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A Talent for Murder Review: The Talented Ms. Highsmith Takes Another Stab at Tom Ripley
One-hundred and thirty-some years since movies were invented, I think we’ve all gotten the hang of suspension of disbelief. We have imaginations! We can close the gap between a historical person’s true eye color and a different hue for the actor portraying them. That’s especially when a film is already playing fast and loose with the facts, as is the case with the grimly fanciful A Talent for Murder’s portrait of mystery writer Patricia Highsmith at the end of her life.
Helen Mirren portrays the bilious Highsmith in a steel-wool wig and contact lenses that turn her peepers into pools of black – a distraction that hampers Mirren’s proven mastery at narrowing her eyes with palpable disdain. Into her home, a remote bunker in Switzerland, arrives a junior editor named Edward (Alden Ehrenreich), who is tasked with coaxing one more Tom Ripley novel out of the author. Racist, abrasive, and alcoholic, Highsmith derives great pleasure from dressing down hapless, uncertain Edward; more worrying yet, she might be homicidal? After all, the last person the New York office sent to check on her went missing, his suits still hanging neatly in her guest bedroom.
Them’s the makings of a twisty two-hander, but screenwriter Joanna Murray-Smith, adapting her own play, injects meta-shenanigans into the mix, as well. As Highsmith and Edward riff on a potential plot for another Ripley novel, Anton Corbijn (director of Control and the underrated A Most Wanted Man) films a version of that murder-mystery in progress, with Ehrenreich playing the ice-cold con artist and other people Edward has encountered in Switzerland – like Olivia Cooke’s charming, cash-strapped heiress, Clementine – popping up as characters in the imagined book who are close to their own reality. The deeper Highsmith and Edward burrow into the story, in a creative partnership that at times gives off a playful, almost erotic heat, the more that shades of Ripley seem to infect Edward in his real life. Or maybe it’s merely tapping into an innate malice Edward has been very good at keeping under wraps until now.
Playing the two faces of Edward/Tom, Ehrenreich gets to stretch his legs, tapping both the comic bumbling familiar from his breakout role in Hail, Caesar! and the ugliness he uncorked in Fair Play. Mirren’s characterization is less nuanced, but she appears to derive such glee, embodying this nasty piece of work, one can hardly begrudge her for letting a little spit fly as she chews the scenery.
Alas, her Highsmith is also the character who bears most the fingerprints of the film’s stage origins. Bound to her chalet, she doesn’t get cast in a part in the novel-in-development. Pity that – it’s where you find the most fun in this chic, seductive trifle. Corbin and his expert cinematographer Robbie Ryan, a repeat collaborator of Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Bird) and Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, Bugonia), shoot the palazzos of Italy in a way that made this American bumpkin swoon. That stylishness carries over to the work of costume designer Gabriella Pescucci and co-designer Uliva Pizzetti Braibanti. I don’t know how much their 80s-vibing vision of Tom in a turtleneck and shoulder-pad-packing blazer has to say about the nature of evil, but I enjoyed the hell out of ogling it.
A Talent for Murder2026, R, 106 min. Directed by Anton Corbijn. Starring Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson, Bríd Brennan, James Faulkner.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.The post A Talent for Murder Review: The Talented Ms. Highsmith Takes Another Stab at Tom Ripley appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.