THE PARABLE OF THE TALENTED:

THE CREEPIEST: John Malkovich as Tom Ripley (ANTHONY LANE, 2004-02-09, The New Yorker)

Is there any place, in the world of Patricia Highsmith, for the non-weird? Not only do crooked souls seem more at ease there than the straight; after a while, the air grows so corrupting that the straight start behaving like the crooked. Highsmith’s first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” was given the full treatment by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951, and nobody who has seen it can forget the frictionless perversion of Robert Walker in the role of Bruno—the charming fellow-passenger who suggests murder as if he were offering a light. But Farley Granger, too, as the tennis star to whom the offer is made, becomes no less disquieting. He begins as a handsome patsy, but somehow Bruno’s guile sucks him in. For Highsmith, life is all backhand and sly drop shot, with a vicious spin on the ball, and the actors who have been drawn to her are not exactly the kind in whom you place your trust; think of Alain Delon in “Plein Soleil,” or Dennis Hopper in “The American Friend.” As for Jude Law in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” he may have been a victim, but, with that ice-white smile and body of bronze, he was a victim who looked like a killer.

It’s a hell of a team, but wait: the captain has arrived. “Ripley’s Game,” directed by Liliana Cavani, sees the welcome return of Tom Ripley. On his previous visit to our screen, he was played by Matt Damon, but that milky substitute can now be put behind us. Ladies and gentlemen, the award for Best Ripley—the deathless bringer of death, a man with a mine shaft where his moral sense should be, and a hero so beloved of Highsmith that she gave him five books to himself—goes to Mr. John Malkovich. The moment that he appears onscreen, you think, Of course: that is Ripley. Highsmith groupies might find him too old, but I see Ripley as being of any age—no less devilish at eighty than he was at twenty-one, and as comfortable in the eighteenth century, perhaps, as he is in the twenty-first. I have no family tree to hand, but, were Malkovich’s Ripley proved to be a direct descendant of his Vicomte de Valmont, in “Dangerous Liaisons,” I would not be remotely surprised. The blood of both characters is rich in the patient scorn of the cultivated; consider our first sight of Malkovich, in Cavani’s film, as he stands perfectly still in a Berlin square and gives the impression, as he has done throughout his movie career, of posing for an invisible sculptor.

Ripley is in Germany to sell some Old Master drawings. He is not a dealer but a persuasive go-between, and his outfit—long dark coat and beret—is the uniform of a modern centaur, with the body of an entrepreneur and the head of an artist. The sale does not go well, and Ripley interrupts his courteous discussion of Guercino to pick up a poker from the fireplace and beat a man to death. This is the only shocking, as opposed to gruelling or mock-glamorous, act of violence that I have witnessed onscreen in the past year, because it flashes out of nowhere, like lightning across a clear sky. Ripley has the same frustrations as you and I, but deals with them quite differently, and in so doing rebukes our inhibitions. Where you or I would say, “God, I could have killed him,” because some guy cut in and took our parking space, Ripley really would kill him, and call it a job well done. But that is not the strangest thing about him. The oddity of Ripley is that he likes to see others do harm as well. He leads them into temptation and, in a parody of human companionship, lends them a helping hand. Although he would never admit as much, he is bored and even lonely, and that is why “Ripley’s Game,” which could have been a freak show, seems more like a portrait of evil making friends.

The brilliance of Ms Highsmith and her hero, Tom Ripley, lies in the demonstration of what life would be like if genes really were selfish.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2004 9:51 PM