The Talented Mr. Ripley (2000, DVD)

What are we to make of it when two people go out on a boat but only one returns to the shore? Theodore Dreiser posed this question in An American Tragedy, which George Stevens adapted to the screen in his brilliant and brutal A Place in the Sun. Stevens film has been characterized by unsympathetic viewers as glacially paced, but that pace is essential to the success of the film; it s what allows us to hear the wind whistling through the soul of George Eastman (played superbly by Montgomery Clift) [1]. Director Anthony Minghella seems to have taken his cues as much from Stevens as from writer..

Imagine being mistaken for someone else, and you knew that playing along with it could mean a much better life for you. That was the case with Tom Ripley, a young man struggling to get by in 1950s New York. When Tom (Matt Damon) is playing the piano to earn some money, he is mistaken for a Princeton University student by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn). Greenleaf assumes that Tom knew his Princeton-educated son Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), who had run off to Italy and was living the high life. On a whim the elder Greenleaf makes Tom a generous offer to travel to Italy and...

Who is Tom Ripley? A cunning counterfeit who kills in cold blood? A shy young social misfit who stumbles into a lie of his own making? Don t come to The Talented Mr. Ripley expecting to know what makes the title character tick. More likely, you ll be ticked off when the end credits roll. You won t be any closer to the heart of Ripley than when you first saw the image of his face fragmenting into shards during the opening credits. In the title role, Matt Damon does as well as the material allows. With each film he makes, Damon gets deeper inside each of his characters. Unfortunately, when he...

This movie was touted by some respected reviewers as one of the top movies of 2000. This is a mystery to me. I found this movie to be fairly absorbing for the first hour or so, until the first murder occurred. From that point on, the story line deteriorated. The plot opens with Tom Ripley, a amateur pianist, being offered $1,000.00 by a shipping tycoon to travel to Naples, Italy to bring back his wayward son, Dickie Greenleaf. Tom is a meek, mild mannered person with a dull personality. He is somewhat hesitant at first to leave his sheltered routine, but accepts the offer. Once he arrives, he.