[Marxism] Anthony Minghella

[Louis Proyect]

The British film director died yesterday at the age of 54. His "The 
Talented Mr. Ripley" was arguably the finest adaptation of a Patricia 
Highsmith novel, about whose works I wrote about here:

http://www.swans.com/library/art14/lproy43.html

The talented Mr Minghella

In an age of reinvention, where America's political princelings remake 
themselves as men of the people, The Talented Mr Ripley may be the film 
of the moment

Frank Rich
Sunday January 23, 2000
The Observer

At the end of a century defined by the American success story, the two 
men considered most likely to succeed to the American presidency are 
both running away from their pasts. Al Gore, brought up in a ritzy hotel 
by a Washington political family, has reinvented himself as a down-home 
Tennessean; George Bush, a political prince educated at Andover, Yale 
and Harvard, is now a man of the people in cowboy boots. The man whose 
job they covet, of course, is the former Bill Blythe, son of a 
travelling salesman and product of the disreputable gambling town of Hot 
Springs, Arkansas, who, via Georgetown, Oxford and Yale, long ago remade 
himself (for a while, anyway) into the Man From Hope.

These days, white American kids can reinvent themselves as black in a 
youth culture dominated by hip-hop. Ralph Lauren instructs us all on how 
to be old-school white. In a country where obsession with body image is 
now a transgenerational religion, the metamorphoses promised by plastic 
surgery outnumber Baskin-Robbins flavours. Those who wish to remake 
themselves in gender, age or biography, whether for fun, profit or 
criminality, need merely trot out a new screen name on AOL, which in its 
5.0 upgrade increases the number of possible fictive identities per 
subscriber from five to seven.

It's into this fluid world that The Talented Mr Ripley has been 
released. Written and directed by Anthony Minghella, of the 
Oscar-anointed English Patient, the film stars the gilded Matt Damon and 
Gwyneth Paltrow; it is sumptuously set in the Technicolor 1950s, in lush 
climes stretching from a penthouse terrace on Central Park West to 
Venice, Rome, San Remo and a bucolic, cliff-hanging village on the 
Amalfi Coast. But for all those glittering trappings, this is no Good 
Will Hunting or Shakespeare in Love. Damon and Paltrow are not a couple 
in the film, and they would as soon kill each other as kiss.

The earnest, upwardly mobile Tom Ripley, played by Damon, isn't 
particularly greedy or ambitious, but he does want to rise above his 
drab circumstances to grab the right, socially acceptable lifestyle, 
along with love and money. By the time he takes a wrong turn in pursuit 
of his fantasy, we're already along for the ride.

When we first meet him, he's a pallid, immaculate young man with Clark 
Kent glasses and fastidious manners. But he lives in a mean flat in 
Manhattan, and his actual job is as an attendant in a concert-hall 
lavatory. Thanks to a borrowed navy blazer and a chance encounter, Tom 
Ripley encourages a shipping magnate named Herbert Greenleaf in his 
mistaken belief that Tom had been at Princeton with his son Dickie, 
class of '56. Dickie Greenleaf - a dazzling all-American golden boy and 
a role very likely to confer stardom on British actor Jude Law - is off 
idling in Italy, sybaritically pursuing a dilettante's calling as a jazz 
saxophonist and a romance with Marge Sherwood (Paltrow), an aspiring 
writer from his Park Avenue set. Dickie's disapproving dad offers Tom 
$1,000 to visit his son in Italy and bring him home to take his rightful 
place in the family business.

The movie's first moments - the warped-lullaby musical theme reminiscent 
of Bernard Herrmann's for Vertigo, the jagged credits in the style of 
Saul Bass's for North by Northwest - recall Hitchcock's high-style 
movies of the Fifties, in which that mercurial director sometimes took 
perverse delight in casting James Stewart, American Everyman, in 
neurotic roles far removed from his angelic Frank Capra heroes. In 
Vertigo, Stewart was John (Scottie) Ferguson, a smart, emotionally 
remote detective whose psyche plunges into voyeurism and sexual 
obsession once he is sent by a shipping magnate on a mission that tosses 
him into a bizarre plot of mistaken identity, murder and suicides both 
real and faked. In The Talented Mr Ripley, Damon, only recently seen as 
Steven Spielberg's American Everyman, Private Ryan, portrays another 
smart, emotionally reticent Peeping Tom, and his parallel assignment for 
another shipping magnate tosses him into similar horrors. The 
tight-lipped Tom Ripley, looking a bit like the pre-superstar Andy 
Warhol of the Fifties, falls in love with the bronzed, self-assured 
Dickie Greenleaf as surely as Stewart did with Kim Novak.

