If you’re at all familiar with Tom Ripley, you know that he’s not the kind of character you want to get too comfortable with – especially if you have something that he covets. A nice apartment, for example. Maybe an art collection. Or merely enough money to allow you to enjoy both.
If you think otherwise, just remember what happens to the character Dickie Greenleaf in Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. For anyone who hasn’t read the novel, or who hasn’t seen any of the various movie or television adaptations of it, revealing Dickie’s fate would be a spoiler. Let’s just say it involves a rowboat excursion and a wayward oar.
Ripley endures as Highsmith’s most well-known creation. He first emerged in 1955, in the novel that involves his relationship with Dickie. And over the next several years, he showed up four more times, his final appearance coming in 1991’s Ripley Under Water.
Since Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, there was little chance that Ripley would be revived a sixth time. But the very possibility of that occurring was what inspired the Australian playwright Joanna Murray-Smith to write her stage play Switzerland. And now, Murray-Smith has adapted her play into a screenplay titled “A Talent for Murder,” which the Dutch director Anton Corbijn has turned into a feature film.
The setting is Highsmith’s house somewhere in the Swiss alps. She resides there alone, a recluse resentful that she’s never been accepted by the New York literary scene. She blames her plight on the presumption that she writes genre novels and maybe because she’s a lesbian. She ignores the fact that she’s also a nasty person who tends to spout racist and antisemitic nonsense.
Then one day a young guy, Edward Ridgeway, shows up. Played by Alden Ehrenreich, Ridgeway has been sent by his employer, a New York publisher, to convince Highsmith to revisit Ripley one last time. Yet Highsmith, played as a combative harridan by the great Helen Mirren, insists she is done with Ripley.
And so the battle begins. Ridgeway is ambitious and Highsmith is unyielding. But, too, Ridgeway is clever, which intrigues Highsmith. Besides, she loves a good challenge – and so she makes a proposal: If Ridgeway can come up with a good story, she’ll sign the contract that he has been waving in her face.
A Talent for Murder then becomes a film within a film. For as the two begin shaping a plot, we see the story play out on screen. A version of Ripley, also played by Ehrenreich, spots a young mark, an heiress (played by Olivia Cooke). And soon he is like a tiger shark set on devouring a lump of chum.
What’s interesting is that the fictional heiress character is based on an actual woman whom Ridgeway had met previously on a train (coincidentally, Highsmith wrote the novel Strangers on a Train). As Corbijn’s film progresses, the two tales, each involving three characters, gradually converge.
And as they do, the threat of something sinister is ever present. For one thing, Ridgeway isn’t the first person dispatched to meet Highsmith. A previous junior editor had mysteriously disappeared. For another, Corbijn never lets us forget the central set piece in Highsmith’s book-lined home: a collection of knives and pistols that hangs on the wall.
Mirren, four time an Oscar nominee and a winner in 2007 for The Queen, perfectly personifies Highsmith’s bedraggled, ill-tempered nature. Ehrenreich, who starred as the young Han Solo in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, proves to be both a convincingly naïve Ridgeway and a murderous Ripley. Moreover, the two play off each other well.
Yet for all its imagination, in the end Corbijn never really finds a way to make Murray-Smith’s screenplay into something worthy either of Highsmith or Ripley. Despite the reference to the missing editor and some handy knife play, A Talent for Murder ends up being little more than a collection of intense moments that limp to a conclusion.
Then again, that’s pure Ripley. Never one to crave attention, he likes to commit his murders with as little fuss, and attention, as possible.