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FILMTRACKS.COM
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VIEW 
Review of The Talented Mr. Ripley (Gabriel Yared)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... only if you seek the competent and rousing selection of
standard jazz pieces from the 1950's, the introverted and reflective
score by Gabriel Yared largely overwhelmed by that surrounding
material.
Avoid it... if you expect the score to trend towards Yared's more palatable work for Message in a Bottle or City of Angels rather than reprising the chilly atmosphere of The English Patient.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Talented Mr. Ripley: (Gabriel Yared) Director
Anthony Minghella, an industry favorite in the late 1990's after his
Oscar win for The English Patient, made several alterations to
the story of The Talented Mr. Ripley from Patricia Highsmith's
novel to force music as an integral part of the narrative. An all-star
cast is placed in the setting of 1950's Italy, caught up in experiencing
the good life defined by women, jazz, and alcohol. Jealousy eventually
turns a rather straightforward story into one of personal crisis, and
the title character is the subject of much transformation over the
course of the story. He navigates his desire to live amongst the wealthy
playboys of the era but finds himself increasingly displeased with how
that life turns out, leading him to become a cold killer seeking
retribution both willingly and otherwise. There is a very sickly morbid
sense of humor that runs through The Talented Mr. Ripley, and
don't expect the outcome to make you feel any better about mankind.
Critics lauded the picture, making it one of Minghella's three extremely
well-embraced pictures of that era. With one of the central characters
performing the saxophone in the film, the production made extensive use
of jazz from the era as American society makes the journey to Italy for
the purposes of the altered story, with numerous pieces selected for the
film as source music and sometimes involving performances by the primary
actors. The soundtrack intentionally juxtaposes that 1950's-centered
style of jazz with the almost completely disparate, classically-inclined
orchestral score infused with a touch of Italian flavor. The director's
strong collaboration with Gabriel Yared, who also won an Oscar for
The English Patient, led to the composer's involvement in the
crafting of this score from early pre-production planning. Like The
English Patient, the original music of The Talented Mr.
Ripley required significant navigation around the infusion of the
integral jazz. Perhaps due to that obvious role of the jazz on screen,
voters granted Yared additional Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Despite the acclaim for this soundtrack, Yared's music for the film is far more subtle and embroiled in somber, creepy suspense, the orchestral interjections amongst the far flashier songs creating problems on album. While Yared ultimately saw over 50 minutes of his music utilized in the picture, only about 25 minutes represented it out of sequence on the long-standing album that was otherwise dominated by the jazz, the two personalities wrestling the album back and forth between them with several awkward transitions in the process. Yared's score represents the turbulent and unsettling mood of Ripley's psychotic but oddly affable character as he disintegrates with fast and furious high points and shrouded, sinister lows. So chilly is its tone that it could not be any more different than the impressively engaging, romantic music that Yared had just provided in 1999 for Message in a Bottle. Despite Minghella's usual raves about Yared's part in the production (the two, in fact, collaborated on one of the score's main themes), the composer's contribution is ultimately hamstrung by its own indecision about how to balance the various facets of the location's beauty, the demented humor of the killings, the child-like innocence bestowed upon Ripley's persona at times, the occasional tangential references to the jazz, and the plethora of suspense in between all of the other styles. The score is introverted and reflective, making use of a full orchestra while lacing portions with celesta, glockenspiel, vibraphone, and marimba for the lead character's various facets, saxophone for the pertinent secondary character, and accordion and mandolin for the Italian setting. Vocals are also integral, ranging from an outright operatic presence for one pivotal theme and moment to a range of eerie, breathy performances meant mainly to accentuate the suspense with shades of dissonance. Yared isn't shy about applying his instrumentation in unpleasant ways in this work, the romanticism teased by both primary themes in their most pleasant renditions often tortured into unsettling tones throughout, especially after the introductory third. To casual listeners, the themes may not state themselves with enough outward and obvious melodicism to stick in memory, but Yared spends nearly every cue in the score developing these ideas to their wicked ends. The main theme of The Talented Mr. Ripley represents Ripley's somewhat aimless character. It exists in two extremely different