But there he and his predecessor part. Where Scottie wants to remake the 
Novak character into his dream girl, Tom wants to remake himself into 
his dream boy. He wants to duplicate Dickie - in looks, in savoir-faire, 
in Gucci accessories - until he can pass as being to the manner, and 
perhaps even to the Greenleaf manor, born. 'I always thought, "Better to 
be a fake somebody than a real nobody,"' Tom says, and no matter what 
the human cost, including the annihilation of his own self, he will not 
be denied. Clark Kent wills himself into Superman, but a Superman as 
ruthless as Macbeth.

Tom Ripley was born in the imagination of the novelist Patricia 
Highsmith (1921-95), who made a life's work of her ostracism from the 
American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention. 'Everyone 
in the book is making themselves up in some shape or form, and that's 
what she was doing herself,' as Minghella puts it. Born Mary Patricia 
Plangman (she later took her stepfather's surname) to separated, 
soon-to-be-divorced parents, Highsmith was reared by a grandmother in 
Fort Worth, then moved at age six with her mother, a fashion illustrator 
for Women's Wear Daily, to Greenwich Village. Later, Highsmith would 
matter-of-factly tell interviewers how she didn't meet her father until 
she was 12 and of how her mother had tried to abort her by drinking 
turpentine five months into the pregnancy. After graduating from 
university, Highsmith made a living writing scenarios for action comic 
books, then started her own itinerant wanderings through America. The 
Talented Mr Ripley, the second of Highsmith's 20-odd books, was written 
in 1955 as she uprooted herself from Massachusetts to Santa Fe, New 
Mexico. Finally, she fled to Europe, where she spent most of her adult life.

In a rare TV interview she granted the South Bank Show in the early 
Eighties, Highsmith is a forbidding, unsmiling figure in a Burberry 
trench coat with a pugnacious, pouchy face framed by thick, parted black 
hair; she looks rather like her favourite bird, the owl. At the end, she 
was living alone in a remote Italian-speaking village with a population 
of 250 perched in Switzerland. Tom Ripley - whom she belatedly brought 
back in four other books; the first, 15 years after his debut - was her 
favourite creation. 'He could be called psychotic,' she said, defending 
him against the charge of amorality levelled by Melvyn Bragg. 'But I 
would not call him insane because his actions are rational. I consider 
him a rather civilised person who kills when he absolutely has to.' If 
there's 'not much to be admired' about him, she added, he was also 'not 
entirely to be censured'.

In the literary arena, Highsmith never got the breaks of the blue-chip 
authors of her time. Her first novel - 1950's Strangers on a Train, 
which lays out some of the Ripley themes of class envy, identity 
switching and male-male infatuation (beta with alpha, in current lingo) 
- was snapped up by Hitchcock and made into a classic film. But the 
director had kept his identity covert while pursuing the rights, thereby 
nabbing the book for the bargain price of $7,500, and the screenplay's 
famous co-writer, Raymond Chandler, got more credit for what was 
on-screen than did the obscure author of the novel that was its source. 
Highsmith did have her literary champions in her native America, 
including Truman Capote and Graham Greene (who celebrated her as 'the 
poet of apprehension' in a 1970 essay), but her books sold better in 
Europe. Only in 1991 did Highsmith reveal that her own identities 
included 'Claire Morgan', author of The Price of Salt, a paperback 
lesbian novel that had sold a million copies nearly 40 years earlier. By 
then her career was taking on a certain bleak circularity: just as 
Strangers on a Train had been rejected by six publishers at the start, 
so her final novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll, was rejected by Knopf in 
America (though published in Europe) the year she died, nearly a 
half-century later. As a postscript Highsmith might well find unamusing, 
Knopf has brought out three of the Ripley novels in a handsome, if 
posthumous, Everyman's edition.

The Talented Mr Ripley was made into a movie once before, the French 
Purple Noon, which René Clément directed in 1960, with Alain Delon as 
Ripley. It tacked on a morally unambiguous ending, reversed Ripley's 
implicit sexuality and de-Americanised its characters. Minghella was 
hired to write the current version by its executive producer, Sydney 
Pollack, when The English Patient was in limbo; Minghella finished his 
first draft just as his movie went into rehearsal in Rome. He hadn't 
originally planned to direct Ripley, but found himself so captivated by 
the material that he asked the studio to wait for him until he was free 
to take it on. Once The English Patient hit it big and other offers 
flooded in, he could have abandoned Highsmith for safer ground, but 
didn't. Even so, 'this film was never intended to be more than a chamber 
film,' says the director. Like him, the star actors all committed to 
this risky project before their biggest career breakthroughs might have 
pulled them in more conventional directions: Damon before the release of 
Good Will Hunting, Paltrow before she had signed on to Shakespeare in 
Love, Cate Blanchett as she was still shooting Elizabeth.

