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| The framer and the framed: Dougray Scott and John Malkovitch in RIPLEY'S GAME. |
We watched RIPLEY'S GAME tonight on the Criterion Channel (where it's part of a "22 Films Scored by Ennio Morricone" festival) - and to my surprise, no, I hadn't seen it before after all. I read all five of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels last year and, while some were better than others, they form a major achievement within their genre and are very comfortably edgy to inhabit for several weeks.
John Malkovitch isn't at all my idea of Ripley, nor is Chiara Caselli remotely his very French wife, here turned into a classical music star on the harpsichord, and the film is also very much more grandiose and Italian than the Swiss suburban affluence of the book; however, seeing it reawakened my dormant memories of the book and enriched my appreciation of it and the others in that series. It also pointed out to me how some moments in the book may have been meant to be read, things that I missed in my own reading. For example, whereas in THE AMERICAN FRIEND Ripley's "game" is quietly orchestrated in spiteful response to something that the picture framer Jonathan says about him socially, here director Liliana Cavani elaborates this pinpoint into a recurring theme of how terrible things can start snowballing once the wrong person's nose is put out of joint. It seems to me true to the book in doing so, though I didn't always take notice from the emphases I imposed on the text as I was reading. It also gave me some food for thought about whether the books can be seen as a chronicle of a sociopathic murderer's repeated failures at trying to become a better man - which, after all, is the reason he started killing in the first place, and at least two of the books (RIPLEY'S GAME and THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED RIPLEY) show him trying to put his best foot forward in awkward friendships. Near the end of this film, as Ripley stumbles out of the room, incredulous that Jonathan's wife (Lena Headey) has spat in his face, he mutters "I didn't expect you to thank me" - a line so shockingly self-absorbed under the circumstances that it exposes our anti-hero as a man who unknowingly lives to take offense.
So I liked it a good deal; it's a well-made film and a decent adaptation, and it's given me a lot to think about, though I don't think Dougray Scott quite achieves the level of tragedy that Bruno Ganz did with the same character in the earlier Wenders film. I'm also thinking that the film's Italianate grandiosity also anticipates that of another, later De Laurentiis production: Ridley Scott's HANNIBAL (2001) - tacitly acknowledging that Tom Ripley was a major stepping stone on the path to Hannibal Lector.
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