Ripley's Game (Liliana Cavani, 2002)

Dougray Scott and John Malkovich in Ripley's Game

Cast: John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Heady, Chiara Caselli, Sam Blitz, Paolo Paoloni, Evelina Meghnagi, Lutz Winde, Wilfred Xander. Screenplay: Charles McKeown, Liliana Cavani, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Production design: Francesco Frigeri. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: Ennio Morricone. 

Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game was filmed before, by Wim Wenders, as The American Friend (1977), a movie that's more Wenders than Highsmith. When I saw that version, as witty and accomplished as it is, I commented that it made me want to see the story done more slickly and conventionally, which is exactly what Liliana Cavani does in her version. The novel was Patricia Highsmith's third about the chameleonic and psychotic Tom Ripley. Most of us have seen one or more of the versions of her first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, whether in the versions filmed by René Clément (as Plein Soleil or Purple Noon) in 1960, by Anthony Minghella (under the original title) in 1999, or by Steven Zaillian (as Ripley) in the TV series in 2023. But few of us have seen the film version of the intermediate novel, Ripley Under Ground, a critical and commercial failure directed by Roger Spottiswoode in 2005, in which we learn that Ripley has flourished on his ill-gotten gains and is further enriching himself as a dealer in art forgeries. So Cavani's Ripley's Game begins rather abruptly, with Ripley (John Malkovich) engaged in a shady transaction and yet another murder. But more important, the character of Ripley has changed: Malkovich's Ripley doesn't have the specious charm of the ones played by Alain Delon, Matt Damon, or Andrew Scott -- maybe because he doesn't need it, being already on top of the world. This lack of charm and vulnerability is a problem for the film to overcome, especially when it invests some of those traits in the film's chief victim, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott). Trevanny should elicit our sympathy: He's dying of leukemia and has an attractive wife (Lena Heady) and small son (Sam Blitz), and he desperately wants to leave them well off after his death. Unfortunately, Ripley overhears Trevanny scoffing at Ripley's wealth and taste at a dinner party, and immediately sets out to get even. What follows is the familiar Ripleyan snarl of schemes and murders. And in the end, it demonstrates what was wrong with my reaction to Wenders's version: Slickness and convention aren't enough to make a really good film, sometimes what you need is an auteur.

Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988)

Michelle Pfeiffer and John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons

Cast: Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, Swoosie Kurtz, Keanu Reeves, Mildred Natwick, Uma Thurman, Peter Capaldi. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, based on his play and a novel by Choderlos de Laclos. Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot. Production design: Stuart Craig. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: George Fenton. 

"Wicked" is a word that has lost a good deal of its pejorative quality, and not just in Boston where it became slang meaning "excellent." There's an attractive quality to wickedness that's lacking in words like "evil." Which is not to say that the wicked pair of the Marquise de Marteuil (Glenn Close) and the Vicomte de Valmont (John Malkovich) aren't reprehensible, but that they fascinate us with their sly wit and determined pursuit of their aims. Close in particular makes the marquise so delicious that there's a considerable shock when she self-destructs upon the failure of her plans, and perhaps the audience even has a glimmer of pity for her final comeuppance. The choice of Malkovich to play Valmont was controversial: He's an actor known for eccentric roles, not the type for a suave seducer. And yet he gives Valmont a snake-like fascination -- so snaky that at one point he even hisses at Swoosie Kurtz's Madame de Volanges -- that makes his conquests of Uma Thurman's Cécile and Michelle Pfeiffer's Madame de Tourvel plausible. He also brings out the vulnerable side of Valmont, so that we find it credible that this implacably rakish figure could find himself undone by this conquest of Madame de Tourvel. But then again, who wouldn't find themselves undone by Michelle Pfeiffer, then at the early peak of her career? In casting Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears followed the lead of Milos Forman, who cast Amadeus (1984) with American actors instead of the British ones usually called on for costume dramas set in Europe, a move that shocked some critics -- especially the British. (The exception in Dangerous Liaisons is Peter Capaldi as Valmont's henchman Azolan, and his Scottish accent stands out oddly.) The irony here is that Forman was at work on his own version of the Choderlos de Laclos novel, called Valmont (1989), which was doomed by being released a year after Frears's film. Dangerous Liaisons won Oscars for Christopher Hampton's screenplay, Stuart Craig's art direction and Gérard James's set decoration, and for James Acheson's costumes. Close and Pfeiffer were nominees, as was George Fenton for a score that blended nicely with excerpts from Vivaldi, Handel, Bach, and Gluck.

Burn After Reading (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2008)

George Clooney in Burn After Reading

Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rasche, J.K. Simmons, Oleg Krupa. Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Music: Carter Burwell.

One of the Coen Brothers' goofy dark comedies, and perhaps the darkest if not the goofiest, with a couple of fatalities that tend to take the levity out of the film. Mostly it's a showcase for the comic skills of some usually serious actors, with Brad Pitt the standout as Chad, an addle-brained employee of a gym who happens upon a disc that he thinks is full of government secrets he can sell to its owner for a reward. It doesn't work out well for him or anyone else. This is the Coens at their chilliest, with no one you much want to root for.

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)

John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich

Craig Schwartz: John Cusack
John Horatio Malkovich: John Malkovich
Lotte Schwartz: Cameron Diaz
Maxine Lund: Catherine Keener
Dr. Lester: Orson Bean
Floris: Mary Kay Place
Charlie: Charlie Sheen

Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Cinematography: Lance Acord
Production design: K.K. Barrett
Music: Carter Burwell

I find it interesting that David Fincher has a cameo -- as the critic Christopher Bing in the documentary about Malkovich's puppeteering career -- in Being John Malkovich, because Fincher and Spike Jonze seem to me to represent two distinct career paths in contemporary filmmaking. Both came out of the heyday of music videos, with their quirky and extravagant special effects and camera tricks, but Fincher has followed a more "commercial" direction with adaptations of bestselling novels like Gone Girl (2014) and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011). His films are fine ones, with professional polish and careful attention to storytelling. He seems to me a major director who subsumes himself into the material, the way such classic studio-era directors as William Wyler and George Cukor did. Jonze, however, has steered a steady course into the offbeat and personal through his four features. Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Her (2013) are all marked by an irrepressibly eccentric imagination, an ability to think things not often thought, to imagine the impossible and make it plausible. The collaboration with the similar sensibility of Charlie Kaufman on the first two films suggested that the writer had the imagination and the director the skill to visualize it, but Jonze's later films show him to be a great assimilator, able to merge the ideas of his writers and the interpretations of his actors into a special and unique whole. Being John Malkovich plays with its themes of power and sexuality brilliantly. Jonze and Kaufman affirm the value of a hungry imagination with their special insights into the way we are all striving to transcend the limitations imposed by consciousness confined in a body. We probably wouldn't choose to be John Malkovich, but the possibility of escaping into someone else, even for only 15 minutes, tantalizes us.