DVD Review: Ripley's Game

Directed by Liliana Cavani

Fine Line Features

It is a rare occasion when the adjective “reptilian” can be meant as the deepest of compliment. Therefore, we must accord Ripley’s Game the proper admiration for allowing John Malkovich—the most sophisticated yet reptilian actor of our time—to portray Tom Ripley—the most sophisticated yet reptilian character of literature—and create the most reptilian sophisticate in cinema history.

The last time the cinemas were lit by Tom Ripley’s icy heart was The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1999. Anthony Minghella’s adaptation featured a poor, young and awkward Matt Damon, Class of 1992, murdering his way into social respectability and Gwyneth Paltrow’s heart. By Ripley’s Game, based on the fourth of Patricia Highsmith’s five Tom Ripley novels, Ripley is safely ensconced in an Italian villa bordering a small village, with a doting wife and an impressive chef.

Although Ripley is far removed from the petty criminality to which he once had to resort in order to build his fortune, it is not to last. Reeves (Sexy Beast’s Ray Winstone, gone all Ben Kingsley), an old partner from Ripley’s brief foray into art forgery, arrives one day, demanding Ripley’s help in murdering a competing Berlin mob boss.

Rather than sullying his new life by getting involved in such a base endeavor, Ripley gives Reeves the name of local British expat framer Jonathon Trevanny (MI:2’s Dougray Scott). Trevanny has recently committed the cardinal sin: At a cocktail party, he said that “the problem with Ripley is too much money and no taste,” within Ripley’s range of hearing. In return, Ripley decides to play a game. Can he kill two birds with one stone: take revenge against Trevanny and aid Reeves simultaneously by turning Jonathon—a sweet family man devoted to his beautiful wife and young son—into Reeves’ assassin?

In comparison with Talented, Game is more successful at translating Highsmith’s perception of humanity’s inhuman depths: We watch and cheer as Trevanny loses everything for Ripley’s amusement. Malkovich is so dispassionate that life and death become just another game.

Game is a European movie—it never made it to American theaters because of rights disputes, not because of its quality—which allows it to be forthright in bringing Highsmith’s vision to life, a strange necessity given Highsmith’s roots in Fort Worth, Texas.

Game is written and directed by Liliana Cavani (best known for 1974’s classic Nazi-sadomasochism sex fantasy The Night Porter) and her touch shows. She gives Ripley’s relationship with his Italian girlfriend a tender eroticism that makes his evil all the more human and frightening: it’s clear that he thinks of himself as an intelligent sophisticate living the life of his dreams, with no remorse. It is because he is so capable of love—of women, art and food, life’s finer pleasures—that we can’t dismiss him, something Cavani plays up. It is this contrast that made Hannibal Lecter so scary in The Silence of the Lambs and so empty in Hannibal: his pleasure and thus the audience’s pleasure in his pleasure was lost in the transition from surprising lust to tedious psychosis.

Cavini allows herself to play with the tones to keep Game from drifting into familiarity. A murder scene on a train—which seems set up as a nod to the first Highsmith adaptation, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 Strangers on a Train—is played as screwball comedy in the finest His Girl Friday tradition, and I began to forget about the brutality of the game and enjoy the antics. I was as caught up in the moment as Jonathon, which makes his subsequent fear all the more palpable. And then Cavini’s game made sense: the tonal shifts follow Trevanny’s point of view of his ordeal.

As the Game ends watching Ripley watching his girlfriend’s musical performance, it feels strange. Cavini fell into the modern dilemma of pandering to those of us raised at the teat of safe conclusions: Ripley loses the game and we are left wondering why his brinksmanship did not carry the day.