The Talented Dickie Greenleaf

(and Jude Law...good lord, Jude Law)

Ciao amici,

I recently discovered the trailer for Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley to be one of those curious artifacts of memory for me of great aesthetic power yet fundamental narrative slip. Perhaps my recall of the trailer’s specific contents suffered precisely for the Jude-Law dolce-vita vibe, already much to taste, being too compelling; I was convinced Ripley’s world would be so intensely pleasurable that I was hesitant to experience it—delayed gratification being the best kind, yes, but also because in such situations I generally prefer to read the book first. Occasionally I’d linger if I came across a still, but allowed myself to venture no further. And honestly? My strategy worked. It was intensely pleasurable, all the more so for the wait. But in the twenty-three years that it took me to proffer these gifts to myself—first Patricia Highsmith’s novel, then Minghella’s feature—my mind had also come to anticipate a marvelously divergent story from the actual marvelous stories I encountered.

The Talented Mr. Ripley was originally published in 1955 and is extravagantly famous, and yet I still feel compelled to warn of spoilers below. The novel is delectable; the film, a sensory feast of the highest order¹—and both are disproportionately spoil-able for works of art of their caliber. My grossly mistaken impressions only bolstered my enjoyment, and I would not want to rob anyone else of similar delights. I’m even tempted to caution against watching the trailer . . . but for those who are ready to join me on the Italian Riviera today, voilà:

Mistaken Tom; mistaken talent

My most egregious memorial blunder is impossible to reconcile with the preview: somehow, I developed the definitive notion that “Mr. Ripley” was played not by Matt Damon but the incomparably swoon-worthy Jude Law. It is a particularly hilarious glitch given the crux of Highsmith’s plot involves the opposite theft of identity. In both novel and film, Tom Ripley (Damon) cunningly befriends and arguably falls in love with the gorgeous, magnetic, literal “Rich Moneytree” Dickie Greenleaf (Law)—before murdering and, with deft impersonation, becoming him.

My true error, however, was less one of mistaken Tom than mistaken talent. Consider Damon’s line in the trailer rattling off his gifts: “telling lies, forging signatures, impersonating practically anybody,” which hews remarkably close to Highsmith:

“Oh, I can do a number of things—valeting, baby-sitting, accounting—I’ve got an unfortunate talent for figures. No matter how drunk I get, I can always tell when a waiter’s cheating me on a bill. I can forge a signature, fly a helicopter, handle dice, impersonate practically anybody, cook—and do a one-man show in a nightclub in case the regular entertainer’s sick. Shall I go on?”

Tom Ripley’s foremost talent is imitation. The foremost talent I’d imagined for him, however, was affecting the desire to be imitated. Enchanted by the preview’s picturesque architecture, the seascapes awash in Riviera light, all the beautiful clothes (to kill, if not to die for), and—above all—the truly world-historical hotness of Law, I had correctly diagnosed Damon’s mimetic envy in personally sharing it, but this Girardian intuition also led me to mistakenly assume that the titular “talent” belonged our godlike mediator.

a. natasha joukovsky @natashajouk

Nothing has ever been hotter than Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley

The anticipated tale unspooling in my mind was thus something more akin to “The Talented Mr. Greenleaf.”

Mistaken gender; mistaken genre

Here’s what I pictured: The enchanted Italian summer of Law and his girlfriend—Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge—is interrupted when Damon shows up and begins vying for her affections in the conspicuous absence of his own girlfriend: Cate Blanchett’s Meredith (who is not in the novel at all). On the surface it’s all elegant manners and elegant parties, but Damon’s envy simmers with increasing mimetic transparency, and the more like Law he grows, the more Law himself grows jealous and temperamental. Jude Law’s celestial hotness is somehow briefly undercut by callous behavior, and Damon, having mirrored his otherwise charming talents, gains an improbable advantage. An episode of infidelity ensues, or at least the threat of one, with Law and/or Blanchett and/or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Freddie Miles showing up inopportunely at the climax, maybe. Everyone emerges unhappy—but no one emerges dead.

