Seeing the 1999 movie finally made me appreciate what a great actor Jude Law is. More and more, I notice weird parallels between The Talented Mr. Ripley and another 1999 film you might have heard of, Fight Club. (lol)
Both films depict the relationship between a male protagonist who is socially awkward, lonely and less successful than he would like (Tom/The Narrator), and an idealised, charismatic and hypermasculine deuteragonist who takes the protagonist under his wing, who the protagonist fanatically adores and emulates (Dickie/Tyler Durden). Both films play it deliberately ambiguously whether the protagonist wants to BE the deuteragonist or wants to be WITH the deuteragonist - is Tom romantically attracted to Dickie, or does he envy everything he has (money and fancy clothes, of course, but also charm, good breeding, education, powerful connections, family etc.)? Like you, I lean towards the latter interpretation, but the former is a big part of it (more so in the source novel). Similarly, Fincher deliberately played up the homoerotic undertones of Fight Club in hopes that they would serve as a red herring.
By necessity, the actor playing the protagonist must give a fairly subdued performance (Edward Norton/Matt Damon), while the deuteragonist must be played by an extremely physically attractive actor with an incredibly energetic, magnetic screen presence (Brad Pitt/Jude Law). The first halves of these two films, in which the deuteragonist dominates, are compulsively watchable and absorbing owing to this actor's screen presence. In the second halves of these films, the deuteragonist is largely or entirely absent, as a direct consequence of which the pacing flags significantly (all the best scenes of both films are in the first halves). Both films even feature scenes in which the deuteragonist is taking a bath, with the protagonist fully clothed in the bathroom next to him, having a conversation which is rife with sexual tension ("I'm starting to wonder if another woman is really the answer we need"; "I'm cold, can I get in?").
Unrelated to all of the above, but I thought the 1999 film was superior to the source novel, by virtue of having an actual plot and narrative structure, whereas the novel felt like more of a travelogue around Italy with a few murders thrown in for flavour.
Good comparison! If you like this type of story, read Apartment by Teddy Wayne, which I've written about before. It features that exact same dynamic of the male protagonist idolizing another guy whom he perceives (and also resents) as superior.
I loved both but found the ending of the 1999 film disappointing - getting away with the crime was the inversion of normal noir morality which made Highsmith’s novel so great. I actually thought that John Malkevitch played the best Ripley - albeit in inferior adaptions of later novels in the cycle. All the performances in the 1999 film are captivating. How’s the peeping Tommy, how’s the peeping…
Some people say Tom gets away with it in the 1999 movie, but I just don't see how he could. Or even if he did, he definitely wouldn't be able to stick around in Europe. It would've been nice to definitely see Tom not get caught, but then again, Saltburn ends with Oliver triumphing and that didn't make the movie that much better.
Apologies, I meant the opposite. It annoyed that Minghella lacked the courage to let Tom get away with it. It felt very Hayes Code. The baddy cannot win. Whereas Highsmiths novels embrace the moral reality of a world where they can.
The 1999 film mothered both Call me by your name's aesthetic and the music video for gwen stefani's Cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGwZ7MNtBFU. for that alone it should be honored
I'm somewhat surprised to read that the Netflix Tom Ripley is a throwback to the amoral character Highsmith originally envisioned! I guess I figured the character would have his edges sanded off more and more with each subsequent adaptation, and that by the time we got to 2024 he'd be a uwu woobie who is turned bad by Internalized Homophobia or whatever. (Casting Andrew Scott, who I associate with Sherlock and thus Tumblr, doesn't help!)
My only Talented Mr. Ripley "opinion" (if you can call it that) is that when I was a kid, my brother went on some sort of overnight trip on a submarine, and when he came back he started describing this really cool-sounding movie about a guy who helps the U.S. military stop Nazi U-Boats, but I didn't quite catch the title of the film, which is why, up until very recently, I confused The Talented Mr. Ripley with The Amazing Mr. Limpet.
Yes, it's a curious reversal, with the old work being more contemporary in softening the evil protagonist and the new version being more by-the-book. But I have no doubt that a 2024 version of the 1999 take would be intolerable haha.
Maybe Mr. Limpet and Mr. Ripley are friends in their world!
I think Ripley's Game is my favorite Ripley in general… For me, the 1999 movie is luxurious experience and a great watch but like you say turns Tom into more of a sad boy that needs love. It just seems like a qualitatively different story, not a bad one, but not the same one.
Purple Noon I thought was great because it turned being exceptionally beautiful into a way to represent sociopathy on screen… even if the ending's a bummer.
The American Friend is a good movie but basically just riffing off the Ripley concept imho, not really an adaptation at all. It mostly "adapts" the same book as Ripley's Game, though, so they're fun to compare. (I have not actually read that book.)
