Bowers-Broadbent’s own austere Creed showed a more alert imagination.The same day at lunchtime, Martin Neary and his daughter, Alice, gave the first of four recitals devoted to Bach’s six solo cello suites and a selection of organ preludes and fugues. Playing from memory, Alice Neary was unusually light and rhythmic in the first and fifth cello suites. She avoided the usual sense of strain and found a particularly happy sense of flow in the first three movements of the first suite. In the fifth she favoured understatement, though she attacked the Courante vigorously, and her gravity in the celebrated Sarabande was deeply touching.Her father played the mighty Prelude and Fugue in B minor efficiently, with one contrast of manual in the slightly tedious knitting-needle section of the Fugue, but I like a slightly more spacious and more rugged style of playing in this work.. “I always thought it was better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,” reflects Tom, aka the talented Mr Ripley, at the end of Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel.

The book’s ice- cool inquiry into how Tom becomes that fake somebody involves two distinct journeys, one of which the movie, hopscotching through Rome, San Remo and Venice, turns into perhaps the most lushly beautiful we’ll see all year. The other, which burrows deep into self-annihilation and the pathology of desire, presents problems which not even the talented Mr Minghella has been able to solve. “I always thought it was better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,” reflects Tom, aka the talented Mr Ripley, at the end of Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel. The book’s ice- cool inquiry into how Tom becomes that fake somebody involves two distinct journeys, one of which the movie, hopscotching through Rome, San Remo and Venice, turns into perhaps the most lushly beautiful we’ll see all year. The other, which burrows deep into self-annihilation and the pathology of desire, presents problems which not even the talented Mr Minghella has been able to solve.
It begins in a Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park, where cultured but impecunious pianist, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), is mistaken for a Princeton princeling by shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf, who dispatches him to Europe on a mission to bring back his errant son, Dickie (Jude Law).

Dickie has been idling on the Amalfi coast with a boat named Bird and a bird named Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), tootling on his jazz saxophone and disporting himself raffishly around town.Minghella has shifted the novel’s time frame to 1958, the year of Vertigo (which it echoes several times) and right on the cusp of the dolce vita later immortalised by Fellini. This is Italy as pleasure-ground and bolt- hole for rich Americans eager to reinvent themselves. The first hour of The Talented Mr Ripley carefully nurtures an atmosphere of sultry apprehension. In the contrasting figures of Dickie and Tom a wry comedy – and intimations of tragedy – keep welling up. Our first sight of them together underlines the difference: Tom, mincing palely on the beach in horrible lime-green trunks, can’t compete with Dickie’s tanned playboy cool, nor do his corduroy jacket and Clark Kent spectacles compare favourably with the linen pants and spiffy blazers, which Dickie wears like a second skin.In Highsmith’s novel one never feels sure if Tom’s attitude to this golden boy is founded on attraction or antagonism (or a mixture of both), but there is absolute calculation at the moment when he decides to make Dickie disappear and then assume his identity.It’s here that Minghella makes his first significant departure from the book. Where Highsmith’s Ripley is a slippery amoral opportunist, Minghella softens him, not just as a social interloper but as a misguided suitor for Dickie’s love. When spoilt, brutish Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman) arrives in a thunderclap of bonhomie to commandeer Dickie’s attention, Tom’s idyll begins to shred.

His lack of experience becomes apparent: he can’t swim, he can’t ski, he doesn’t wear the right clothes. He discovers that the rich are not different but indifferent, and we are asked to feel his painful sense of exclusion from the charmed circle he fancied his own.The film wants us on Tom’s side in a way Highsmith never deigned to care about. The decision to humanise Ripley is understandable from Minghella’s point of view – he has a duty to the box-office – but it gets him into trouble once Dickie makes a sudden and violent exit from the picture. We spend the first hour helplessly seduced by Jude Law’s wonderful narcissism and moodiness, and his departure leaves a vacuum which Matt Damon is sadly incapable of filling.In the novel Marge complains that Ripley “isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life”, but Damon is just too farm-boy wholesome to convey the sexual ambiguity that’s required. He hasn’t the slyness or plausibility of Ripley, or his quicksilver chameleon ease.In Plein Soleil, Rene Clement’s 1960 adaptation of the novel, Alain Delon’s Ripley shrugged on Dickie Greenleaf’s identity as casually as he did his dove-grey three-button suit and white loafers He made it feel like a part he had been born to play.

While one can’t blame Matt Damon for failing to match Delon’s suavity, his struggle with the role intensifies as the story goes on.This is a pity, because in other ways Minghella has been skilful, and occasionally ingenious, in his tailoring of the movie. He changes Dickie from a would-be painter to a jazz musician, thus setting the classically- trained Ripley another challenge in his impersonation of a hip dude. Minghella’s collaboration with Gabriel Yared on a splendidly insinuating score complements the use of 1950s jazz classics, and echoes the idea of Ripley as a master of improvisation, as ready to warble “My Funny Valentine” in his Chet Bakerish tenor as he is to use a marble bust for an emergency weapon. The director and his editor, Walter Murch, also play with sound; there’s a lovely moment when Dickie tells Tom that he’s “spooky”, and the repetition of the last syllable is picked up by the hiss of a high-hat cymbal in the next scene’s jazz concert.Minghella has even invented a character of his own, a textile heiress named Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), who has escaped to Italy from America under a false identity. Her subterfuge provides an ironic chime with Ripley’s efforts to scale upwards, passing himself off as a member of the privileged expat class. Blanchett drifts in and out of the narrative, though she does get to wear an amazing ball gown (this is one of the great clothes movies) and is awarded a telling speech about having enough money to be able to despise money – if only she knew what it has cost Ripley. She’s also photographed more kindly than Gwyneth Paltrow, who dissolves messily under some very cruel angles in the second half.And talking of cruelty, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s heroically unpleasant Freddie is worth the price of admission all by himself.