Ripley’s Game (2003)

Ripley's Game (2003)

Taglines: Older. Wiser. More talented.

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? Luisa prepares for her concert.

Ripley’s Game is a 2002 thriller film directed by Liliana Cavani. It is adapted from the 1974 novel of the same name, the third in Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripliad”, a series of books chronicling the murderous adventures of con artist Tom Ripley. John Malkovich stars as Ripley, opposite Dougray Scott and Ray Winstone. Highsmith’s novel was previously adapted in 1977 as The American Friend by director Wim Wenders, starring Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz.

Film Review for Ripley’s Game

Here is a film that manages to be enjoyable and ridiculous in a ratio of about one to three: a mix which isn’t quite right. It’s one of those semi-intentional comedies in which you can go into a kind of Zen state of giggling, never quite knowing if you’re laughing with it or at it. And for this kind of ambiguity, there can be no better man than “Being” John Malkovich, that eye-rolling, lip-pursing, beret-wearing actor playing Patricia Highsmith’s famous character Tom Ripley, seen here in middle age and reaching the autumn of his career in Nietzschean ruthlessness.

Ripley's Game (2003)

There’s a weird sense of deja vu watching him. Ripley is a wealthy and charismatic American with an unlocatable drawl of an accent, living in some style in Italy. A fastidious connoisseur of fine art, books, furniture and food, he is nevertheless expert also in crime, and takes an ironic pleasure in despatching low-life scum who deserve no better. He comes to a party with a bottle of wine, which turns out to be an Amarone. Hmm – is he going to have human liver and fava beans with that? Should Sir Anthony Hopkins tire of playing fiction’s greatest serial killer, there is really only one man worthy to climb into his prison overalls.

Pending that, however, Malkovich plays the debonair criminal mastermind, seen first in Berlin. Mastering his distaste with a grimace, he has to do a shady business deal with an expatriate Cockney superlad played by Ray Winstone. It is obvious that Malkovich and Winstone are one of cinema’s great undiscovered comedy double-acts. “‘Ere,” snarls Ray, shoving his great plump face against Ripley’s. “Don’t try to do me over on this, right?” “Don’t threaten me,” replies Ripley in his calm and feathery whine. “I’m not the one wearing an earring.” Ooooh, get her.

Many years later Winstone turns up again, uninvited and unwelcome, at Ripley’s sumptuous palazzo; he demands help with a business competitor back in the Fatherland who badly wants topping. Eager to get Winstone out of his hair, or rather off his scalp, Ripley has one of his devilishly clever ideas. The night before, at the party to which he had brought along the Amarone, he had been insulted by a drunken picture-framer, Jonathan Trevanny, played by Dougray Scott, who had had the temerity to suggest that Ripley was just a rich Yank with no taste. What deliciously ingenious revenge it would be to involve this upstart in Winstone’s criminal scheme! So he induces Ray to offer Jonathan a vast sum of money to undertake an assassination in Berlin – money which the seriously ill and impecunious Jonathan badly needs.

Ripley's Game (2003)

So the clockwork of this “game” is set creakingly in motion, requiring as lubricant our tolerant suspension of whatever critical faculties we bring to the cinema with us. Why on earth should a serious villain entrust his money to a preposterous amateur, who has no aptitude for the task, and furthermore no training in the firearm and garrotte which are going to be the tools of his trade?

But on the other hand: why worry? Especially when John Malkovich is on hand, doing something camp in almost every scene to distract us from the fact that the plot makes zero sense. At one stage he is sitting up in bed, apparently embroidering some silk, a pansy task he abandons with the suavity of James Bond when it comes to embracing his beautiful Italian wife.

In another scene, the great man is shown removing a soufflé from an oven, wearing a stylish pair of oven-mitts and calling his creation a “hommage”. Very often he is shown wearing his beret and standing in a kind of male supermodel attitude, a cross between Frank Spencer and Ben Stiller’s creation Derek Zoolander, striking a pose as if on the catwalk and about to turn 180 degrees and sashay back to the curtain – his whole body doing one big physical pout.

The best moment is when he is bicycling around his airy grounds on an old-fashioned push-bike, his knees bobbing up and down as he pedals, and then has to brake to answer a call on his mobile phone. Why on earth is he doing this? Why is he doing any of it? You expect his bike to float above the ground: a hovercraft powered by sublime silliness.

Such, then, is the unshakeable sang-froid he brings to his secret career in violent crime, and having inveigled poor Jonathan into a terrible mess for his own amusement, he decides to help him out, which leads to the most bizarre scene. Ripley joins him aboard the Düsseldorf express, where the poor, hapless man is supposed to strangle one of Winstone’s many enemies with a lethal-looking metal cord – which at first I took to be Ripley’s bike lock. But Ripley takes over, killing the guy in the train lavatory and then despatching every single henchman who comes to look for them. That nasty train loo ends up packed with bodies, like the state-room scene in the Marx brothers’ Night at the Opera.

Can it be true that Liliana Cavani, who directed The Night Porter, is responsible for this rickety nonsense? It seems so, and not even John Malkovich’s bizarre bon mots and threats can quite make up for the slapstick and forced urbanity that make up the substance of this deeply strange thriller. “There’s something of the mudslide about you,” whinnies Ripley derisively to the dishevelled Winstone. But by the final credits Ripley and everyone else joins him in the long, messy slide into absurdity.

Ripley's Game Movie Poster (2003)

Ripley’s Game (2003)

Directed by: Liliana Cavani
Starring: John Malkovich, Lena Headey, Hanns Zischler, Ray Winstone, Uwe Mansshardt, Paolo Paoloni, Maurizio Lucà, Chiara Caselli, Lena Haadey
Screenplay by: Patricia Highsmith, Liliana Cavani
Production Design by: Francesco Frigeri
Cinematography by: Alfio Contini
Film Editing by: Jon Harris
Costume Design by: Fotini Dimou, Raffaella Fantasia, Alberto Verso
Set Decoration by: Verde Visconti
Art Direction by: Giovanni A. Scribano
Music by: Ennio Morricone
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language, some sexuality.
Yapım Stüdyosu: Fine Line Pictures
Distributed by: Fine Line Features
Release Date: September 4, 2003

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