THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY
Three years have elapsed between Anthony Minghella's multiple-award-winning film, The English Patient, and his current one, The Talented Mr. Ripley. The films have similarities—both are based on successful novels, both have complex, multi-layered characters, both exploit settings as a reflection of character, both have plots that circle back on themselves—but the newer film moves from the epic feel of The English Patient to a tense psychological study more like the later Hitchcock.
  Minghella draws his inspiration from the same source as Hitchcock—Patricia Highsmith's novels. While Strangers on a Train is based on Highsmith's first novel, Minghella's film uses the plot and title of her second. The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed previously by Rene Clement as Purple Noon (1961) starring Alain Delon, but Clement changed the story in one direction, especially the ending, and Minghella changed it in another to the point that seeing one film does not spoil the experience of the other (Purple Noon is available locally on videotape and is worth watching in its own right). The cold-blooded Tom Ripley is the central character in five of Highsmith's novels, and Wim Wenders' The American Friend draws upon two of them for its plot. In adapting Highsmith, Minghella makes Ripley more sympathetic than in the novel and reduces the pre-meditation with which the novel's hero carries out his crimes; in the film Ripley at first almost blunders into his dangerous situations and then must think and act quickly, while drawing upon his talents to escape the consequences.
  The film falls into two parts. In the first, the impoverished Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is sent by Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn) to Italy to bring back his wayward son Dickie (Jude Law). When Ripley arrives in Italy, he is fascinated by the life Dickie leads, ingratiates himself with Dickie and his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow), and decides to stay as long as he can. Tom's relationship with Dickie becomes complex as he is both sexually attracted to Dickie (they bathe together) and wants to be him (he dresses in Dickie's clothes and repeats what he has heard him say to Marge). Eventually, Dickie tires of Tom, and insults lead to violence.
  The second part of the film traces Ripley's impersonation of Dickie and the increasingly complex actions he must take to evade the police and escape exposure as he encounters people who knew both him and the other young man.
  Minghella has carefully compacted the Highsmith novel so that little time is wasted in exposition—the opening scene in which Ripley meets Dickie's parents is a good example. Some critics felt too much time was wasted on showing the beauty of Italy; on the other hand, something could be said about the contrast between the gorgeous scenes and the dark deeds being done there. The opening titles, as Hitchcock's usually did, tie in with the theme of the film, and a village ritual in Italy, in which a replica of the Virgin is carried up from the sea to land, is interrupted by the floating body of a young woman in a manner reminiscent of the opening of Frenzy. In another Hitchcock moment, Ripley has a razor concealed in his bathrobe pocket but cuts his finger, and the spreading circle of red, as he talks to Marge, would probably have pleased Hitchcock.
  The success of a film that centers around the actions of a murderer is usually dependent on the success of the lead actor, in this case Matt Damon. Some critics felt Damon is entirely too boyish to be menacing and that he fails to convey the unfeeling quality of the literary Ripley; on the other hand, the person portrayed by Damon is exactly the sort of person the police would not suspect. Individual viewers will have to decide whether Damon is extraordinary or just adequate for this very complex role. Jude Law as Dickie is shallow, totally self-confident, and believable as the object of Ripley's desires. Gwyneth Paltrow is good in a part that demands little, and Cate Blanchett conveys the snobbery of a rich American woman who likes only people who have lots of money, but who pretend they hate being wealthy. Nearly stealing the movie is Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dickie's friend, Freddie Miles; vulgar, born to the manner, and immediately suspicious of Ripley, Hoffman makes himself hateful on first appearance and dominates nearly every scene he's in. In a new and minor part as Jack Davenport, Ripley's new friend, Peter Smith-Kingsley is so convincing that he nearly undermines the film's ending by undermining the audience's identification with Ripley.
  The Talented Mr. Ripley, while not vintage Hitchcock, has enough suspense to keep the viewer on the edge of the seat throughout most of its considerable length and enough complexity to keep the viewer thinking about it after the last fade-out. Top

 