Blanchett, intriguingly, plays a character that didn't exist in 
Highsmith: another expatriate East Side socialite who gets caught in the 
Tom-Dickie web. In a witty inversion of Ripley's efforts to trade up in 
social class, she uses an assumed name to disguise her identity as a 
textile heiress. It is but one of many significant alterations Minghella 
has made to the novel. Dickie's father has been deepened into a more 
controlling Jamesian blue blood; two deaths and other characters have 
been added as well, even as some of the book's plot devices have been 
streamlined.

'You've drunk the drink, and the taste that's left in your mouth is what 
you go with,' says Minghella about adaptation. His Ripley is a riff on 
Highsmith. Literally so: in the novel, Dickie is a would-be painter, not 
a sax player. By making the switch, Minghella, himself a pianist, is 
able to turn Dickie and Tom's thwarted bond into an almost musical duet. 
The closest their relationship comes to some sort of unspoken 
consummation is an early nocturnal scene in a smoky Naples jazz club 
where Dickie's sultry sax partners with Tom's tentative piano on 'My 
Funny Valentine'. It's a cultural moment of exquisite nuance: Damon (in 
his own voice) precisely mimics the tragic Chet Baker's famous 
androgynous rendition of the song, whose lyric carries the longing of 
its tragically unhappy author, Lorenz Hart, a closeted, alcoholic 
homosexual who saw himself as a graceless outsider among the glamorous 
showbiz elite.

Minghella, who is not gay, also had to figure out what to do about the 
book's use of Ripley's guarded sexual identity. In the novel, Marge says 
dismissively of Tom: 'All right, he may not be queer. He's just a 
nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex 
life, if you know what I mean.' Marge speaks for the vacillating 
Highsmith, who once said of Tom that he's a 'little bit homosexual... 
not that he's ever done anything about that'. (In the later Ripley 
books, she none-too-convincingly marries him off.) Minghella agrees that 
the character is a virgin who has been left out of sex as he has been 
left out of life's parties, but he is more candid in displaying Tom's 
unspoken desire for (and tenderness towards) Dickie. In one of the 
movie's saddest, at times hallucinatory motifs, Damon repeatedly steals 
glances at Jude Law in any reflected surface he can find, expressing his 
affection with a terrified furtiveness that is at once sinister and 
heartbreaking.

Minghella removes Highsmith's stereotypes, the lingo of 'perverts' and 
'sissies', only to find that his movie could land in another potential 
minefield by today's PC standards. Could the new Ripley be found guilty 
of equating homosexuality with Tom's criminal pathology?

Minghella says of Tom's attraction to Dickie: 'The studio would have 
been thrilled if it was transmogrified into a love for Marge - he wants 
the life, so he wants the girl! Having not done that, you lay yourself 
open to criticism for dramatising a man with ambivalent sexuality who 
kills people. I'm desperate that no one infer a connection between his 
actions in the film and his sexuality. But it's a sorry state of affairs 
if you can only write about a homosexual character who behaves well - 
that's another kind of tyranny, I think. The minute you try to pull back 
from what's sensual and erotic, you're losing your nerve, and I just 
didn't want to shrink away from the romance of it; it's very tender to 
me. It seems to me so much the fabric of the story - not so much that 
Tom was gay but that he was in love with Dickie and with Dickie's life.'

As balance, and to provide a stunning plot twist not in Highsmith, 
Minghella has expanded a character who appears in only a few lines in 
the novel, Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport), into an important 
player, 'a gay person who is centred and comfortable with himself'. 
Without making a case out of it, the movie also generates sympathy for 
Tom as a closeted homosexual, with a boldness that wouldn't have been 
ventured by Highsmith in the Fifties.

For all his alterations, Minghella has contradicted the book's 
intentions in only one substantive way: his Ripley has the stirrings of 
a conscience. The director is willing to risk criticisms from Highsmith 
purists. 'There's so much nihilism in film right now,' he explains. 'If 
I'm going to tell a story that's so bleak and so much a journey of a 
soul, if in the end Ripley was just going to go about his business, 
what's the journey?' In Minghella's view, to do so 'is a cynical 
statement, and a very easy one'.

