Anthony Minghella kept Patricia Highsmith’s plot and changed its price: his Tom Ripley still gets away with murder, but the last killing costs him the one person who loved him. That choice is what still sets The Talented Mr. Ripley apart from every other Ripley on screen.

Tom Ripley begins the story in a borrowed jacket. A Princeton blazer, lent to him for a party where he is filling in at the piano, is enough for shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf to mistake the young New Yorker for a classmate of his son Dickie, and to pay him a thousand dollars to sail to Italy and bring the boy home. Matt Damon plays Tom, Jude Law plays Dickie, and Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel builds everything that follows on that first, almost accidental lie.

Dickie Greenleaf has no intention of going home. He lives in Mongibello, a fictional village on the Italian coast, on his father’s money, with a sailboat, a stack of jazz records and a girlfriend, Marge Sherwood, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who is writing a book about the place. Tom gets in by doing his homework. He studies jazz before he arrives because he knows Dickie loves it, presents himself as an old acquaintance from college, and for a while the plan works: Dickie takes him in, the reports to the father dry up, and the job of fetching the son quietly turns into the project of becoming his closest friend.

Then Dickie gets bored. Freddie Miles, a loud friend from his circle played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, sees through Tom at once, and Dickie starts making plans that do not include him. Out on a small boat off San Remo, with Dickie telling him the friendship is over, Tom kills him. What follows is the part of the story most people remember: Tom takes Dickie’s name, his signature, his allowance and a flat in Rome, keeps his own name for anyone who knew him as Tom, and spends the rest of the film running between the two lives.

Two more characters make that double life harder to hold. Meredith Logue, an American heiress played by Cate Blanchett, met Tom on his first day in Italy, when he introduced himself as Dickie Greenleaf; she is an invention of the screenplay, and the most dangerous witness in the film precisely because she only knows the false name. Peter Smith-Kingsley, played by Jack Davenport, is a musician in Venice whose part Minghella expanded well beyond the book, and who offers Tom something close to a life he could actually keep.

Around them the circle tightens. Freddie turns up in Rome asking where Dickie is, Inspector Roverini of the Italian police starts asking his own questions, and Herbert Greenleaf hires an American private detective, Alvin MacCarron, played by Philip Baker Hall, to find out what happened to his son. Marge, who never trusted Tom, is the one person close enough to notice the details. Every escape Tom engineers buys him a little time and costs him something he cannot get back.

From Highsmith’s page to Minghella’s script

Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, four years after Alfred Hitchcock had turned her first novel, Strangers on a Train, into a film, and she stayed with the character for decades, writing four sequels that readers now group as the Ripliad. Her Tom is a cheerful opportunist. The novel follows him into murder and out of it with almost no sense of consequence, and it closes with him in Greece, rich on Dickie’s money and worried only that policemen might be waiting for him at every port. That lightness, a killer the reader roots for almost against their will, is the engine of the book and the reason the character lasted through five novels.

Minghella, who wrote the screenplay as well as directing, kept the skeleton of the plot and changed its temperature. He made Tom’s attraction to Dickie explicit where the novel left it in the subtext, added Meredith, built up Peter, and rewrote the ending so that Tom, on a ship bound for Greece, kills Peter to keep his secret safe from Meredith. The film’s Ripley still walks free. He simply pays for it with the only relationship in which he was not pretending, and the story ends on that loss rather than on his escape.

That is the sharpest difference with Purple Noon, the 1960 French adaptation by René Clément with Alain Delon as Tom, and with the Ripleys that came later. Wim Wenders turned Ripley’s Game into The American Friend with Dennis Hopper; Liliana Cavani filmed the same novel under its own title with John Malkovich; Steven Zaillian’s black-and-white Ripley series for Netflix gave Andrew Scott eight episodes in the part. Each reads the character differently. Minghella’s is the version most interested in what the lies cost the liar.

The cast and the crew behind it

For Matt Damon the role came right after his breakthrough. He had won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Ben Affleck and had just played the soldier everyone was searching for in Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan. Ripley asked him for the opposite of that open, likeable screen persona: a young man for whom charm is a tool and every kindness has a purpose. Years before Jason Bourne and The Martian, it remains the darkest lead role of his early career.

The supporting cast reads, in hindsight, like a preview of the following decade. Jude Law won the BAFTA for best supporting actor and earned his first Oscar nomination as Dickie, the role that introduced him to a wide American audience. Gwyneth Paltrow arrived a few months after winning the best actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Cate Blanchett was coming off Elizabeth, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also appeared in Magnolia the same year, had a handful of scenes as Freddie long before his own Oscar for Capote.

Behind the camera, Minghella brought back much of the team from The English Patient, the film that had won nine Oscars, best picture and best director among them. John Seale was the cinematographer, Walter Murch edited and Gabriel Yared wrote the score, which later won the Critics’ Choice award for best score. Music is part of the plot rather than decoration: jazz is the language Tom learns in order to get close to Dickie, and the soundtrack sets Yared’s music alongside period jazz and Renato Carosone’s Neapolitan hit Tu vuò fà l’americano. The islands of Ischia and Procida, in the Bay of Naples, stood in for Mongibello, with further shooting in Rome and Venice.

Miramax and Paramount Pictures shared the film, with Paramount handling the North American release and Miramax International the rest of the world, on a budget of around $40 million. It opened in the United States on Christmas Day 1999, runs a little over two hours and fifteen minutes, and went on to five Academy Award nominations: best supporting actor for Law, best adapted screenplay for Minghella, best original score for Yared, plus costume design and art direction.

More than a quarter of a century on, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the adaptation that takes the character’s solitude most seriously. Highsmith’s Tom got away with murder and kept smiling for four more books; Minghella’s gets away with it and loses the only person who knew who he really was. Whether that reads as a betrayal of the novel or as its most interesting interpretation is the argument the film keeps starting, and it is why this version comes back into conversation every time a new Ripley arrives.