MAN ON THE MOON
Seeing "Saturday Night Live" seldom and "Taxi" even less, I was not familiar with Andy Kaufman, the strange comic genius who is the subject of Milos Forman's Man on the Moon. Forman's most successful biographical film, Amadeus, had a successful play to provide it structure. His other excursion into biographical material, The People vs. Larry Flynt, tried, less successfully, to impose artistic structure on a contemporary life, and Man on the Moon, with the same writers who created the Flynt screenplay, exhibits some of the same problems.
  Andy Kaufman, from all of the evidence, was a very strange person—perhaps an adult who preserved his childlike innocence, perhaps a person who veered into madness regularly, perhaps a schizophrenic whose alter ego, Tony Clifton, expressed his real feelings about the world. Whatever he was before his death from a rare lung cancer at thirty-five, he turned comedy on its head and permanently altered the performance arts.
  Jim Carey is amazing as Andy Kaufman; he totally disappears inside his impersonation of Kaufman and successfully plays not only the comedian but all of the characters he created. In addition, he reproduces Kaufman's comic routines in ways that even Kaufman's most devoted fans admire. Carey should have been nominated for an Academy Award. Danny DeVito is fine as his agent, George Shapiro; Paul Giamatti is completely believable as Kaufman collaborator Bob Zmuda (who played Tony Clifton when Clifton had to share the stage with Kaufman); and Courtney Love nicely handles the part of his understanding girlfriend. A number of people from "Taxi" play themselves, as does wrestler Jerry Lawler.
  The film reproduces most of the important events in Kaufman's career—the well-known comic routines, the series of wrestling matches with women, the Carnegie Hall show after which he took the audience out for milk and cookies, and his constant pushing of the envelope. What it doesn't—and perhaps couldn't—reveal is what Kaufman himself was really like. At one point his girlfriend tells him, "There is no real you," and she may be right, but that doesn't keep us from wondering if there is more that could be said. That the film was produced by his friends and approved by his family may imply a sanitizing has occurred. For example, the relationship of Kaufman to his alter ego, Tony Clifton, the vulgar, obnoxious, insulting lounge lizard singer, is merely shown; no attempt is made to explore the reasons for Tony's existence. Kaufman's love-hate relationship with the audience is also simply a given, not something that is explored. At one point, Kaufman travels to the Philippines for cancer treatment and realizes the treatment is exactly the kind of show business deception he himself has practiced, and a sly smile settles over his face. At that point we seem to glimpse for an instant the real person behind the mask. A more definitive examination of Kaufman's life is still waiting to be made.
  But Man on the Moon is a significant film for a variety of reasons. It's worth seeing for Jim Carey's performance, for the brilliant opening sequence, for Carey's reproduction of the famous routines, and for a view of one of the strangest performers ever to appear before an audience and recreate himself again and again. Top

 

 

WILDE
Oscar Wilde died in November of 1900, so in this centennial year of his death, the man's plays are being restaged and his work is being reexamined, as well as his place in English literature. In anticipation of seeing The Importance of Being Ernest with a new act never before presented in America and of seeing Wilde's grandson discuss his famous ancestor, I read Richard Ellmann's biography, and that led me to the 1998 film based on the biography. Wilde created a public persona, one which served him well for some time but then helped bring about his destruction.
  Brian Gilbert's film of Wilde's life spans the time from 1882, when he toured America, to 1897, when he was released from prison. The film emphasizes Wilde's homosexual relationships at the expense of exploring his home life and his creativity. The picture that emerges is one of a gentle man who genuinely loved his wife and children, but, for all the sophistication of his wit, he was hopelessly naive about Victorian society, and it crushed him.
  Stephen Fry is superb as Wilde; he resembles him in size and features, and his voice certainly fits what we know of Wilde. He conveys Wilde's complexity while keeping the audience's sympathy throughout his misadventures. Co-starring is Jude Law as Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful, passionate, childish and emotionally unstable youth who became the center of Wilde's devotion and eventually led him to destruction. Law manages to make believable Bosie's notorious bitchiness and mood swings and also to show how his relationship with Wilde gave them each something they needed. Vanessa Redgrave performs nicely in her few scenes as Wilde's flamboyant mother, and Jennifer Ehle is believable as Wilde's wife, Constance. Most impressive is Tom Wilkinson (The Full Monty) as Bosie's father, the Marquis of Queensbury; history records Queensbury as being one of the crudest, most self-righteous members of the nobility of his time, and Wilkinson manages to give a three-dimensional quality to the man without in any way redeeming him.
  Although the film is slow at times, and the proportion of nude young men higher than necessary, Wilde is a moving film, especially in the last third when it deals with the trial and Wilde's imprisonment. For those who know Wilde's life, the film nicely illustrates it; for those who don't, it's a painless way of finding out more about one of the most important playwrights of his century and, after Shakespeare, probably the most quoted person in the English language. Top

