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Film Description
The re-appearance of Tom Ripley in territory familiar to those who have seen Wenders' The American Friend. Here Malkovich is the coolly effective anti-hero. Score by Ennio Morricone.
As adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game turns out to be a real blast, and that’s at least halfway due to John Malkovich in the tit... more >
As adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel, Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game turns out to be a real blast, and that’s at least halfway due to John Malkovich in the title role. For fans, this is primo John, full-grade Malko, Malkovich central: thanks to the dictionary definition of perfect casting, you realise the actor’s unrivalled gift for expressing elegant disdain hasn’t been this unfettered, this much in evidence since Dangerous Liaisons (or, for that small minority of us with a particular fondness for his Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, Con Air).
After the interpretation of buff Alain Delon and sunkissed, preppy Matt Damon in previous screen Highsmith adaptations, it’s a real breath of fresh air to see Malkovich attempting to play Ripley as someone akin to Victor Meldrew; sociopaths just seem that little bit more believable when perpetually peed off about everyone, and the actor seems to be turning his nose up at everything here, at the very corners of the screen. You can see exactly why this Ripley sneers so much and so often at the outside world the minute Cavani’s camera sets eyes on the character’s Italian country retreat. With its meticulous canvasses, restored harpsichords, perfectly manicured gardens and a virtuoso girlfriend (Chiara Caselli) seated at the piano, it’s a shrine to good, carefully cultivated taste.
There’s simply no way this Ripley is going to allow his hands to get dirtied by the “squalid turf war” brought to his doorstep by the slobbish Reeves (Ray Winstone, on marvellously greasy form here: clad in a too-tight leather coat, wolfing down fried eggs smothered in HP sauce); this Ripley takes good care of those hands, and the sight of Malkovich in oven gloves, tending to his souffle, is almost worth the ticket price alone.
Eventually, Ripley decides to farm out the gun-for-hire work to a weak-willed English picture restorer (Dougray Scott), who’s looking to provide for his wife (Lena Headey) and child before he falls victim to the leukaemia in his system.
Unlike the high (camp) seriousness of Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cavani’s film is played – right from the start, and up to a certain point – for ironic, smirking fun; sometimes it plays like Strangers On A Train with even more laughs. The Talented Mr. Ripley, with its youthful protagonists and glamorous cast, was about nothing if not how beautiful murder can be, a lesson in the aesthetics of killing. The Malkovich/Cavani version, based on a later Highsmith novel, doesn’t go for beauty – the Berlin scenes are overcast and drizzly, the Italian countryside nondescript – but theirs is nonetheless a very seductive film about what it means to get away with murder: the plot’s most telling feature is that we find Ripley heading into the male menopause while living la dolce vita and not rotting in prison. The conniving conviction of his logic is best expressed in a speech where he berates the picture-framer for his inherent weakness of character: “The only reason you’d get caught at school is that you never thought about killing your teachers.” For a moment, that seems like the most logical idea, even act, in the world, and it’s during that moment we realise how susceptible we are to Ripley’s line of thinking.
If the abiding sense is of a film about getting away with murder which is itself getting with more than it should, well, yes, Ripley’s Game has its faults, but more often than not compensates with an abundance of mordant wit, the performances of its two leading men (and the memorable clash between them), and the way it manages to preserve on celluloid some idea of what was there on the page in the first place.
Ripley knows what it is to be alone, truly alone, in the world, and the picture-framer comes to understand that this new-found friend has used him purely for the purposes of making another man know the true meaning of solitude. Both book and film turn on an act of self-sacrifice, one death the formerly rampant Ripley knows he won’t be able to forget in a hurry: for the final shot, the camera tilts slinkily, suggestively past the Italian girlfriend to the tombs behind her and then up to high heaven itself. This is a film about knowing of death, rather than looking at it, and that’s what makes it a smarter proposition than the Minghella Ripley, lifting it into the realms of a mainstream thriller a connoisseur like Ripley – or indeed Malkovich, one suspects – might rightfully savour.
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