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Synopsis: Young Thomas Ripley (Matt Damon) is hired by an industrialist to go to Italy and retrieve the industrialist's wayward son, Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law). Once there, Ripley discovers that he likes the life that Dickie leads and manouevers to become part of it, all the while fixating on Dickie himself. When Dickie ultimately rejects Ripley, Ripley kills him and endeavors to step into Dickie's identity, weaving a web of lies, deceits, and murders as he goes.

Somewhere along the line, this all went horribly wrong. The Talented Mr. Ripley seemed to have everything going for it: a superb source novel, a good cast, and a director fresh from an Oscar winning triumph. I blame it on that pesky director. Anthony Minghella's previous film, The English Patient, is, to my mind, the single worst movie ever to win Best Picture at the Oscars. I was leery of him adapting Patricia Highsmith's classic crime novel and all of my fears were vindicated. What we have here is a self-important director who doesn't trust his material. As a result, he infuses it with an annoying artiness that begins to wear on the audience after a while. In other words, the movie begins to drone. Fully twenty minutes before the end of the movie, I was looking at my companion's watch and wondering how much longer it would take for the Mr. Ripley of the title to make good his final escape from the circumstances.

All of which is too damned bad, because Ripley is one of the more interesting characters in the history of crime fiction. Most series characters (there are five Ripley novels) are detectives or other do-gooders. Ripley is a bisexual sociopath. The horrifying beauty of Highsmith's novels is the way she causes the reader to identify with Ripley even as he commits horrifying crimes. Minghella never approaches that. He tries to take advantage of Matt Damon's all-American good looks to pull it off, but Damon's performance presents Ripley as a fairly unlikeable character, and his crimes, which are at something of a distance on the printed page, are horrifyingly enacted in the film. The result is a serious downer of a movie in which the audience is perfectly aware of its misplaced identification with Ripley (or rather, the film's attempt to misplace that identification) and doesn't much like it at all.