 

AN IDEAL HUSBAND
Probably less well-known than The Importance of Being Ernest or Lady Windermere's Fan, Wilde's play, An Ideal Husband further illustrates this month's theme of attempting to be someone else. Eighteen years ago Sir Robert Chiltern (Jeremy Northam) supplied inside information to a friend who invested in the Suez Canal and made a fortune; the friend left Sir Robert a substantial part of that fortune, and it became the basis of his social and political success. Now Mrs. Cheveley (Julianne Moore of The End of the Affair), a close acquaintance of the deceased friend, has traveled to London to request Sir Robert's support for a shaky project in Argentina; further, she has the letter in which Robert provided information to his friend and threatens to publish it if he refuses to help her. While Robert is concerned about his career and social position, he is even more distressed that his wife Gertrude (Cate Blanchett—Elizabeth and The Talented Mr. Ripley) will see him as less than the "ideal husband" she now believes him to be.
  He confides in Lord Arthur Goring (Rupert Everett of My Best Friend's Wedding), a playboy and spokesman for Wilde's point of view, who advises him to confess all and make up with his wife, but he refuses. The rest of the play, through a series of stagey contrivances, misunderstood identities, wagers, and other plot manipulations, answers the question of whether Robert will choose to betray his values to preserve his marriage or whether he will preserve his integrity at the cost of his wife. Of course, as in all such ballroom comedies, the final act indicates who among the eligible people will be paired off with whom—usually no real surprise.
  Most of the pleasure of the play is in the language, such as Goring's opening remark to his butler, as a young lady slips discreetly out of his bed, that his schedule today is too busy—not enough time for sloth and idleness. Everett, following Wilde's advice, delivers each of the famous quotations as if they were normal speech, but his delivery is slower than I expect in the trading of witty remarks; it's almost languid at times and slows the pace. Otherwise, Everett is excellent—poised, debonair and handsome, revealing the profile that one critic dubbed the eighth natural wonder of the world.
  Julianne Moore is superb as the worldly Mrs. Cheveley, combining a tough exterior with an admiration for her opponent's skills; she looks and sounds the part, shaping her American accent into a British one that blends seamlessly with the other British actors. Minnie Driver plays Mabel, Sir Robert's younger sister, in a part that isn't much to begin with and that receives scant development, and Cate Blanchett has little more to do than be the adoring but now disillusioned wife.
  Director Oliver Parker has streamlined the play, but it seems longer than it should be because everyone displays such serious emotions—a bit too much contemporary fleshing out of parts, perhaps from too many courses in method-acting. Wilde did not give his characters much depth; they are merely mouthpieces for his witty conversations, and often he seems to be laughing at the emotional mixes they have gotten themselves into. For example, would Wilde have taken seriously the strain in the Chiltern marriage because Gertrude has an overly idealistic view of her husband? It's merely a plot device, and I would have preferred a production in which the director would have let the characters be the silly twits that they are and left us to enjoy the language and the satire. Nonetheless, the play is well-constructed and there is much to enjoy in this production—the sets, Everett's and Moore's acting, and above all, Wilde's language. Top