5 out of 5

Director: Anthony Minghella

While director Minghella’s heavy hand threatens to sink the film on occasion – especially when stumbling to place purposeful pieces of story on screen so that we buy later scenes – the majority of the picture is gracefully captured, the larger sets or locations where important moments taking place seemingly laboriously crafted and lit to glow with the shifting moods of the film and of Tom Ripley, as he swings from joy to depression and back and forth.  Damon’s representation of Ripley is unbelievable.  I had wanted to brush him off at the time as an “it” boy with Good Will Hunting, but this film made me accept him as a brilliant actor – he doesn’t play Tom as a split personality, or someone acting as different personalities when needed, but as Tom Ripley, one man, struggling with the desire and need to move forward and be accepted.  This concept is what stays true to the book, which is crime and noir at heart, and making one decision which avalanches into a series of worse and worse decisions.  As with the best of noir, we have to understand these decisions, and believe that we, in the same scenario, might follow a similar path, and Minghella gives Damon a ton of room to represent this on-screen.  Our other name actors all turn in convincing representations of particular types – Paltrow as the put-upon girlfriend, Jude as the insufferably rich son, Hoffman as the smarmy friend, Blanchett as the high-class simpleton – each exists for a specific reason in the film – some shard in the core crime committed by Ripley – and they pull their strings beyond the duties of the script.  Our director does some nice compositional work, especially with mirrors, but there are moments of 90s-television-esque swoops and zooms that feel out of place for something mostly graceful, punctuated by a similarly cheesy score.  And yet – that story, these actors – it is a mesmerizing film that actually enriches some aspects of the book with a resonance that can only be achieved through film.