Sixteen is a great age to see a movie, there on a threshold between wide-eyed wonder and something like maturity. That\u2019s how old I was when I first laid eyes on The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella\u2019s ravishing, exquisitely grim 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith\u2019s flinty 1955 novel. I\u2019d been a movie fan for years at that point, but something about its elegant menace, its beauty flecked with blood, grabbed ahold of me like little had previously. It is by no means a feelgood film, this story of queer longing and loneliness giving way to murderous deed. But watching it now (as I do perhaps embarrassingly often) still evokes the primal thrill of art cracking open a young mind.<\/p>\n
Minghella, who died in 2008, was a master of style, crafting wholly credible visions of the past. His prowess is perhaps best on display in Ripley, which takes the viewer on a grand tour of mid-20th-century Italy, both its sun-splashed coastal languor and its more anxious, cobble-gray city streets. Tom Ripley, a low-birth conman sent to Europe\u2019s blessed boot to retrieve a prodigal shipping scion at his father\u2019s behest, is in awe of the country, as are we in the audience; so much so that we begin to sickly root for Tom\u2019s increasingly sinister campaign to stay there.<\/p>\n
Gabriel Yared\u2019s alternately forbidding and playful score \u2013 its seductive clarinet, its ominously plinking glockenspiel \u2013 envelops as Tom plunges ever further into his pool of lies, dragging hapless heirs and dilettantes down into the murk with him. It\u2019s seriously high-grade suspense, though the film thrums with a sadder, more profound undertone. Just beneath the film\u2019s lacquered finish is a bitter, and disarmingly empathetic, consideration of what it is to live with unspoken desire, to yearn and reach for a golden world from which your true self would likely be shunned.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no mystery why I, having just come out of the closet in the summer of 1999, saw in this film something particularly salient. But it wasn\u2019t just that. It was the electric rush of Minghella\u2019s seamless execution, working with a cast of soon-to-be-enormous actors \u2013 who, I\u2019d argue, have never been better.<\/p>\n
Few other young, straight male actors trying to make their name in 1990s Hollywood would have been confident enough to play this shifty queer protagonist with anything matching Matt Damon\u2019s precise, fearless conviction.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n