In defense of my flamboyantly heterosexual misinterpretation, it follows logically enough from the preview if you can forgive the bungled names. While the film as a whole is significantly gayer than the novel, in which Tom’s homosexual impulses are largely confined to his too-emphatic denial of them and distaste for Marge’s laundered bras, the preview seems to deliberately mask what is a really compelling adaptive choice. When Damon whispers, “I wish I could live Dickie’s life for him,” though, “I know what I would do,” I still think the trailer’s editing—that cut to Marge with her boudoir eyes—seems to imply that “what he would do” would be her. And then you see them together on a Vespa! Meanwhile, the über-homoerotic chess-in-the-bath and (for more obvious reasons) corpse-caressing scenes—two of the most memorable in the film—are nearly obliterated. Tom doesn’t mourn Dickie like this in the novel; however, the murder does occur at approximately the same juncture, around a third of the way through. Jude Law is only in the first third of the movie, but he positively overwhelms the preview. Only Jude Law was nominated for an Academy Award.

All that said, there was clearly some bias at play. My imagined narrative was basically a 1950s variation on The Portrait of a Mirror. Perhaps this was what thrilled me most about The Talented Mr. Ripley: my utter surprise it was a thriller. While Highsmith and Minghella themselves differ in profound ways, both make every mimetic subtlety and shame I imagined violently explicit, all while retaining the patrician style and cunning sophistication of the novel and film of manners I expected them to be.

The portrait of a murder

Tom brutally murders Dickie in the novel with basically zero compunction and the pre-meditated intention to steal his identity. The complex moral-psychological intrigue that generally belies snobbist narratives is almost entirely replaced by logistical considerations. (“The danger of it, even the inevitable temporariness of it which he vaguely realized, only made him more enthusiastic. He began to think of how.”) This makes sense, as Tom swiftly sates his metaphysical desire through literal, material mimesis. It is this material process of actually becoming Dickie that rather becomes subject to sophisticated analysis, commingling with the delicate logistics required to hover between two identities:

He felt alone, yet not at all lonely. It was very much like the feeling on Christmas Eve in Paris, a feeling that everyone was watching him, as if he had an audience made up of the entire world, a feeling that kept him on his mettle, because to make a mistake would be catastrophic. Yet he felt absolutely confident he would not make a mistake. It gave his existence a peculiar, delicious atmosphere of purity, like that, Tom thought, which a fine actor probably feels when he plays an important role on a stage with the conviction that the role he is playing could not be played better by anyone else. He was himself and yet not himself. He felt blameless and free, despite the fact that he consciously controlled every move he made. But he no longer felt tired after several hours of it, as he had at first. Now, from the moment when he got out of bed and went to brush his teeth, he was Dickie, brushing his teeth with his right elbow jutted out, Dickie rotating the eggshell on his spoon for the last bite. Dickie invariably putting back the first tie he pulled off the rack and selecting a second. He had even produced a painting in Dickie’s manner.

Tom’s transformation is initially more physically arduous in the novel than the movie, requiring hair dye and make-up. In the latter it is signified by little more than removing his glasses, and Damon makes several swift changes in scenes that aren’t in the book (at the opera, on the boat at the end), often to great effect. Art, like life, is all about trade-offs though, and what the film gains in switcheroo drama it loses in the weight of metamorphosis. When Tom becomes Dickie in the novel, he fully embodies him for months—and having to revert to being Tom in the aftermath of Freddie’s murder comes as a devastation:

He went on packing. This was the end of Dickie Greenleaf, he knew. He hated becoming Thomas Ripley again, hated being nobody, hated putting on his old set of habits again, and feeling that people looked down on him and were bored with him unless he put on an act for them like a clown, feeling incompetent and incapable of doing anything with himself except entertaining people for minutes at a time. He hated going back to himself as he would have hated putting on a shabby suit of clothes, a grease-spotted, unpressed suit of clothes that had not been very good even when it was new. His tears fell on Dickie’s blue-and-white-striped shirt that lay uppermost in the suitcase, starched and clean and still as new-looking as when he had first taken it out of Dickie’s drawer in Mongibello. But it had Dickie’s initials on the pocket in little red letters.