Everywhere else, the film enhances the novel rather than challenges it. 
A soft-spoken Englishman reared on the Isle of Wight by working-class 
parents of Italian stock who ran an ice cream business and 
morning-to-midnight café, the 45-year-old Minghella relates intensely to 
Ripley's and Highsmith's outsider status. 'Every English person was a 
Dickie Greenleaf to me,' he says of his childhood, and he drew heavily 
on his adolescent longings in the script, his memories 'of being behind 
the glass of an ice cream van' serving better-off neighbours, of 
delivering his parents' wares through the tradesmen's entrance of the 
Isle of Wight's monied Royal Yacht Squadron.

But he has also deepened the movie's reach as a totemic American fable. 
A serious student of American culture since he arrived as a young man at 
the University of Hull, where he ultimately became a lecturer in drama 
before beginning his writing career in theatre and television, Minghella 
has used the vantage point of the century's end - and the perspective of 
an outsider - to set Highsmith's story within a historical context that 
wouldn't have been possible at mid-century.

Advancing the novel's time frame from the early to the late Fifties, 
Minghella has been able to capitalise on the voluptuous Italy of il boom 
- a belated postwar prosperity as giddy as America's. The wealthy, 
sexually liberated Rome of the movie's key sequences is right out of the 
1959 La Dolce Vita, a backdrop in contrast to the relatively 
strait-laced Americans in the foreground. Even in their Continental 
idyll, where they try to reinvent themselves as slumming bohemian 
artistes and Camus-caffeinated existentialists, Dickie and Marge covet 
kitchen appliances and sports cars; they nominally maintain separate 
residences rather than shacking up, as befits the conventions of their 
social class and the pre-Sixties, pre-Pill culture. When Tom sees two 
Italian men being physically affectionate with each other - an image 
inspired by a Cartier-Bresson photograph of the period - he recoils as 
if mortified, even though it's an intimacy he craves.

To Minghella, an important aspect of his movie, which could be teased 
out of the novel only with the advantage of Nineties hindsight, is 'the 
collusion of men during a period in American social history when it was 
at its zenith' - that is, in the years just before the dawn of Betty 
Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. In this sense, he feels Paltrow won't 
get enough credit for a performance that in the Fifties could have been 
a Grace Kelly glamour turn ('Hitchcock would have cast Gwyneth in 
everything'). Though Marge is the character who sees most clearly 
through Ripley's game, she is manipulated or patronised by every man on 
screen, straight or gay - each of whom is intent on keeping her in her 
place and in the dark. For the film's narcissistic straight men, she's a 
good egg; for the closeted gay characters, she's an unwitting decoy.

Minghella says that in addition to looking again at Vertigo and 
contemporaneous Fellini movies (particularly his favourite, I Vitelloni 
) in preparing Ripley, he helped nail down the young American 
characters' cultural and sexual milieu by reading memoirs by bisexual 
Sixties poet and social critic Paul Goodman and gay author and poet Paul 
Monette who died of Aids in 1995. Yet the larger American themes of The 
Talented Mr Ripley, sounded by Ripley's relentless mission to reinvent 
himself along the lines of his gaudiest dreams, transcend the movie's 
particular time and place. Both as written initially by Highsmith and 
then expanded by Minghella, what might have been a narrow thriller seems 
like a mordant recap of a classic, perhaps the classic, strain in 
American literature and social history.

Minghella talks affectionately about American writers from Wharton and 
James to Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver. But the biggest 
influence on his Ripley screenplay seems to be one he didn't mention: 
Fitzgerald. In Minghella's screenplay, Ripley is an unmistakable 
descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will 
stop at nothing to will his romantic idol, Daisy, into believing he is 
of her class. By making Ripley not just a fraudulent Princetonian but 
also a men's room menial - a detail not in Highsmith's book - Minghella 
heightens the parallel to Gatsby, who invoked an Oxford pedigree to 
cloak his humble past as James Gatz, a janitor. For much of the way, 
especially given the empathy and intelligence with which Damon laces 
(and yet never sentimentalises) a spooky role, it is possible to admire 
Ripley as 'talented' in the way that Fitzgerald saw Gatsby as 'great' - 
as a grand dreamer with the creative vision to make something of 
himself. They might have been the kind of dreamers who have always built 
America, had they not overreached.

The brilliance of Highsmith's conception of Tom Ripley was her ability 
to keep the heroic and demonic American Dreamer in balance in the same 
protagonist - thus keeping us on his side well after his behaviour 
becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby (even 
allowing for the rumours that Gatsby had 'killed a man once').

