Spring Round-Up: Writing as Opposed to Recommending - Page 7

I don't think Farrell could "open up" a thug like this without violating the premise of the character; he's not someone who's going to spill his guts about why he is the way he is. When we see a sexy gorilla like him on the street, however, we may figure it's better to avoid his gaze, but with Farrell we get to watch from a safe remove the sociopathic poetry and ballet the tough guy embodies. (He's more convincing and interesting than sexy-taciturn Russell Crowe as the tamed musclebound beast in L.A. Confidential (1997).) We can't get inside Farrell's character, but we can become aware of what's inside us that responds to him. And Farrell has more skill at playing this kind of arousing goon than anyone since the very young James Cagney, that hale, bright-eyed, dancing-and-crowing little bantam of a psychopathic Irish-American gangster.

Intermission is all about bad boys, on both sides of the law, and of all ages, and how some of them find their way to a more settled, productive existence in the company of women, and some of them don't. It's character-filled and episodic, but also tightly conceived in a literary way. (A rock-throwing little boy is an effective symbol of the raging impulses all the men in the movie are prey to.) But maybe it's a tad too neat, finally, and too cute. More faint praise, I'm afraid--I enjoyed it but apart from what Colin Farrell brought to it, it represents what the moviemakers already knew rather than anything they discovered in the process of making the movie.

Finally, from the DVD bin: Ripley's Game (2002), directed by Liliana Cavani and starring John Malkovich as the same character played by Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) but later in life (both movies are adapted from books by Patricia Highsmith). Malkovich establishes from the very start Ripley's peculiar combination of narcissistic finickiness and indifference to common morality. His sense of himself functions in the place of scruples, but at the same time Ripley's identity is permanently unbalanced. His talent is to use his lack of balance as an advantage in unstable criminal situations. He's the ultimate improvisationalist who goes after what he wants regardless of the consequences, and then becomes what he has to become in order to turn the resulting fiascos into successes.

Malkovich is very precise here. You can see something inside him snap when a man to whom he's trying to sell some illegally-obtained Renaissance drawings refers to him and his criminal associate as "you people." Later when an English neighbor, not realizing he's in the room, puts him down for being a typical American with more money than taste, Ripley doesn't accept the man's embarrassed situation-saving cordiality. He moves toward the poor man, meeting each succeeding bland remark with an ambiguous-but-confrontational single word: "Meaning?" I don't think anybody but Malkovich could so simply have given that word the tense combination of aggression and neurotic defensiveness, a feeling that Ripley when pricked is capable of almost anything in reaction and is beyond caring about reacting publicly.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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