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Ripley's Game
***
Cinema
Reviews - Week of July 4, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15.
USA-UK-Italy. 110 minutes. Directed by Liliana Cavani. Written by Liliana
Cavani, Charles McKeown; based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. Starring
John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Headey, Chiara
Caselli.
"I am not troubled by conscience, and as a
younger man, that bothered me. It no longer does."
Right there is the obvious difference between
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Ripley's Game", which takes
place in the present day and shows a Tom Ripley who is comfortable with his
evil, amused by it, and uses it to spin playful games at his leisure. The
first movie from Patricia Highsmith's books was about a young man who thought
it was "better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody", and we responded
to him and the other characters in complex ways. He was a psychopath, but
his madness and violence were borne out of a need to be loved. His victims
didn't exactly have it coming, but they weren't good people
either.
Now, Ripley is living in a stylish European manor
with a beautiful young pianist for a wife. (What happened to his homosexuality
is anyone's guess; maybe someone who has read the books can e-mail me with
an explanation.) In the opening scene he kills a man, but hey, the guy was
rude to him, and gentlemen just don't do that, especially when Ripley is
trying to talk fine art. He makes his money from crooked deals, and then
slips back to the country, where good wine and classical furniture are draped
all around.
In the first movie, the lead was Matt Damon, who
went for hesitation and vulnerability mixed up with intelligence and calculation.
The sequel (based on the same book as Wim Wenders's "The American Friend")
casts John Malkovich, an actor who does nothing better than slinking around
comfortably, intelligence and calculation being simple reflexes, and only
dark delight needing any kind of attention. The plot involves one of Ripley's
criminal associations coming back to haunt him -- a gauche criminal played
by Ray Winstone, who needs an assassin to get gangsters off his back. And
Ripley has the perfect candidate -- one of his neighbours (Dougray Scott),
a devoted family man who needs the money. Seducing him into evil, and training
him in the ways of fending off enemies like a juggling act, will be the
entertainment of the moment.
Where the first movie was chock-full of character
studies, thrown into a beautifully labyrinthine plot and put together with
Hitchcockian precision, the appeal of "Ripley's Game" is just plain indulging
our fascination with evil. Obviously, we're disgusted by Ripley, and shocked
at how he manages to act as the Devil toward Scott, offering him temptations
he can't pass up and slyly looking on at the process of his conscience being
eaten away. But we can't get enough of it. Malkovich has always had a knack
for making this stuff fascinating, and he does it again, in quiet scenes
of lazing around in the hellish paradise he's made for himself, and in the
movie's big action set pieces, one of which involves killing an onslaught
of hoods (with a garrotte, in the confines of the bathroom of a moving train),
and the other seeing Malkovich and Scott setting up violent traps to defend
themselves against a gang of revenge attackers. These scenes are as darkly
comic as they are lurid, with absurdity framing the blood.
Lurid is exactly what I expected from the director
of "Ripley's Game", an Italian filmmaker called Liliana Cavani who became
famous in the 1970s for a movie called "The Night Porter". That film starred
Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling as a Nazi and a concentration camp survivor
who run into each other in Vienna and rekindle the sadomasochistic sex romps
they enjoyed during the war. It was one of those releases like "Boys from
Brazil" and "Marathon Man" -- twisted, high-gloss exploitation films that
got disgusting thrills out of the Holocaust in the days before filmmakers
knew how to treat it seriously. But you know, I sort of liked "The Night
Porter"; it was in bad taste, but involving, and more upfront about its abuse
of a serious subject than the other movies I mentioned. Here, as there, Cavani
uses a seedy, spying camera and beautiful European locations to draw us into
the action and dress it up as art. She's a sick puppy, but she's good at
what she does.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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