Hacker Cinema
Ripley's Game
2002 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Liliana Cavani
Tom Ripley - cool, urbane, wealthy, and murderous - lives in a villa in the Veneto with Luisa, his harpsichord-playing girlfriend. A former business associate from Berlin's underworld pays a call asking Ripley's help in killing a rival. Ripley - ever a student of human nature - initiates a game to turn a mild and innocent local picture framer into a hit man. The artisan, Jonathan Trevanny, who's dying of cancer, has a wife, young son, and little to leave them. If Ripley draws Jonathan into the game, can Ripley maintain control? Does it stop at one killing? What if Ripley develops a conscience?
2 positivefrom 2 commenters
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2 comments on Hacker News
I like the Ripley novels too and I agree with you that reading her as a "gay icon" is detrimental. I was commenting on her personality and eccentricities and I would avoid reading those into her books.
> Mostly those movies miss the main point of the character: he's egocentric, manipulative and ultimately sleeps like a baby without any guilt whatsoever once he's done murdering whoever stops him from that. All the tension in the books is about avoiding getting caught, which usually leads to additional victims. Not very compatible with the average Hollywood movie of course but it makes for an interesting anti hero.
I read Tom as a rebuttal to Crime and Punishment.
As far as the adaptations, Ripley's Game is my favorite. Malkovich gets so many good lines. Purple Noon is pretty good too (Alain Delon is great) though the ending is weak.
I was quite obsessed with the five novels featuring Tom Ripley when I was in my twenties; before the Matt Damon movie happened. They are really good thriller novels and they kind of suck you in with the way she plays with notions of good and evil by making you root for what is basically a sociopath murderer. Characterizing her as some kind of gay icon detracts from the fact that these books weren't really about that. There's hardly any kind of sex or intimacy in them at all.
If anything, they might leave you wondering whether she was more trans than lesbian. Most of her protagonists are male and heterosexual (except for one of her last novels portraying a gay protagonist with aids). Women are portrayed like accessories rather than developed characters. I don't think she actually did any female protagonists at all. Tom Ripley's relationship with his spouse is definitely very cold (he has one from the second novel onwards) and weirdly a-sexual (e.g. they have separate bed rooms even).
There have been several movies based on the Tom Ripley novels that definitely portray him either as practically gay or at least very confused on that front. The Matt Damon one by Anthony Minghella is probably the most famous but arguably also the worst interpretation since it is all about guilt. There was one featuring John Malkovic loosely based on Ripley's Game that captured the cold psychopath a bit better and another one by Wim Wenders featuring Dennis Hoppers based on the same novel that had a very different spin on that. And there are a couple more obscure ones. Mostly those movies miss the main point of the character: he's egocentric, manipulative and ultimately sleeps like a baby without any guilt whatsoever once he's done murdering whoever stops him from that. All the tension in the books is about avoiding getting caught, which usually leads to additional victims. Not very compatible with the average Hollywood movie of course but it makes for an interesting anti hero.