Hollywood remake of the first of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels, originally made in France, under the title Purple Noon, forty years earlier. (The remake is done in period: Chet Baker and Charlie Parker are the coolest, man.) Clearly, writer-director Anthony Minghella does not owe his inspiration to a desire for greater fidelity to the novel. René Clément's version may have had a conventional (though very clever) ending that wasn't true to the book, but in Minghella's version the entire conception of the hero, or antihero if you'd rather, is not true to it. Which would be no crime in itself if it made a different kind of sense. Which it doesn't. And the ending is scarcely improved by being left up in the air. Minghella's main creative contribution is to homosexualize the hero (Matt Damon), so that the initial killing becomes a spur-of-the-moment affair motivated by things like jealousy, rejection, hurt feelings, even retaliatory self-defense. (If the new sexual orientation was the way Minghella wanted to go, he might have found richer soil in the fourth novel of the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, where the hero dons a dress and high heels for an escapade in Berlin.) The killer's talents as a mimic and a forger, laid out as givens early on, now come in conveniently handy for the purposes of stepping into the identity of the dead man. Which does away with one of the most memorable sections of the earlier version: the studious details of the transformation. The different motive, coupled with the different, tortured personality of the killer (no longer an ice-water sociopath), infuse the proceedings with a new purposelessness. And Minghella's pacing, carried over from The English Patient, threatens continually to bring things to a standstill, sinking into the luxurious cocktail-swilling lifestyle of affluent Americans abroad. (Admittedly, the Australian actress Cate Blanchett does a note-perfect debutante accent, in a squanderingly subordinate role.) Things pick up a little when the polizia come into it, and there are sufficient remnants of Highsmith's genius to ward off total boredom. But barely. Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd