Friends and Strangers
by Chris Dashiell

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY
(Anthony Minghella).
It seems a disadvantage at times to have read the book on which a movie is based. Friends who have read the Patricia Highsmith novel are mostly telling me of their disappointment in the new film. I haven't read it, and so I enjoyed the picture on its own terms, although I have reservations. It's an opulently produced movie with a sleek visual surface, delivering some tension and boasting a few fine performances. The title character is thrust by chance into the orbit of Dickie Greenleaf, a wealthy young American living in Italy, whom he becomes obsessed with to the point of assuming his identity. This need to become someone else is the point of fascination in this story. Minghella, who wrote the script, is unfortunately a bit confused as to motivation. He needed to make up his mind whether Ripley falls into his role unawares or plans it all ahead of time - he tries to have it both ways, which is bewildering. The film also seems to attempt the style of Hitchcock (the excellent Gabriel Yared score certainly reminds me of Bernard Herrmann), but Minghella lacks both Hitchcock's visual inventiveness and sense of timing.

Matt Damon does a very good job in a role that requires him to be in almost every scene. If you think of Ripley in terms of the familiar psycho killer figure, you might think Damon is miscast. But the movie has something completely different on its mind (which I will get to), and Damon's Ripley is more of an insecure loner, a sort of blank slate with chameleonlike behavior. Jude Law is very convincing as the charismatic Dickie, and the supporting turns by Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman are brilliant. The weak link is Gwyneth Paltrow as Dickie's girlfriend - there's not much to the role anyway, and her limited expressiveness doesn't help matters.

As an example of the thriller genre, The Talented Mr. Ripley is too diffuse to be in the front rank. Minghella's style is all over the place, and the plot relies too much on coincidence. But I found myself actually moved by the picture because of its deliberately different approach to the main character. We're not meant to gape at Ripley from the outside in fascination at his aberrant behavior, but identify with his extreme need to appear as something other than he is. And it becomes clear that this need masks a total lack of self-knowledge - in this way he represents, in extremis, a painful condition that many of us have known. (At least I have, and so Ripley's plight - and Damon's performance - touched me in a more personal way than if this had just been a movie about some demonic criminal.) In any case, this seems to me to be the point of the final scene, which has been so severely criticized - by the time someone loves Ripley for himself, it is too late for him to turn back.

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER
(Pedro Almodovar).
Almodovar's films have a comic/anarchic strain and a soap opera/ melodrama strain. Lately he's been trying to bring the two aspects closer together. This picture about a woman (Cecilia Roth) grieving her son's death, who goes in search of the boy's father, mixes the sentiment right in with the campiness, and it has an amusing performance by Antonia San Juan as a wisecracking transsexual. But, as much as I hate to pan a film with such good intentions, I can't help but feel that Almodovar has gotten lazy here. He pours on the effects: a beautiful pregnant nun (Penelope Cruz), self-conscious references to A Streetcar Named Desire, and an "I will survive" philosophy of female triumph, but there's not enough depth to make the characters come alive - everything comes too easy, as if Almodovar wrote it all in an afternoon and never bothered to revise. It's gotten great reviews, but I was bored through much of it, frankly - and that's an unusual thing to say about an Almodovar film. If he really wants to create movies that are more substantial, then I think he needs to take more time and be willing to let the characters step out from behind the clichés.

THE STRAIGHT STORY (David Lynch).
Yes, it's the story of a man named Straight. Alvin Straight, Iowan, aging and in poor health, gets the news that his brother in Wisconsin has had a stroke. He decides that he has to go see him, and so he sets out on the road on his John Deer lawnmower, pulling a little trailer for over 300 miles. Along the way he meets various folks and dispenses his homespun wisdom. My heart had a real argument with my head about this one. My heart liked this film because of the conscious simplicity of its style, and the way the slow-moving old man on the lawnmower represents something fine and humane in a world that moves too fast. The people in this film are basically kind and decent and hard-working. Most of all there is Richard Farnsworth as Straight - a truly remarkable performance. Even the most banal nuggets of practical philosophy are given life through Farnsworth's wonderful voice, his expressions, the way his eyes move. My head would like to point out that the film sometimes seems rather condescending to rural folks, making them seem a lot simpler than real people are, and sometimes making them seem worse - like dumb caricatures of country bumpkins. My head also distrusts the film's occasional preachiness about the value of family ties. My head is definitely on to something - I would never want to give it short shrift. Lynch's perspective is a little too flat - even when Straight and another old man reminisce about the traumas of World War II, the situations depicted are a tad ready-made. Still, I recommend The Straight Story. Besides the awesome Farnsworth, it has Sissy Spacek playing his daughter, a disabled woman with a strange verbal tic that is an amazing feat of acting in itself, but in addition she creates a real character. Not a great film, but a truly gentle and loving one, and my head has no problem with that.

Chris Dashiell