's even darker nightmare, 'innocent' Guy easily becomes a killer. In Highsmith's world such activity is, if not natural, to be expected. This is why, in her topsy-turvy moral universe, the amoral Tom Ripley is less an antihero than a hero.

The two most profound changes that Minghella wrought upon Highsmith's original--which brings his Ripley squarely into the realm of bourgeois morality--is that he has made Tom Ripley capable of love, and he has determined that Ripley must be punished for his crimes. At the end of the film, Ripley falls in love with Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport), a minor char- acter in Highsmith's novel. In his introduction Minghella writes, "the novel is about a man who commits murders and is not caught. And so the film is about a man who commits murders and is not caught. But it departs in one crucial sense by concluding that eluding public accountability is not the same as eluding justice. The film has a moral imperative: You can get away with murder, but you don't really get away with anything." At the end of the film, Ripley, in order to conceal the first two murders, kills Peter. Thus, by killing the person who means the most to him--echoes of Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol here and the idea that "each man kills the thing he loves"--Ripley is, in fact, punished enough to meet traditional standards of both Hollywood and conventional morality. This reflexive, traditional moralizing is a perversion of Highsmith's universe. In her novel, Ripley--the ultimate outsider--is not punished for rejecting what Highsmith sees as the truly immoral: the unthinking social and moral standards of normalcy. As she once remarked in an interview, "Ripley isn't so bad. He only kills when he has to."

It is not only in the script that Minghella makes Highsmith's story more palatable to mass audiences. A great deal of the charm of The Talented Mr. Ripley resides in its lush, if calculated, visual beauty. Minghella and his cinematographer John Seale have re-created a Hollywood fantasy of late 1950s Italy. In bright travelogue colors and panoramas, they take us through the countryside outside of Mongibello, the Riviera, the cafes of Naples, and Roman nightlife. This mise-en-scene is often beautifully rendered and purposefully evocative of high-end, classic, sophisticated Hollywood films set in chic, stylish European settings. Many of these were sentimental romances such as Roman Holiday, Funny Face, Summertime, Three Coins in a Fountain, and Rome Adventure. There was also a distinct genre of elegant thrillers such as Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief and The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Stanley Donan's Charade. All of these films promoted a new and distinctive use of European and continental locales in postwar Holl ywood film. The vastness of Cinemascope and the luxurious Technicolor presented U.S. audiences with an elaborate fantasy of post-war Europe that banished the harsh black-and-white images of the war--either from Life magazine, Hollywood films like Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair, or, most starkly, the work of the Italian neorealists like Rossellini's Open City--replacing them with an imagined world of glamor, chic, and (mostly) innocent worldliness.

These films, for the most part and to varying degrees, reflected an American desire to rediscover and reimagine Europe as a cultured, elegant alternative to the United States. They also articulated a specific fantasy that placed 'innocent' Americans in a continental setting to let them discover the innate wholesomeness of their Americanism: few, if any, of these characters stay in Europe or view it as a replacement for their homeland. For films of the time, European locations provided an original and often quietly provocative critique of American life and mores. They were, to a large degree, updated and more optimistic versions of the classic Henry James novels in which the 'innocent' American going to Europe is corrupted. For James, this embrace of the old world often meant disaster--Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady is trapped in a hideous marriage; Daisy Miller dies; and Milly Theale in Wings of a Dove also dies. In the films of the late Fifties and early Sixties influenced by James, Americans go t o Europe, discover eroticism, and become fuller Americans. Europe here is a hothouse that allows them to bloom sexually.

We are reminded of these films continually while watching The Talented Mr. Ripley, and with reason, since Minghella consciously draws upon them. The resonance is not only visual. Highsmith, a keenly literary writer, drops two hints in her novel that she is, in part, playing with Jamesian material--references to The Ambassadors in which the bourgeois American, Lambert Strether, is sent to Paris to retrieve the son of a woman to whom he is engaged. As usual with Highsmith's work, the detail is wantonly perverse, for

the sociopathic Tom Ripley is hardly the innocent American of James's imagination. Yet, rather than play or engage with this idea, Minghella speedily retreats from it. This is reflected in the film's visuals, as Minghella shies away from the more radical possibilities of using European locales as the aforementioned films used them. These films--particularly Three Coins in a Fountain, Rome Adventure, and Summertime--presented mainstream American audiences with a critique, albeit a gentle one, of Ame rican morality. The characters questioned their personal and social values when faced with the new (sophisticated and sexualized) European surroundings, and audiences were invited to do the same, as they also savored the lush Technicolor beauty of the old world. Minghella, however, uses these same images simply to create an atmosphere of nostalgia. The travelogue-like backgrounds and location shooting that functioned as a commentary on U.S. social mores in the Fifties films, function simply as travelogue footage here.

In the end The Talented Mr. Ripley remains a very safe film. The enormous moral challenges that Highsmith offered in the novel are wiped away, and Minghella's reliance on traditional Hollywood-generated visual images functions only as a way to placate, not stimulate, audiences. It is true that a film conveying the highly ironic and disturbing moral complexity of Highsmith's novel would not have enormous box-office potential, a choice reflected in all of Minghella's artistic decisions. While entertaining and, at times, suspenseful, this Mr. Ripley shows more talent in merchandising acceptable middlebrow culture than in creating provocative art.

Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and has written on film for The Los Angeles Times, Radical America, Z Magazine, Gay Community News and The Boston Globe.