Getting Away with Murder

No wonder director Anthony Minghella's next movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmit chilling 1955 classic of murder among expatriate Americans, is one of this year's most eagerly awaited releases: it stars Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cate Blanchett, and reunites the editor, photography director, costume designer, and composer from Minghella's 1996 phenomenon, The English Patient. On the Mediterranean set, PAMELA HANSON captures a blaze of young Hollywood royalty

PAMELA HANSON

Julian Symons, writing in The Sunday Times of London about his fellow crime novelist Patricia Highsmith's most chilling creation, described Tom Ripley as "an apparently nice young American, in whose emotional equipment some moral governor has been left out." In the more forthright terms of Ripley's (and Highsmith's) native land, Ripley is a sociopath. Over the course of five books he inherits someone else's fortune, settles in the French countryside, marries the beautiful Heloi'se, and collects art—all the while killing people who tip his delicate mental balance or threaten his ultracivilized existence. But the most appalling thing about Tom Ripley is that somehow the reader ends up rooting for him. Highsmith's subtly empathic portrait of madness is that good.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Highsmith introduced her hero without a conscience, is getting the red-carpet treatment for its second translation to the screen (the first was Rene Clement's 1960 Purple Noon, while another Highsmith novel, Strangers on a Train, became one of Alfred Hitchcock's finest). Director Anthony Minghella is sticking with the editor, director of photography, costume designer, and composer from his previous, nine-Oscar outing, The English Patient, which will ensure a lush celebration of the movie's 1950s Mediterranean backdrop, shot in Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Naples, and Sicily. Matt Damon should be a splendid Ripley, with a face capable of alternately lighting up with Tom's "innocent-looking American smile" and registering his twitchily paranoid pulse as he murders—and then assumes the identity of—expatriate golden boy Dickie Greenleaf (played by Jude Law). Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett are the female stars: Paltrow as Marge, who is in love with Greenleaf and distrusts Ripley from the moment he arrives in the Italian village of Mongibello; Blanchett in a role that was added for the movie. Mr. Ripley may be frighteningly talented, but so is this crew.

ELISE O'SHAUGHNESSY