I'm probably never going to watch the Netflix adaptation though because I 1) don't actually like Andrew Scott's acting very much and 2) really hate digital black and white most of the time.
I found Purple Noon's ending oddly comedic, like the next scene after the final shot would one of Tom being confronted by reality, accompanied by a womp-womp. I do like the movie a lot, though.
Never thought about digital vs. film B&W. What do you dislike about digital B&W?
honestly I'm not tooootally sure what I don't like about it, I think unlike film B&W it feels like it lacks a certain visual depth? a richness? like the darks aren't dark enough and the whites aren't white enough, but I don't know enough about film technology to know if that's actually the issue.
in general I prefer film over digital because it feels "warmer" to me, unless a movie is using the more "cold" feeling of digital in an interesting way (like Zodiac). but again I don't really know enough to know why I react this way… just that I do.
"But watching Dickie talk to Tom was like watching someone trying to talk to a future school shooter." What a great way of putting it. I wanted to love the new Ripley when I discovered Johnny Flynn was in it, as I find him very underrated but the material is way too constraining in this and as you point out, Scott chafes at this character. They seem at odds from the beginnning. Which is extra odd considering the discourse about them having (repressed?) desires for one another, which I can't detect at all. It's inexplicable how Tom managed to finagle his way into their circle in this one.
Beast (2018) with Jessie Buckley and Emma (2020) are great. I'm just rewatching Lovesick (fka Scrotal Recall) which he's the lead in, classic British comedy series that I believe is on Netflix.
Really interesting review although we have completely different takes on the various adaptations. In your comment about the 1999 movie having a trauma plot you basically summed up my feelings on why I dislike the movie. I want Tom to be a psychopath, not a human we feel empathy towards! This comes down to my view of the story being a quintessential American tale and Ripley being a sort of ur-American, purposefully sloughing off history to create himself as a new person. I wrote a review of the film, also comparing it to Purple Noon, which might be interesting in conversation with your own piece: https://derekneal.substack.com/p/the-talented-mr-ripley-1999
Also, I recommend The American Friend! Dennis Hopper as Tom is pretty crazy.
Will check out your review! Yeah, if handled poorly, the 1999 movie could've become everything we hate about sad backstory re-imaginings. But to its credit, it pulled it off.
Seeing the 1999 movie finally made me appreciate what a great actor Jude Law is. More and more, I notice weird parallels between The Talented Mr. Ripley and another 1999 film you might have heard of, Fight Club. (lol)
Both films depict the relationship between a male protagonist who is socially awkward, lonely and less successful than he would like (Tom/The Narrator), and an idealised, charismatic and hypermasculine deuteragonist who takes the protagonist under his wing, who the protagonist fanatically adores and emulates (Dickie/Tyler Durden). Both films play it deliberately ambiguously whether the protagonist wants to BE the deuteragonist or wants to be WITH the deuteragonist - is Tom romantically attracted to Dickie, or does he envy everything he has (money and fancy clothes, of course, but also charm, good breeding, education, powerful connections, family etc.)? Like you, I lean towards the latter interpretation, but the former is a big part of it (more so in the source novel). Similarly, Fincher deliberately played up the homoerotic undertones of Fight Club in hopes that they would serve as a red herring.
By necessity, the actor playing the protagonist must give a fairly subdued performance (Edward Norton/Matt Damon), while the deuteragonist must be played by an extremely physically attractive actor with an incredibly energetic, magnetic screen presence (Brad Pitt/Jude Law). The first halves of these two films, in which the deuteragonist dominates, are compulsively watchable and absorbing owing to this actor's screen presence. In the second halves of these films, the deuteragonist is largely or entirely absent, as a direct consequence of which the pacing flags significantly (all the best scenes of both films are in the first halves). Both films even feature scenes in which the deuteragonist is taking a bath, with the protagonist fully clothed in the bathroom next to him, having a conversation which is rife with sexual tension ("I'm starting to wonder if another woman is really the answer we need"; "I'm cold, can I get in?").
Unrelated to all of the above, but I thought the 1999 film was superior to the source novel, by virtue of having an actual plot and narrative structure, whereas the novel felt like more of a travelogue around Italy with a few murders thrown in for flavour.
Good comparison! If you like this type of story, read Apartment by Teddy Wayne, which I've written about before. It features that exact same dynamic of the male protagonist idolizing another guy whom he perceives (and also resents) as superior.
I loved both but found the ending of the 1999 film disappointing - getting away with the crime was the inversion of normal noir morality which made Highsmith’s novel so great. I actually thought that John Malkevitch played the best Ripley - albeit in inferior adaptions of later novels in the cycle. All the performances in the 1999 film are captivating. How’s the peeping Tommy, how’s the peeping…
Some people say Tom gets away with it in the 1999 movie, but I just don't see how he could. Or even if he did, he definitely wouldn't be able to stick around in Europe. It would've been nice to definitely see Tom not get caught, but then again, Saltburn ends with Oliver triumphing and that didn't make the movie that much better.