variants, one of which comprising the slightly curious, prickly, frantic, nearly Arabic-tilted personality that is explored in "Crazy Tom" and "Ripley." Yared clearly meant this version of the identity to reflect the sanity lost in the character, and it threatens to define the score in context with its Bernard Herrmann resemblance. The default version of that theme has its origins in the child-like lullaby heard on cello and celesta in the "Syncopes" cues and informing both the opera performance and the score's default original song performed vocally by Sinead O'Connor in the lovely and gripping "Lullaby for Cain." Representing the turmoil within Ripley and his dissatisfaction with his identity, O'Connor's voice is both innocent enough to capture his childhood fantasies and rough enough at the corners to adequately portray his darker inclinations. The second theme of the score is equally engrained throughout, coloring the location and the success associated with the jazz-performing character that Ripley kills. Heard in its most romantic form for "Italia," this idea permeates the work just as impressively and provides the only representation of Yared's ethnic-associated tendencies for the region. Its whimsical, descending figures lead directly into the suspense material, as in "Cain & Abel." More impressive is the occasional incorporation of the saxophone to lace this material with connections to the source songs. A third idea for the humor of the killings is introduced in "I Hate You" and summarized in "Mischief" and was a late addition by Yared to supply some jilted, off-kilter caper element seemingly inspired around the margins by Henry Mancini, and the technique simply sounds out of place in this context. These ideas are often conveyed in the slew of contemplative cues in which Yared barely advances them, requiring close attention for full appreciation. The outright killing and corpse-related moments are unpleasant washes of dissonance using the same instrumentation but straying into the composer's horror element. The full score exposes just how troubling the darker half can be; much of this material simply compounds the bleak suspense of the whole affair, especially in the greater role for the dissonant vocalizations. On the original 1999 album, the jazz songs dominate. The monaural bounciness of many of these classic pieces is so contrary in style to Yared's material that the sum is nearly intolerable in conjunction. Had the lengthy tracks by the Guy Barker International Quintet and others been condensed into one section of the album, perhaps the score half could have been more easily appreciated for its subtleties. The most unfortunate turn in the 1999 album comes between "Crazy Tom" and Charlie Parker's "Ko-Ko," the first of which Yared's strongly vibrant twist of the string section for the Ripley theme and the latter perhaps the most upbeat jazz piece on the product. In 2024, Music Box Records tackled Yared's score alone for expansion, supplying the full 53-minute film presentation of the film recordings alone on one CD and a combination of the album's suite arrangements, the opera performance of "Lullaby for Cain," and a variety of alternate and demo takes on a second CD. The opera recording is the key addition on the latter CD, as it is yet another version of the work's highlight in vocalized form. The alternate and demo takes aren't particularly attractive enough to merit much interest aside from the intellectual curiosity of hearing Yared adjust this score, sometimes significantly, to meet satisfaction. The changes are especially noticeable as the composer added the Mancini-inspired caper material for the third theme relatively late in the process. He also toned back the Italian element by the final product. The additional cues available from the score proper don't always match up with what ended up tracked around in the film, but the presentation definitely does better justice to the composer's strategy with his themes. Listeners seeking additional performances of the Ripley and location themes will be pleased by the newly revealed cues, but don't expect any of them to present the lighter and voluminous renditions that occupy the highlights. In the end, most casual listeners will want the 1999 album with half of this score and the bulk of the songs. Even if you enjoy the swinging jazz that played such a crucial role in the film, the disjointed placement of tracks on the album causes those performances to swallow up Yared's tightly-wound and internally focused score. On either product, the main lullaby is hauntingly effective, and its manifestations throughout the products are easily the highlight of the listening experience. Despite some promise from the location's theme as well, though, Yared's overarching ideas aren't really coherent enough to really appeal. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
1999 Sony Classical Album:
Total Time: 63:52
2024 Music Box Records Album: Total Time: 120:51
NOTES & QUOTES:
The large insert of the 1999 Sony Classical album is difficult
to refold once opened. It contains acknowledgements and the extensive
note below, both written by director Anthony Minghella. The 2024 Music
Box Records set also contains detailed notes about the film and
score.