Ripley's debut was in 1955, the era of the Beats and anti-heroes and 
also of a new mainstream critique of the American 'success' story, 
typified by nonfiction books like 1958's The Affluent Society, by John 
Kenneth Galbraith. A half-century later still, Ripleys seem almost a 
constant on the American landscape - the real-life landscape as well as 
that of the culture. Outlaw Americans have always thrived in prosperous 
times like Fitzgerald's Twenties and Highsmith's Fifties - and in the 
Gold-Rush frontier before that - when success seems to be everywhere and 
in such tantalising reach. Our twin economic peaks of the Eighties and 
Nineties have produced a share of characters who could have walked right 
out of the pages of a Highsmith novel.

In the early Eighties, a young man named David Hampton bamboozled some 
of the chicest households on the Upper East Side into believing he was 
Sidney Poitier's son - in part by persuading them that he had been a 
classmate of their children's at various elite schools. (In John Guare's 
fictionalised stage version of the story, Six Degrees of Separation, the 
impostor learns how to fake his identity by having an affair with a male 
Ivy League undergrad - a tactic that Ripley uses in Highsmith's novel.) 
The Eighties also brought us newly minted masters of the universe - 
Gatsbys who, if not caught, might have become Ripleys: the inside trader 
Ivan Boesky, who used his membership in the Harvard Club to trick 
business colleagues into believing he was from an upper-class 
background, and Jeffrey P Beck, the Drexel mergers-and-acquisitions 
maniac known as Mad Dog. Beck was so convincing that he befriended 
Michael Douglas and served as an adviser and bit player for Oliver 
Stone's Wall Street. Only after the crash was it discovered that Beck's 
legendary tales of derring-do in the Vietnam War and clandestine 
adventures with the CIA were fiction.

The current boom has created not just self-invented New Economy pin-ups 
such as internet entrepreneur Jim Clark but also the likes of Martin 
Frankel, who, with the right lies, his East Coast estate and impressive 
computer consoles, passed himself off as a financial genius while 
supposedly stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from US insurance 
companies. Though he was a gawky, bespectacled high-school dropout and 
so neurotic that he suffered from 'trader's block', he somehow convinced 
his prey, as well as the many women he attracted to his harem, that he 
was a brilliant stock speculator and world-class sybarite. Even when he 
was on the run in Europe, fleeing an international manhunt, he travelled 
first-class, with luggage tonnage to match. Once he was apprehended, one 
female friend, Cynthia Allison, told Time magazine that Frankel only 
wanted to live the American Dream.

The same could be said of Andrew Cunanan, who apparently struck many as 
no less charming than Ripley. He convinced a variety of well-educated 
prey that he was an intelligence officer, a Yale graduate and the son of 
Philippine plantation owners as he traded socially upward, reinventing 
himself at each step, in his long and bloody path toward a rendezvous 
with Gianni Versace.

Once Cunanan killed himself, the Miami Beach police found a well-thumbed 
library of tasteful self-improvement that he had left behind: HW 
Janson's tome, History of Art, a Francis Bacon coffee-table book and 
biographies of Condé Nast, Slim Keith and William Paley. This could have 
been Ripley's upwardly mobile reading list - or items on the 
self-improvement checklist kept by the young James Gatz. (Martin Frankel 
also kept a list, found after his capture, the first item on which was 
'launder money'.)

There's something about Ripley, in both his desire for a better life and 
his eagerness to discard the unhappy past, that is built into the 
American character, most alluringly so, and we live in a time when, more 
than ever, a new life is plausible. The world is agog with technological 
change that not only encourages us to reinvent ourselves to find success 
or happiness or sex, but also increases the tools with which we can do 
so and the social mobility that encourages us to go for it.

In a chatroom, anyone can be a Ripley - or whoever. It's a liberating 
time in the history of a protean nation, and also a conflicting one. 
While Ripley has to laboriously scratch out a passport photo to trade in 
an identity, we can do it in a digital click. But where do we want to go 
today? Who do we want to be? How much of ourselves (and family and 
friends and values) are we willing to trade away, in the name of 
self-improvement and ambition of one kind or another, to get there?

No one, it seems, is immune to these questions. In the library rotunda 
of the $100 million mansion he built near Seattle, Bill Gates has 
inscribed not a triumphal captain-of-industry epigram but a yearning 
quotation from, of all books, The Great Gatsby: 'He had come a long way 
to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could 
hardly fail to grasp it.' At the turn of our century, even the man by 
whom most of the Western world measures success finds romance in a 
mythic charlatan who rubbed out his past, then built a fortune and a 
mansion, all in the mistaken faith that he could find happiness by being 
someone else.