Sixteen is a great age to see a movie, there on a threshold between wide-eyed wonder and something like maturity. That’s how old I was when I first laid eyes on The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella’s ravishing, exquisitely grim 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s flinty 1955 novel. I’d been a movie fan for years at that point, but something about its elegant menace, its beauty flecked with blood, grabbed ahold of me like little had previously. It is by no means a feelgood film, this story of queer longing and loneliness giving way to murderous deed. But watching it now (as I do perhaps embarrassingly often) still evokes the primal thrill of art cracking open a young mind.
Minghella, who died in 2008, was a master of style, crafting wholly credible visions of the past. His prowess is perhaps best on display in Ripley, which takes the viewer on a grand tour of mid-20th-century Italy, both its sun-splashed coastal languor and its more anxious, cobble-gray city streets. Tom Ripley, a low-birth conman sent to Europe’s blessed boot to retrieve a prodigal shipping scion at his father’s behest, is in awe of the country, as are we in the audience; so much so that we begin to sickly root for Tom’s increasingly sinister campaign to stay there.
