Ripley: Believe Him or Not

A few months back, following the death of Alain Delon, I watched the 1960 French thriller, Purple Noon, which helped launch Delon’s career as a screen idol. It was a colorful flick about deception and mayhem, and boasted not one but two impressive twists at the end. It wasn’t until recently that I learned that this film was based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first in a string of five novels featuring a young American who’s adept at impersonating others, for his own personal gain. Much more recently, Netflix showcased Ripley, a eight-part miniseries based on Highsmith’s first Ripley novel. I watched the critically acclaimed series from start to finish, thrilling to its take on the Ripley character and on its spectacularly detailed black-and-white cinematography.

Though the Texas-born Highsmith spent her adult life in Europe, her story has always had an All-American hustler at its center, and of course Hollywood eventually provided us with an American take on her plot. The 1999 film written and directed by Anthony Minghella (known for his Oscar-winning The English Patient) starred a  youthful Matt Damon in the title role. Key supporting parts were played by Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Cate Blanchett, with a very young Jude Law in the key supporting role of the wealthy, feckless Dickie, Ripley’s first victim. (It won him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.)

Though I confess I’ve never read the novel that started it all,  the contrast between the various screen versions has been fascinating. The French-language film much admired by Highsmith stands out for its gorgeous leading man, its spectacular Italian locales, and some nifty surprises that make a sequel unlikely. The TV miniseries apparently sticks far closer to the mood and plot of the original. I was fascinated by Andrew Scott’s playing of Ripley not as a charismatic rogue but as a sort of nonentity, a quiet con artist who succeeds because he seems to blend in everywhere he goes, with no one quite able to spot the fact that he’s dangerous. A snake in the grass, without question. 

Then there’s Minghella’s Hollywood version. The leading role is played by Matt Damon, clearly chosen in part for the youthful innocence of his looks. (I’ve read that Leonardo di Caprio was an earlier choice for the part.) Whereas the Tom Ripley of the TV miniseries is an experienced grifter, bilking the unwary whose medical bills he’s stolen, Damon’s Tom starts out looking like a clean-cut young man, a pianist sensitively accompanying a classical singer at a house concert. He doesn’t seem to be on the make until opportunity suddenly drops into his lap, giving him a trip from NYC to an Italian beach resort to persuade the scion of a wealthy American family to quit loafing around and come home. 

Damon’s Tom Ripley and Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf quickly bond over a passion for jazz. (The role of music in the film is an effective change from the miniseries, in which Dickie—though by no means talented—aspires to a career as an artist and Tom claims to share his interest in Caravaggio.)  As we see from the start, Damon’s Tom really does love music . . . and quickly comes to love the handsome, mercurial Dickie. Every bad thing his Tom does seems almost accidental; his most dastardly deeds stem from spur-of-the-moment decisions made in time of crisis. He’s played, in a low-key way, as a closeted homosexual, one whose self-loathing leads him in dangerous directions. We’re supposed to end up feeling sorry for the guy. I ask you: what’s the fun in that?

 

The Colorful Drama of Purple Noon

The recent passing of French leading man Alain Delon called my attention to the fact that, at the start of a long career, he first hit it big in René Clément’s 1960 thriller, Plein Soleil, known to American moviegoers as Purple Noon. I never saw this film until recently, but its title instantly had meaning for me. Back when I was in high school, my French teacher handed out extra credit for various experiences involving the French language. If you dined at a local French restaurant and swore that you’d spoke en français to the waiter, you got points. (This proved very popular with my family, all of whom loved the opportunity to further my scholastic career by dining out.) You also got points for attending a French-language film and trying hard not to read the subtitles. Most of us kids, thoroughly brainwashed by Hollywood, had no interest in checking out a film in French. And our teacher, in recommending Purple Noon (then playing at a local art house), said nothing to convince us that we’d actually find this film entertaining. As a consequence, I missed out on more extra credit, as well as a chance to see a really fascinating cinematic game of cat-and-mouse.

