In 2019, The Ringer dived deep into the sector of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” examining each the unconventional and the movie in a longform piece celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the movie’s unlock. Within the piece, author Haley Mlotek issues out that the Tom Ripley that readers meet within the novel isn’t the same as the Tom Ripley that audience meet when he seems within the movie. Within the novel, Mlotek writes, Tom is “already a petty felony” with a historical past of scamming and conning. Specifically, he continuously poses as an Inner Income Services and products employee and calls freelancers to inform them that they underpaid their taxes, whereupon he has them ship the owed “taxes” without delay to him.
But, within the movie, Tom has no longer somewhat entered the sector of crime and manipulation. As Mlotek wrote, “He is merely filling in as a piano accompanist for a chum, dressed in a borrowed Princeton jacket earlier than operating to make his shift as a rest room attendant at a lavish efficiency area. When the target audience leaves and earlier than the janitor catches him, he performs the piano at the level, indulging his fable of being watched.”
Tom has some evolving to do earlier than he turns into the kind of one who can take over the lifetime of anyone he has simply murdered. Reasonably, he starts simply as the kind of one who can fake to be a special model of himself than he’s — anyone who went to Princeton and used to be buddies with Dickie Greenleaf. This manner, audience get to watch as Tom turns into obsessive about Dickie, then with maintaining the charade of pretending to be Dickie.
