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.