 Purple Noon (certainly a garish title) turns out to be the first screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s famous 1955 thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Forty-four years later, Anthony Minghella wrote and directed a much more complicated English-language version. It starred a young Matt Damon and featured such rising talents as Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman in a tale of a young man who’ll go to any lengths (including bloody ones) to achieve the lifestyle he feels he deserves. Highsmith herself strongly preferred Delon’s take on Tom Ripley, which relies less on pathos and more on the audience’s ability to identify with a young man whose creative improvisations help him get what he wants out of life.

 It's been pointed out that Ripley’s story goes well into film noir territory, but shifts the formula by being shot in brilliant color in some of the world’s most beautifully sunlit places. Much of the action of Purple Noon takes place on a gorgeous yacht off the coast of Italy. That’s where a feckless, and very wealthy, young San Franciscan named Philippe Greenleaf sets out on a cruise along with his fiancée, Marge, and his amusing new buddy, Tom Ripley. Philippe is not a very gracious host, especially after he discovers Tom trying on his clothes. What happens between them sets the stage for a series of deceptions in which Tom, back on shore, creatively pretends (with the help of a portable typewriter and some glue) that Philippe is alive and well, happily ensconced at a local hostelry. His on-and-off masquerade as Philippe leads to additional mayhem, as well as to his passionate wooing of Marge, for reasons that eventually become all too plain.

 It's curious (and perhaps disturbing) that author Highsmith, who spent most of her adult years in Europe, imagined Tom Ripley as a born-and-bred American. Her multiple follow-up novels to The Talented Mr. Ripley have led to several additional films as well as a 2024 Netflix miniseries. Obviously, this is a young man whose exploits we love to follow, even if we don’t consider him a model of wholesome behavior. The French version, Purple Noon, largely sidesteps the novel’s obvious homoerotic subtext: what else would you expect in 1960? Still, this is a marvelous intro to a sinister but fascinating world. Too bad it’s too late for me to get extra credit.

 

 

Spreading the Word About “Contagion”

Who’da thunk I’d watch a disaster movie and feel . . .  nostalgia? But that was my first reaction when viewing Contagion, the 2011 medical disaster movie directed by the very busy Steven Soderbergh. I first became a Soderbergh fan after seeing 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape, a modest but emotionally dynamic chamber piece that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and ushered in an era of adult-themed indies made by serious young filmmakers. Since then, Soderbergh has had a solid career in film and television, including Erin Brockovich, the multiple Oscar-winning Traffic, and a sexy George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez thriller, Out of Sight. For variety he’s helmed some lucrative franchises like Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels.

 When it was released in 2011, Contagion did nicely at the box office. Its impressive cast and far-flung settings attracted viewers around the globe, eager to see such major stars as Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, and Jude Law fight off a worldwide pandemic. But I doubt anyone took it terribly seriously. After all, in 2011 we hadn’t endured a true global medical disaster for almost 100 years. Not since 1918, and the latter days of World War I, had the world seen the so-called Spanish Flu epidemic that took the life of my mother’s father, as well as millions of others. It was exciting to watch Paltrow and Winslet in the throes of a horrible virus, but we knew perfectly well that we and our loved ones were safe.

 That was then. Now that we’ve been through 3½ years of COVID, I could watch Contagion from a new, more enlightened perspective. A lot of what appears on screen seems all too familiar: the origin of the virus among tainted bats and pigs in a Chinese marketplace; the spreading of the disease, in those first innocent days, from simple hand-to-hand contact; the fear behind every cough as the world starts to catch on to what is happening; the grimly mounting statistics on the TV screen; the desperate urge for a vaccine that will return the world to the way it was before. The filmmakers presciently show so many things that became all too familiar in 2020, like the turning of football stadiums into mass hospitalization sites. And there’s Jude Law’s blogger character, who evolves into an anti-vaxer urging the public to avoid vaccination altogether. Sound familiar?