Tom mourns Dickie in the novel only in the death of his own portrayal of him. This sorrow is short-lived, however. By the next paragraph, Tom is reasoning:

It was senseless to be despondent, anyway, even as Tom Ripley. Tom Ripley had never really been despondent, though he had often looked it. Hadn’t he learned something from these last months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act these things with every gesture.

This is the heart of where the novel and film diverge. For the Tom of the novel, acting and being are one and the same. Tom is “himself and yet not himself” as Tom and Dickie alike, and his ability to forge a single, stable personality out of their lethal combination is arguably what gives the novel its triumphant ending in Crete: “‘To a hotel please,’ Tom said. ‘Il meglio albergo. Il meglio, il meglio!’” [“The best hotel. The best, the best!”] He is Tom Ripley by name, but with Dickie’s money, supporting Dickie’s tastes: in clothes, in art—even in women. By the beginning of the second book, Ripley Under Ground, Tom has amassed an impressive art collection, paints regularly, and is married to a woman, Heloise, whom he desires and enjoys bedding. Notably, she basically comes off as a super-hot, French version of Marge (at face value, Marge is no Paltrow, though given she’s described from Tom’s perspective, I find her purported unattractiveness suspect). When Dickie Greenleaf’s young cousin Chris comes to visit, Tom’s elegant life in the French countryside makes an enviable impression that echoes Dickie’s on Tom back in Mongibello.

In short: Tom’s talent for imitation is so finely developed that he ultimately succeeds in affecting the desire to be imitated. The talent Highsmith bestows on him from the outset transforms into the talent I imagined, as Tom becomes Dickie in all but name.

Fascinatingly, the film accomplishes a near-perfectly inverse trick, becoming an effective adaptation not for its fidelity to Highsmith but the internal consistency of its various revisions. When Tom impersonates Dickie in the movie, he is not being, only acting. The murder is at least partially a crime of passion, and Tom grieves. He enjoys the fine things Dickie’s money buys him, but these are largely things for Tom: a classical piano, the bust of Hadrian. And he’s fussy about them, not careless like Dickie. The bust scene with Hoffman’s Freddie is particularly illustrative, and augments the novel’s purely logistical second murder to include a more emotive underpinning. Minghella’s Tom is also pretty consistently gay, with the heavily altered character of Peter Smith-Kinsley reciprocating his affections. The ending completes the inverted arc as Meredith (who thinks Tom is Dickie) and her family’s presence on the boat forces Tom to kill Peter against his wishes to maintain his cover. Whereas in the novel Tom still manages to become Dickie as Tom, in the movie Tom can’t escape himself even as Dickie. The film ends on the boat, before he makes it to Greece, with the same shot that concludes the trailer: of a distinctly un-triumphant Damon in...

The mirror

For all their mimetic splendor, there is something I think both variations of The Talented Mr. Ripley gloss over if not miss about my talented Mr. Greenleaf: that affecting the desire to be imitated is all an act, too. Highsmith illustrates that performing self and performing other are both fundamentally performances, but because the novel is limited to Tom’s perspective, this is largely achieved through Tom’s performance of Tom as opposed to Dickie performance of Dickie. You may have caught a tiny hint of the latter above, though, embedded in one of Dickie’s mannerisms Tom imitates: “invariably putting back the first tie he pulled off the rack and selecting a second.” Albeit subtly, this line suggests to me that Highsmith likely understood what Tom does not: that Dickie’s own nonchalance is just as manufactured as Tom’s is in playing him. Dickie only pretends not to care about his beautiful clothes. What his hereditary privilege and material resources provide is not some greater claim to elegance by nature, but earlier exposure to elite models of etiquette. This is why, as Thorstein Veblen explains, “manners maketh man”: they are the self-performance of class. Affecting the desire to be imitated is at least a product if not the telos of imitation itself.

Note none of this is meant as a criticism. As I said earlier, art is about tradeoffs. Likely the story’s appeal, and unquestionably its accessibility benefit from such omissions. Not every novel can be about the echoing desires of four Dickie Greenleafs! And thank goodness for it. I feel the same way about The Talented Mr. Ripley as I do about 1999 Jude Law: I would change nothing. Il meglio, il meglio! I have never been more gratified to be wrong.

Distinti saluti,

Natasha

1. Except for the title graphics; that font should be illegal.