The Worst Man Wins
by Chris Knipp

There have been many film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith stories, and quite a few featuring Tom Ripley, her most famous character. Why another one? Well, as I am hardly the first to say, John Malkovich seems to have been born to play the older Ripley, in Liliana Cavani's new film Ripley's Game. Give the young one to Alain Delon (Purple Noon) or Matt Damon (The Talented Mr. Ripley): both were arguable versions of the fledgling scoundrel. But it’s uncanny how well Malkovich wears the skin of the grown man. And it’s weird, and cruel, that a film of this caliber could have been sent straight to DVD in America.

Life requires action -- sometimes the slow patience of the lizard, other times the gift of abrupt violence. Ripley’s accomplished murders and thefts, so bold, so risky, so improvisational, prove that he possesses the existential courage one needs to survive and enjoy life. As his reward for jobs well done, Tom occupies an expansive Palladian villa in Treviso with a beautiful harpsichordist. He enjoys the best wines, the best cars, and the best risotto made from truffles in his kitchen by the best cook in the Veneto. He knows the difference between a Guercino and a Parmigianino, and he’s never anything but well dressed. Malkovich serves the role as well as it serves him: isn’t he, like Ripley, a brash American turned well-heeled European sybarite?

The paradox of the Ripley novels is that a master criminal may also be good at the art of living, and the tricky thing about watching Malkovich is that one may be tempted to admire him. (And yet within the first ten minutes we see Ripley kill a man with a poker for little more than mishandling some Renaissance drawings.) This isn’t a new experience for the reader of Highsmith’s many novels, particularly the Ripley ones: to enter the world of her criminals has the appeal of being bad and getting away with it. As Graham Greene said, "[Highsmith] has created a world of her own -- a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.”

The perfect foil for Ripley is Trevanny (Dugray Scott), a man whom fatal illness has given an edge of desperate bravado, but who remains sensitive to moral values. After being lured into committing a serious crime for big money (which he can leave to his wife and young son), Trevanny waits with Ripley in the villa for some gangsters bent on revenge, and as they chat to pass the time he remarks that in school he always got caught. Tom smiles and says, “You know why? Because you didn’t think of just killing your teachers!”

John Malkovich hasn’t very often played a nice person. Yes, he’s been Biff in Death of a Salesman, Tom in The Glass Menagerie, and Lennie in Of Mice and Men. But then we have such menacing rogues as Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady, and the assassin of In the Line of Fire. Tom Ripley is Malkovich’s triumph. It combines all of these. Is it a surprise that playing the wickedest man of all, he has never been more appealing? There’s something sublimely ugly about him that reminds us that good looks are not the only attractive features in a man. There is also power, taste, and originality. He’s elegant, he’s an esthete, and he’s smart. When his shady associate Reeves (Ray Winstone) asks him if he has the extra fifty thousand he’s offering, he just snaps his cell phone shut. The ruthless man is also impatient with stupidity.

This is an actor’s film. Winstone is superb in the smaller role of the abominable, self satisfied lowlife who comes to Ripley to get a murder done. Reeves is little more than a pretext for a caper, a reason for coming out of retirement, but Winstone makes him seem forward without ever being overdrawn. Scott plays a picture framer living in a nearby town, who has acute myelogenous leukemia. Scott is an actor who looks both handsome and unwell. He may suffer a little too much, but he also has an admirable recessiveness that keeps the glamour Cavani spreads over her characters (they’re all a bit too well dressed, but this film comes out of Italy, the land of bella figura) from overwhelming his essential weakness.

This film shows us the two essential elements of Highmith’s celebrated criminal: Tom Ripley is pure evil, and it’s a lot of fun to be him. People unfamiliar with the Highsmithian sensibility may find the end unsatisfying. But it is perfectly in character. Cavani’s suave Game gives the devil his due.

Jersey Girl might be seen as a touching new sign of maturity from the irreverent lapsed Catholic Kevin Smith, whose potty-mouthed, quick-thinking convenience store denizens charmed and teased us in the low budget Clerks. Here he does indeed deal with grown up problems. A high-powered New York publicist, Ollie Trinke, who happens to be played by Ben Affleck, has his wife (who happens to be played by Jennifer Lopez) die in childbirth. He falls apart, moves in with his working class dad (George Carlin, very convincing here though he hasn't a great deal to do), and after getting kicked out of the business by insulting Will Smith and a crowd of journalists waiting to meet him (a far-fetched idea), he spends the next seven years reluctantly taking over the raising of his daughter in New Jersey and doing municipal laborer jobs arranged by his dad, like digging trenches and collecting garbage, till the daughter grows up into a Latina version of Shirley Temple. Then along comes Liv Tyler, and Ollie needs to make a choice.

These are grown up problems, all right, and Smith's directness and frank language come in handy in talking to kids about sex, and describing the nitty gritty of baby care. But killing off the wife in the first quarter of an hour is blatant tear-jerker stuff, and the movie has the gloss and facile thinking of a mindless Hollywood romantic comedy, without any wit. There are some good moments, but also some dreadfully corny ones. Smith indulges his taste for celebrity cameos (as if J-Lo and Affleck weren't enough) by having a scene where Affleck's character runs into the real Will Smith and Smith says he only makes blockbusters to be able to spend more time with the wife and kids. But that's hokum: Will still makes the blockbusters. He doesn't collect garbage in New Jersey.

The movie's resolution is specious. "Forget about who you thought you were, and just accept who you are," the tagline goes. Bosh! There's no reason to believe that a guy with Ollie Trinke's pizzaz wouldn't feel stifled in New Jersey. This is a surefire formula for frustration and revolt five or ten years down the line. Home and family vs. career and ambition isn't a choice anybody really needs to make. The grown up problem is how to manage doing both.

The writing in this film just isn't very good, so it's hard to see this as a viable change of direction for Kevin Smith. Go back to Clerks and listen to that dialogue. It sparkles; it surprises; it cracks you up. Jay and Silent Bob are absent from Jersey Girl. Smith hasn't made up for the lack of them.

©2004 Chris Knipp
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