Ripley's Game

Easily the best thing about Liliana Cavani’s adaptation of the third book in Patricia Highsmith's Ripley series is John Malkovich’s performance as the urbane, art connoisseur, self-styled aesthete and ruthless psychopath who is now holed up in a luxurious villa near Vicenza a much older and self-assured individual than when Matt Damon played him in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999).

Now an up-market art dealer (read “crook”) Ripley is now living the life of a well-to-do gentleman with his beautiful concert pianist wife (Chiara Caselli). Although Ripley, as before, has no problem with murder as a means of resolving his problems things go pear-shaped when his former associate, Reeves (Ray Winstone), a Cockney thug, turns up wanting him to whack some of his Eastern European gangland rivals. In typically twisted style Ripley suggests to Reeves that he approach his neighbour, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott), who, inexplicably, has a picture-framing business in the local town, but more importantly and ever so conveniently is dying of leukemia and has a wife and child to provide for.  As he unwisely slighted Ripley’s taste at a dinner party, the hyper-sensitive Ripley delights in the idea of revenge by embroiling him with the equally ruthless Reeves.  Initially shocked, Jonathan eventually accepts Reeves's proposition but when the latter wants him to do a second job or have his own family whacked, Ripley steps in to restore the order of things.

The film is at its best in its first half with Cavani, despite some occasionally noticeable lapses like the awkwardly realised initial meeting between Jonathan and Reeves, establishing the dynamic between the reptilian Ripley, completely relieved of the aching homosexuality that characterized the Minghella version, and the naïve Jonathan.  Once the second hit takes place (in a surprisingly commodious railway car lavatory) and the action component permutes however, it all gets a bit ordinary, Cavani handling the conventional bad guys-vs-(sort of) good guys shenanigans with little flair.

The sometimes awkward Scott provides generic family man fare but is nowhere as effective as Malkovich, whose Nietzschean Ripley is a diamond-hard version of the young man we first met in Minghella’s film.  

FYI: Wim Wenders gave us a very different version of Highsmith’s novel with The American Friend (1977)

 

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