Apologies, I meant the opposite. It annoyed that Minghella lacked the courage to let Tom get away with it. It felt very Hayes Code. The baddy cannot win. Whereas Highsmiths novels embrace the moral reality of a world where they can.
The 1999 film mothered both Call me by your name's aesthetic and the music video for gwen stefani's Cool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGwZ7MNtBFU. for that alone it should be honored
Cool is the best pop song of the 2000s
I'm somewhat surprised to read that the Netflix Tom Ripley is a throwback to the amoral character Highsmith originally envisioned! I guess I figured the character would have his edges sanded off more and more with each subsequent adaptation, and that by the time we got to 2024 he'd be a uwu woobie who is turned bad by Internalized Homophobia or whatever. (Casting Andrew Scott, who I associate with Sherlock and thus Tumblr, doesn't help!)
My only Talented Mr. Ripley "opinion" (if you can call it that) is that when I was a kid, my brother went on some sort of overnight trip on a submarine, and when he came back he started describing this really cool-sounding movie about a guy who helps the U.S. military stop Nazi U-Boats, but I didn't quite catch the title of the film, which is why, up until very recently, I confused The Talented Mr. Ripley with The Amazing Mr. Limpet.
Yes, it's a curious reversal, with the old work being more contemporary in softening the evil protagonist and the new version being more by-the-book. But I have no doubt that a 2024 version of the 1999 take would be intolerable haha.
Maybe Mr. Limpet and Mr. Ripley are friends in their world!
I think Ripley's Game is my favorite Ripley in general… For me, the 1999 movie is luxurious experience and a great watch but like you say turns Tom into more of a sad boy that needs love. It just seems like a qualitatively different story, not a bad one, but not the same one.
Purple Noon I thought was great because it turned being exceptionally beautiful into a way to represent sociopathy on screen… even if the ending's a bummer.
The American Friend is a good movie but basically just riffing off the Ripley concept imho, not really an adaptation at all. It mostly "adapts" the same book as Ripley's Game, though, so they're fun to compare. (I have not actually read that book.)
I'm probably never going to watch the Netflix adaptation though because I 1) don't actually like Andrew Scott's acting very much and 2) really hate digital black and white most of the time.
I found Purple Noon's ending oddly comedic, like the next scene after the final shot would one of Tom being confronted by reality, accompanied by a womp-womp. I do like the movie a lot, though.
Never thought about digital vs. film B&W. What do you dislike about digital B&W?
honestly I'm not tooootally sure what I don't like about it, I think unlike film B&W it feels like it lacks a certain visual depth? a richness? like the darks aren't dark enough and the whites aren't white enough, but I don't know enough about film technology to know if that's actually the issue.
in general I prefer film over digital because it feels "warmer" to me, unless a movie is using the more "cold" feeling of digital in an interesting way (like Zodiac). but again I don't really know enough to know why I react this way… just that I do.
"But watching Dickie talk to Tom was like watching someone trying to talk to a future school shooter." What a great way of putting it. I wanted to love the new Ripley when I discovered Johnny Flynn was in it, as I find him very underrated but the material is way too constraining in this and as you point out, Scott chafes at this character. They seem at odds from the beginnning. Which is extra odd considering the discourse about them having (repressed?) desires for one another, which I can't detect at all. It's inexplicable how Tom managed to finagle his way into their circle in this one.
From just watching Ripley, I'd think Flynn had neither talent nor presence haha. What stuff do you recommend with him in it?
Beast (2018) with Jessie Buckley and Emma (2020) are great. I'm just rewatching Lovesick (fka Scrotal Recall) which he's the lead in, classic British comedy series that I believe is on Netflix.
Really interesting review although we have completely different takes on the various adaptations. In your comment about the 1999 movie having a trauma plot you basically summed up my feelings on why I dislike the movie. I want Tom to be a psychopath, not a human we feel empathy towards! This comes down to my view of the story being a quintessential American tale and Ripley being a sort of ur-American, purposefully sloughing off history to create himself as a new person. I wrote a review of the film, also comparing it to Purple Noon, which might be interesting in conversation with your own piece: https://derekneal.substack.com/p/the-talented-mr-ripley-1999
Also, I recommend The American Friend! Dennis Hopper as Tom is pretty crazy.
Will check out your review! Yeah, if handled poorly, the 1999 movie could've become everything we hate about sad backstory re-imaginings. But to its credit, it pulled it off.
In fact his ending was the ultimate cowards fudge, caught bit not too caught.
Something something all desire is a desire for being, etc.