The Talented Mr. Ripley: A-

Meet Tom Ripley (Matt Damon). He's handsome, smiles alot, has a great laugh, and is charming as hell. He enjoys Italian vistas and the company of other men (both fraternally...and, well, not). He's got a great ear for music (he professes to a jazz addiction) and an eye for decoration (though once, famously, one of his room designs ended in a bit of a fiasco). Plus, his social mannerisms are to die for!

Who wouldn't love to meet/befriend/lust after the looking-for-love Mr. Ripley I've just described above? Anyone missing their brain and a pair of peepers, that's who - or so says writer-director Anthony Minghella in his classically sun-dappled The Talented Mr. Ripley. The rich subtext to his answer also provides his film with its subversive charge: that in wanting to know the shiny, all surfaces "man" above, you fall directly into that man's trap; that in falling for a nobody with a gleaming smile and a twinkle in his dimples, you make him a somebody. Such is polished, sly thesis of Minghella's film: that deception, lying, and identity are all intrinsically linked into how you use the first two to perverse how peopele connect you with the latter.

But I jump ahead of myself. The tale of Tom Ripley, New York University piano tuner and all-around good guy, has been famous for more than 50 years since Patricia Highsmith, that cooly amoral creator of amoral men, first published the first of five Ripley novels (collectively known as "Ripliad"). What makes this latest adaptation of Ms. Highsmith's literary work such a fascinating one - certainly a picture with which one can take lessons in genial banter and split-second timing - is that the famed English Patient auteur strips away most of the early malice from the source material and builds from the ground up; crafting an origin story with a heady sense of knowing irony (the joke being that Mr. Ripley's origins are the very seeds of his murderous adventures: to find one). This may be that rare film whose curiousity is a doomed trait - since to discover the answer is to banish the demon - yet is played off with such well-structured effectiveness that such a weakness is lost in the shining light of Jude Law's bronzed skin or the glimmering Meditterranean.

The Talented Mr. Ripley begins with our as yet not quite evil hero tickling his ivory keys for a bunch o' rich folk. Two of these folk are the parents of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), a playboy heir lost to the "depravity" of Southern Europe. Dickie's parents would love to see him brought home but have yet to find a willing emissary. Enter our piano player, decked out in a borrowed Princeton jacket, and soon the worried parents have assumed several things at once - that Tom knew their son at school, that Tom is a perfectly responsible young lad - and sent Mr. Ripley off to Italy to recover the errant young jazz-fancier. Skip ahead and Tom has insinuated himself into the rich Park Avenue-transplants that Dickie surrounds himself with. Among these are Marge (Gwenyth Paltrow), Dickie's girlfriend (though he cheats mercilessly), Meredith (Cate Blanchett), a rather startlingly pleasing young textile heiress, and Freddie Miles (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). All together these wealthy guardians of society have quite the time together - with Ripley included - but events are stirring in the horizon to capsize their decadent, metaphorical, boat of sin and glamor.

If I sound abstract, it's intentional - because the split-second, teetering dominoes-effect catastrophes that occur are best left to one's imagination and sudden revelation. Anthony Minghella spins a taunt, paradoxically revolting and ravishing story from plain old class-envy but his more admirable accomplishments are in the details (since that is where the devil, our Tom, resides). The script charges the air between Dickie and Tom with eroticism and mis-begotten lust while skewering the pockets between this class intruder and everyone else with suspicion and jealousy (Hoffman's beady eyes are twin jewels of disgust and barely contained, barely understood one would think, hate). With such hardly mentioned, healthily registered contempt between him and the world he so desires, why wouldn't Mr. Tom Ripley end up the way he is: "trapped in the basement" of his own demons, locked, without a key. As films go, Minghella parlays such an obvious idea (pander to audience sympathies) into a movie where we despise the serial-killing, identity-theiving protagonist every moment until we don't; where Matt Damon's enlivened performance turns a remorseless psychopath into a fallen angel of sorts.

Ultimately the clever, entrapping machinations of The Talented Mr. Ripley are enough to keep the audience hooked. And the cast's work is like icing on the cake. Law and Paltrow, as two naieve brats playing house, plaster on their characters' necessary emotional hollowness until their very existence seems futile - a fact the director exploits with subtle skill. Blanchett turns in flawless work, her note-for-note debutante made into a perfectly realized creation. And Damon, his face working overtime to get at what makes Mr. Ripley tick, reaches an applause-worthy high (even if he, no thanks to an occasionally too shallow conception, can't quite express the driving vanity of his character's bloody escapades). Brought together then strung apart over continents and 138 minutes, these waifish personalities serve as fodder and tender (and sadly, even once or twice as love interest) to the burning-bright flame of Anthony Minghella's fascinating subject; a fire stoked and managed with cutting undercurrents of sexuality and empathy that makes it all the more searing and memorable.