Performance of the Month: Matt Damon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999)

Matt Damon, ignored by the Oscars, but utterly fascinating in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"

Matt Damon has the very good fortune to be not only a bankable movie star, who’s starred in the hugely successful Bourne franchise, but also a talented actor, given his Oscar-nominated performances in “Good Will Hunting” and “Invictus”.  And even now, as the handsome boy grows older, but more textured as an actor, solidly supporting in films like “True Grit” and “Contagion”, I wonder if he will ever give a performance more impressive than that in Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley”.

The most impressive quality about Damon’s work in the picture is that he’s always performing more than one role, sometimes juggling multiple roles at once, in playing a character who is never quite who he is pretending to be, since he’s being someone else at the same time.  (If that sounds confusing, consider that I wrote it after re-watching the film at 4am.  As Tom Ripley himself says “I always thought it was better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody”, and there are several different Tom Ripleys just as there is no Tom Ripley.

His entire performance works on the premise that he’s a chameleon, who with a borrowed jacket becomes a Princeton alumnus, fast friends with some free living American expatriates in Italy, a murderer, the person whom he killed, and so forth and so on.  If you work on the presumption that Tom Ripley doesn’t exist, but rather becomes whatever persona the situation requires, then the film is a multi-layered meditation on identity.  For Tom’s identity is as fluid as the sea where he first meets Dickie Greenleaf.

He constantly reinvents himself, and the viewer is never sure if they are ever seeing any of the real person- that is, if there is a real person there to begin with.  As the film progresses, Damon’s work becomes a Rubix Cube of constantly turning sides.  There is a different Ripley for every other character in the film, and this is one very well-cast film, with heavy hitters like Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman playing opposite Damon.  But Damon’s main co-star is himself.

What begins as an attempt to insinuate himself into Dickie’s life becomes an absorption of Dickie’s lifestyle; an intensity that builds to a romantic attraction to Dickie, which to me reads as the major crisis of Tom’s identity.  The initial murder is in fact provoked because Tom’s affections are rejected; he acts like a spurned lover, and we recall the intimacy and not at all subtle hints of homoeroticism from earlier scenes between Tom and Dickie (the duet of “My Funny Valentine” and the bathtub chess game).  And yet Tom glides from this to an attempted seduction of Dickie’s fiancée Marge (Paltrow), but this again is the absorption of Dickie’s life into his own.  Then there is the flirtation with Meredith (Blanchett), and the jealousy of Dickie’s friendship with Freddie (Hoffman), and finally the “is he or isn’t he” game with Peter (Jack Davenport), who probably gets closer to the enigma of Tom Ripley than anyone else in the film, and pays the price for it.  It matters very little to me whether Tom is or isn’t gay, because I think his motive is ultimately to be anything to anyone, at any time.

The complexity of the role had to be a big attraction for Damon, who was just coming off the success of “Good Will Hunting” when this film was released in 1999, because the dark nature of the material doesn’t seem to be the obvious choice for someone concerned with being golden boy at the box office.  It is a complex juggling act, and Damon never once drops a ball.  He keeps the different Toms/Dickies/Whoevers in constant motion, with the possibility of seduction or murder coexisting at every moment.  It is a brilliant performance and quite an achievement for the young Mr. Damon.  And I’m not certain, but I’d be willing to bet that Tom Ripley was a Scorpio.