No end to Tom Ripley - so a revisit to John Baxter's thoughts on John Malkovich's impersonation - RIPLEY'S GAME (Liliana Cavani, 2002)

Three Ripleys - Andrew Scott, Matt Damon, John Malkovich

As fast as we thought the only remaining possible iteration of Tom Ripley and his talents might be a musical, perhaps in the late Sondheim fashion where sets are mostly bare and we just have the words and music, (though dont hold our collective breath. As far as I know we are still waiting on a production of the great man's Passion, his brilliant version of Ettore Scola's wonderful movie Passione d'Amore..but I digress....)

But no there's yet another iteration, this time by the Birmingham Rep (I'm not joking)...you can find The Guardian's review here.

It prompted John Baxter to suggest prolonging this attention by republishing his note on RIPLEY'S GAME (Liliana Cavani [and John Malkovich uncredited], 2002)

If one experiences a twinge of alarm at the occasional sight of John Malkovich solemnly pedalling his old-fashioned upright bicycle down Boulevard St. Germain, it’s attributable to his performance in this little-known contribution to the growing mythos surrounding Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley.

 

The story develops so naturally that only in retrospect does its implicit nihilism become apparent. Ripley is enjoying the luxury of a Palladian villa in rural Italy and a sleek wife (Chiara Caselli) who is also a harpsichord virtuoso, when a local expat, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott), casually insults him at a party.

 

Ripley discovers that Trevanny is dying from leukemia and needs money to provide for his wife and child, so when Reeves, his former partner in crime (a marvellously vulgar Ray Winstone) needs someone killed, Ripley, mostly, it seems, to amuse himself, proposes Trevanny for the job and nudges him into taking it.

 

Thereafter, the story speeds down corridors of carnage, with numerous low-lifes shot, garrotted, caught in mantraps and beaten to death with blunt objects. With each death, Trevanny becomes more comfortable with killing, and begins to look up to Ripley as his sensei : an instructor not only in murder but in the philosophy that underpins it.

 

To Ripley, who has no moral compass, the whole episode is another round in the game that is his life. When there’s nobody to kill, he gets on with his chores, pausing, for instance, in the middle of incinerating the morning’s harvest of corpses to call a florist and order peonies for his wife’s concert. This element is better captured in the film’s French title Ripley s’amuse : Ripley Amuses Himself or, more precisely, Ripley Has Some Fun.

 

However much there is to admire in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr.Ripley and René Clément’s Plein Soleil, aka Purple Noon, neither captures the sociopathic chill of Highsmith’s original. [I’m less familiar with Wim Wenders’ The American Friend and Roger Spottiswoode’s Ripley Underground.] 

 

Matt Damon is too much the upwardly mobile yuppie, impatient for his unearned rewards, and Alain Delon the mindless satyr, greedy for life. The way Delon dives below on the yacht where he had just murdered Maurice Ronet and returns to bite into a ripe peach as he takes the wheel says everything we need to know about his moral landscape.

As for Damon, he brings to mind Lucy in Peanuts and her petulant “All I want is what’s coming to me.” Neither offers any insight into the reasons behind their murders and lies. The acts justify themselves

 

Malkovich’s Ripley has arrived at a measured assessment of his nature, and that of the world in which he lives. When the innocent Trevanny asks how he can kill with such sang froid, Ripley replies “I lack your conscience - and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is watching.”

 

Being so little involved allows him to toss off non sequiturs with faultless deadpan. Warning Trevanny of possible repercussions to his assassinations, he concedes thoughtfully that those seeking retribution will target him rather than Trevanny because “these Balkan types tend to take strangling quite personally,” and after garrotting two men in the toilet of the Berlin-Dusseldorf express and almost killing a third, he muses “It never used to be this crowded in first class.”

 

'....Ripley owes almost everything to Malkovich...."

Ripley’s want of guilt or scruple is implicit in his sideways glances in the midst of an act of violence, his way of pausing in the midst of a skirmish to run an appreciative finger down the curve of a thigh in a mural, and in the casual manner in which he imposes his will with a few evenly modulated words, tonelessly repeated.

 

When Trevanny sneers at a party that Ripley has “too much money and no taste” Ripley, expressionless, simply enquires “Meaning?” Trevanny offers a kind of explanation. Ripley repeats “Meaning?” and continues to do so until Trevanny flees the scene. Later, when Ripley’s wife, as they start to make love, asks how he intends to act in a certain situation, he says “Turn over and I’ll tell you,” and repeats the order until she surrenders with a contented sigh to the sure, if cruel, touch of a skilled handler.

 

Assigning credit for this chill and glittering exercise in amorality is not easy. Director Liliana Cavani co-wrote the screenplay with Charles McKeown, author of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but clearly the complex portrait of Ripley owes almost everything to Malkovich. He also took over when Cavani left to direct an opera at La Scala, and is responsible for about a third of the completed film, which was never given a cinema release in North America and barely seen elsewhere.

