Blogical Conclusion

IT’S NOT A KILLING IF IT’S MURDER

APR 26, 2008 - THE WAY ANTHONY MINGHELLA SAW IT, Tom Ripley merely killed Dickie Greenleaf. When the director adapted Patricia Highsmith’s nasty little novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, he shaped the elimination of Dickie’s character as an accident. A crime of passion, the courts would have called it. Dickie’s gotten tired of Tom and his constant mooching. “I think we’ve seen enough of each other for a while,” is one of the kinder things Dickie says on the boat that will turn out to be his final resting place, and Tom’s adamant refusal to take a hint results in crueller name-calling: that Tom can be a leech, that Tom can be quite boring. The plangent score over Tom’s equally plaintive face leaves us in no doubt about the direction our sympathies are to be routed.

Poor Tom. Poor homosexual Tom with an unrequited crush on Dickie. Poor helpless Tom who is now being slapped around by a bullying Dickie. And then, an incensed Tom, a provoked Tom who grabs an oar and slams it into Dickie’s head. Blood begins to cascade down Dickie’s face. Tom is horrified, but Dickie launches himself on his inadvertent attacker, pinning him to the floor of the boat and screaming, “I’m going to kill you.” His face, already twisted with rage, is rendered positively demonic by the unceasing drops of blood that are now leaking onto Tom, who’s yelling “Stop, stop, stop, stop” – and when Tom finally pushes Dickie off and pummels him to death with that oar, we shake our heads at the sad turn of events that caused Tom Ripley to kill Dickie Greenleaf.

But the way René Clément saw it in Plein Soleil (the French adaptation of the same novel), Tom Ripley didn’t just kill Dickie Greenleaf (here called Philippe) – he murdered him. By the time the event is to occur, Tom (Alain Delon) and Philippe (Maurice Ronet) have already been discussing its possibility in a what-if conversation on that boat. Philippe knows Tom isn’t who he says he is, so he goads the impostor, “So you kill me. What then?” Tom reveals his plan, that he’ll first dispose of the body, then forge Philippe’s signature and write himself a new life with untold riches. Philippe challenges Tom to a game of poker. If Tom wins, he stands to gain $2500. Philippe deliberately loses, and yet Tom doesn’t want the $2500. Hell, he doesn’t want the $5000 that Philippe ups the offer to. He wants it all.

And so he sticks a knife into Philippe’s chest. You’d think the suddenness of the action would be complemented by a sharp burst of music – all we’ve heard so far is the lapping murmur of the ocean – but there’s just Philippe’s gnarled death-croak of an “Aaah.” He keels over. And now the soundtrack explodes with dramatic chords and odd rumblings of percussion – as if informing us that the crime isn’t as significant as its consequence – and the sea too explodes, with the fury of an impotent witness. (In contrast, in Minghella’s take on this scene, the violence is contained within the boat; the waters stay serene throughout.) As Tom prepares to get rid of Philippe’s body, he also tries to take control of the craft, but seeing that it’s apparently gotten itself a mind of its own, he downs a mouthful of liquor. (He may not be able to steady the boat, but at least himself he can steady.)

He wobbles over to the far end and fetches an anchor, which he straps onto Philippe – but as he tosses his victim overboard, he’s knocked into the water. The camera plunges into the choppy sea, recording Tom’s flailing attempts to clamber back aboard, and when he does, it’s back on the deck, now looking askance at Philippe’s body being dragged alongside the boat, still attached through a length of cable. Tom loosens the cable, flings it behind, and the body finally sinks. If Hitchcock, in Torn Curtain, showed us how difficult it was to kill a man, we see in this earlier film some sort of corollary: how difficult it is to dispose of his body once you’ve killed that man. After his exertions, Tom takes his shirt off, towels himself dry, and rewards himself with a voracious bite out of a fruit he finds in the cabin. He’s clearly taken the first step towards satisfying his hungers.

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