 Some things that are shown in the film fortunately didn’t happen in real life. First of all, the film’s eventual miracle vaccine is injected into the nasal cavity (yuck!), something we fortunately haven’t had to deal with. Secondly, though some of us did help strip store shelves bare of toilet paper, we didn’t run out of food and find ourselves making do with MREs, like the movie’s characters. Nor, at least in my experience, did real-life vaccine injection sites devolve into vicious brawls as people fought over scarce resources. Another of the film’s plot strands has the U.S. and its western allies cynically sending placebos overseas so as to hang onto the precious dosages for their own populations. In some ways we’ve been very lucky that these hideous movie scenarios haven’t played out for real.

 Yet the movie overlooks some issues that we’ve had to acknowledge in the real world. Like: the fact that deaths from COVID have been very much linked to social class, with hard-working ethnic minorities (of which the film has very few) bearing the brunt of the infection. Contagion’s innocence in such matters makes it seem rather quaint. Still, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

 

 

Going Into Orbit Over “The Martian”

As Thanksgiving approaches, the world’s engineers and space scientists are expressing their gratitude for The Martian. This saga of a modern-day astronaut stranded on Mars is an upbeat movie that makes space exploration look exciting, shot by a team dedicated to ensuring on-screen scientific accuracy. I myself grew up in an era when space travel was regarded as a thrilling adventure, and government expenditure on space-going missions seemed like money well spent. It’s been far too long since we cheered a man on the moon. As someone with close family ties to Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which makes an important cameo in the film, I’m personally thankful for anything that encourages voyages (manned or unmanned) across the cosmos. Let’s keep those science nerd-types employed! And while we’re doing that, let’s keep alive mankind’s dreams of exploring our universe

Though I’m rooting for The Martian because of its whole-hearted endorsement of space science, I also love this project because of what it says about the screenwriting process. I teach in the screenwriting division of UCLA Extension’s world-renowned Writers’ Program, so I count among my students many teachers and doctors and airline pilots who’re convinced they have what it take to make it to Hollywood. Most won’t get very far, but it still remains possible for would-be writers, whatever their day jobs, to hit the jackpot in the movie game.

Take the case of Andy Weir. He’s a mild-mannered software engineer who grew up, as so many engineers do, enamored of science fiction. He’s been writing stories since childhood, but his very first novel, The Martian, was truly the little spacecraft that could. Weir researched the story intently—delving into such arcane subjects as botany, orbital mechanics, and weather conditions on Mars—and then, if Wikipedia is to be believed, offered it as a free serial on his website. Once he turned it into a low-rent Kindle ebook, it was endorsed on the Goodreads site, then discovered by Crown Books . . . and the rest is publishing history.  

But how did the 2011 novel become a 2015 Matt Damon movie, directed by Ridley Scott? Personally, I’m less interested in the business details than in the aesthetic challenges. Weir didn’t undertake the screenplay, which was written by Hollywood veteran Drew Goddard. Part of Goddard’s task was to explore the character of Mark Watney, who’s stranded on Mars when his crewmates leave him behind during a crisis, thinking him dead. Alone on Mars, without any initial way of communicating with earth, Mark does a great many creative things to stay alive. In a movie, we can watch him in action, but we can’t have access to his thought processes. The Mark of the novel keeps a running log, which shows us the way his mind works, and also introduces us to his vivid—sometimes profane, often very funny—voice. Movie audiences will never be satisfied with constant voiceover, so Weir’s idea of a log has evolved in the film into Mark’s series of video selfies, theoretically made for some far-off posterity. Given how much hard science is being thrown at us, it helps a lot to see Damon at his most brashly charming, spelling out his plans, crowing over his small successes, and struggling to absorb fuck-ups.

There are other good additions in the screenplay, like a deft characterization of an ultimate JPL space nerd who’s brilliant at solving problems of astrophysics but hasn’t yet figured out how to behave appropriately with actual human beings. And a new coda wraps up loose ends to give us a satisfying version of happily-ever-after.