 

Fortunately a 2004 DVD does justice to the wintry Italian landscapes and the silky, truffled luxury of Ripley’s existence. If life is indeed no more than a game, this is one of the most agreeable ways in which it can be played.

At the Sydney Theatre Company - THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY by Patricia Highsmith Adapted for the stage by Joanna Murray-Smith Directed by Sarah Goodes.

 “After two films, a TV series, now on stage. What next? The musical?”

Thus said a friend when I sent him a photo of the poster above for the Sydney Theatre Company production billed as The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Adapted for the stage by Joanna Murray-Smith Directed by Sarah Goodes. It has just started a season at the Roslyn Packer Theatre and is heading for Melbourne when that’s done.

With all those predecessors I wonder how many people in the house last night knew the story in some detail. My friend suggests possibly very few and cites the example of the Lloyd Webber musical version of Sunset Boulevard  though that theatre piece hadn’t been turned into a Netflix series only a year before. But the overlap between Netflix subscribers and STC attendees may indeed be that modest. However, given the general popularity at least of that recent Andrew Scott impersonation it seems likely that there would be more than a smattering seeking to relive once again the pleasure of watching Ripley get away with it. I was certainly one of those. (Only in René Clément’s original iteration with Alain Delon as Ripley is there a suggestion that the law is going to catch up with him.)

Patricia Highsmith

For those who know Ripley I wonder whether they there checking up to see if Joanna Murray-Smith was going to take liberties with the Highsmith original. Most crucially how was the playwright going to wrestle with the book’s alleged sublimated gay subtext. I always wondered about the emphasis on that element in the Anthony Minghella/Matt Damon iteration. It seemed to take Ripley on a path that in his later  appearances in four further novels never seemed to be pursued by the author.

The first Ripley, Alain Delon in Plein Soleil

And there was some curiosity about how  the STC playmakers were they going to manage a story whose setting moved from New York, the Amalfi Coast, Rome and Venice, taking in a murder on a boat, among others. The signifiers that moved the story on were smart indeed, managed entirely by a quick verbal indication and the rest done by the placement of objects on an otherwise bare stage. The bones of the production were on display via the appearance of the set changers and others such as those operating fans when the scene called for ‘windy’. It honed to Highsmith’s story very closely.

It’s played out by a group of six actors, only one of whom I had ever heard of,  Andrew  McFarlane, a stalwart of Crawfords best known for his role in The Sullivans. McFarlane played Dickie Greenleaf's father. The others were Will McDonald (Tom Ripley), Raj Labade (Dickie Greenleaf), Claude Scott-Mitchell (Marge Sherwood), Faisal Hamza (Freddie Miles) and Johnny Nasser as Inspector Roverini. Complete unknowns. Or maybe I should get out more often. All excellent anyway, especially Scott-Mitchell playing Marge, a character Highsmith herself reviled.

The play did it again… 

I’ve been a Highsmith fan for quite some time. Twenty five years ago I contributed a piece to Senses of Cinema which recalled encountering Highsmith on film, in her books and, briefly, in person. I mentioned the first time I saw her name on the credits of Clement's Plein Soleil: “The source material only registered on a second viewing, a novel titled The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. I started reading Highsmith at a rapid rate. At that time she had published seven or eight novels which she once described, very simply somewhere, as books in which she "studied the effects of guilt on her characters.” 

I don’t know when Joanna Murray-Smith made the same discovery of the author but over the years she has relished the relationship. Way back in 2014, the very first post on this blog was a report on her play Switzerland.  I rehashed the Senses piece there as well. That play was about Highsmith herself, the prickly personality but Ripley lurked around its edges.

A quick word search of the blog produces more than a few Highsmith references. There  was a review of the Plein Soleil DVD. (I expressed there much admiration for Geoffrey O'Brien's accompanying booklet.) There was a note about Todd Haynes version of Carol,  a book Highsmith originally published under the pseudonym Clare Morgan as “The Price of Salt”. There was a second stab at Carol a year later. John Baxter contributed an enthusiastic piece praising John Malkovich’s Ripley in Liliana Cavani’s adaptation of Ripley’s Game. Finally there was a note about a good documentary about Highsmith by Eva Vitija which screened at the Sydney Film Festival.

And here is a literary opportunity. Sydney’s Best Kept Secret Bookshop, Badger Books of Woollahra, has a set of first editions of the five Ripley novels, one of them inscribed by the author, plus some additional Highsmith memorabilia for sale. CLICK HERE if you are at all curious. Perhaps do so sitting down. There are a bunch of other Highsmith First Editions also on offer.

In the meantime the play’s the thing.