The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

Cate Blanchett as: Meredith Logue

Director: Anthony Minghella
Selected Cast: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law & Philip Seymour Hoffman
Written by: Anthony Minghella (Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name)
Release Year: 1999
Genre: Crime / Drama / Thriller
MPAA Rating: R

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The 1950s. Manhattan lavatory attendant, Tom Ripley, borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party. When the wealthy father of a recent Princeton grad chats Tom up, Tom pretends to know the son and is soon offered $1,000 to go to Italy to convince Dickie Greenleaf to return home. In Italy, Tom attaches himself to Dickie and to Marge, Dickie’s cultured fiancée, pretending to love jazz and harboring homoerotic hopes as he soaks in luxury. Besides lying, Tom’s talents include impressions and forgery, so when the handsome and confident Dickie tires of Tom, dismissing him as a bore, Tom goes to extreme lengths to make Greenleaf’s privileges his own.

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Photoshoot; Cate Blanchett with her husband, Andrew Upton on the featurette
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Quotes from Cate Blanchett

  • On why she accepted a minor role for the film: “I felt it was somewhere I hadb’t really gone before. I feel there’s something incredibly good but lightweight – in the good sense of the word – about Meredith. I must admit that I welcomed that when I was in the middle of shooting Elizabeth.” (Sydney Morning Herald, February 2000)
  • “It was intensely painful for Meredith to fall in love with someone who didn’t return her affection. I felt she would look back on that when she was 50 and realize it was the turning point in her life. And I relished playing that.” (Interview, January 2000)

Quotes from Others

  • Anthony Minghella:
    — On creating and expanding the part specifically for Cate Blanchett: “I first met Cate Blanchett during the filming of Elizabeth. News travels fast in the small community of filmmakers. Ralph Fiennes had advertised her marvels from the set of Oscar and Lucinda, and now Shekhar Kapur, Elizabeth’s director, was full of her. I had written the small role of Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr Ripley, a wealthy and gauche young American on her first visit to Europe.
    At a casting meeting I had idly mentioned that I was looking for someone with the same qualities I had seen in Blanchett both in Oscar and Lucinda and Paradise Road. Her agent suggested I asked Cate herself. A week later we were sitting at Peg’s Club in Covent Garden, where the scalped and peeled look she carried while filming Elizabeth made her look like a convalescent from a serious illness. Her enthusiasm for Ripley was so unbridled that I panicked and worried if, not for the first time, an agent had encouraged a client to go for a meeting for a smaller role on the basis that they might be offered the main one. This thought began to paralyse our conversation until I wondered aloud whether she knew who had already been cast in the film, and she rattled off the names of Matt Damon, Jude Law and Paltrow.
    I went home entranced and started writing more scenes for her character. Every time I picked up the screenplay the part of Meredith got a little bigger. Blanchett’s performance in the film owes as much to the screwball antics of Lucille Ball as it does to the classical dimension Geoffrey Rush spoke of when describing her debut performance in Electra. She’s a natural comedienne, a whole body actor whose love of dance is betrayed in the physicality she brings to each character. But it is her voice, rich and thrillingly able to transform accent and register, which marks her out as the real thing.”
    — “[Cate] Blanchett is the Bach of acting, giving the lie to the myth that artists have to lead eccentric or destructive lives in order to be any good.”
    — “What’s astonishing to me is how she gives every moment of the performance some inflection. Here it’s the angularity of Meredith, all the elbows and knees. I felt as if she was in full sail. She’s also oddly comic: so I feel as if she’s a tradegian with a fool’s mask on, or a fool with a tradegian’s heart. She’s a filmmakers’ actress in so far as you go to any director and ask about Cate Blanchett and they immediately become animated.”
  • Gwyneth Paltrow:
    — “Cate [Blanchett] is just so brilliant. I can’t wait to work with her again. She really is one of the actresses I admire the most.”

Trivia & Facts

  • Filmed in Italy and USA.
  • Nominated for five Academy Awards, more accolades here.
  • Cate Blanchett earned her second consecutive BAFTA nomination, this time for Best Supporting Actress.
  • Cate Blanchett and Jude Law worked together in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004).
  • Is based on the novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. There are an additional four novels which follow ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’, they are ‘Ripley Underground’, ‘Ripley’s Game’, ‘The Boy Who Followed Ripley’, and ‘Ripley Under Water’.
  • 16 years since the film’s release, Cate Blanchett would be in another film, Carol (2015), based on a Patricia Highsmith novel.
  • Anthony Minghella originally wanted Tom Cruise for the role of Ripley but after seeing Good Will Hunting (1997), he decided to cast Matt Damon.
  • The character Meredith Logue was invented for the film and was not in the Patricia Highsmith’s novel. When Anthony Minghella learned that Cate Blanchett was interested in playing the small supporting role of Meredith, as opposed to the female lead, he duly expanded the role to get her on board.
  • The first scene Cate Blanchett shot for the film was when Meredith first meets Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Peter (Jack Davenport) at the cafe at Piazza di Spagna.
  • Cate Blanchett and Matt Damon also worked together in The Monuments Men (2014).

Los Angeles Premiere, 12 December 1999