At the same time, I felt that music might also provide the movie with a way of dramatising the thematic argument between two of the film's central characters. Accordingly, Dickie Greenleaf, son of a wealthy industrialist but living a sybaritic life in southern Italy, exchanges his paintbrush from the novel for an alto saxophone in the movie. Similarly, Tom Ripley, in the film story, becomes a classically trained pianist, with a personality as clenched as the most formal of fugues, arriving in Italy terrified of letting go, of speaking from the soul in that way jazz demands of its players. To impress Dickie, his new friend, Ripley learns about jazz, struggles through Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie. His taste and personality seem stolid in comparison to Dickie's freewheeling exuberance. But as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that, just as in music, where truly great extemporizing begins with Bach and Mozart, it is Ripley, the so-called square, who is the more genuine improviser. His ability to turn on a dime -- reel off the most elaborate riffs of fantasy contrasts sharply with Dickie, who is soon revealed as emotionally conservative and trapped in more conventional patterns of behaviour. Dickie's rebellion is evidently a passing phase, a correlative of the grand tour he is taking before settling down in New York, wild oats scattered, married, and assimilated. And in that sense, Ripley's journey, wilder and entirely unpredictable, is much closer, ironically, to the exhilarating chaos of a Bird solo or the searing meditations of Coltrane. The film dramatises these ideas in a continuous musical argument -- its title sequence identifies Ripley with classical music (he plays piano to accompany a lied for mezzo-soprano, is enraptured with the sound of Beethoven's Third Piano Quartet). Then Ripley's musical aesthetic is kept under wraps as the film's source and performed music is pursued exclusively through jazz. The sound of jazz dies along with Dickie, until its ghost is summoned towards the end of the movie, with a busker in the Piazza San Marco playing "You Don't Know What Love Is", echoing Dickie's alto solo after the suicide of his clandestine lover, Silvana. The film's tone darkens, and the music becomes increasingly tense and sober. As the screen finally goes to black, the magnificent John Martyn provides a specially recorded vocal version of the same song -- a reminder, through this most sophisticated of lyrics (though apparently written for an Abbott and Costello movie!) that Ripley's journey into a nightmare of his own making is motivated by a longing to be loved at any cost. The Talented Mr. Ripley is also dignified by a score from my friend and collaborator Gabriel Yared, who has been closely involved with the film since the earliest drafts of the screenplay. A good film composer -- and Gabriel is, without doubt, a great one -- can provide clues to a film's psychological gear changes, can intensify the movie and alert the audience to its ideas in the most subtle ways. With such significant episodes of performed music, Gabriel's score had to locate a voice that would neither invade what was preordained, nor be suffocated by it. The character of Ripley is a deliberately opaque one, and his inner being, its dislocations and yearnings, needed teasing out. Ripley often doesn't know or understand what he's feeling and yet his perspective is the one through which every moment of the film is refracted. Gabriel's task was, in part, to imagine he was listening to the troubled music of Ripley's heart and to make it heard. Gabriel's first sketches were an attempt to summon this music and also to suggest a nostalgia for a past that never really existed. So much of Ripley's personality is based on false premises -- the idea of a life lived by others and from which he is excluded, his profound dissatisfaction with who he is and where he comes from, the fantasy of a future in which he could be someone entirely different. Working in his studio on the Ile au Moines off the coast of Brittany, we agreed on a syncopated theme, Baroque in feel, which could be translated to a music box voicing, its inherent sweetness tinged with something strange and disquieting, mechanical, and repeated. Ripley hears it at moments when he is most unhinged or excited, most childlike. Its provenance undoubtedly owes something to a memory from my own childhood, when my grandmother kept a small music box in the shape of a gondola in her room, and its sound -- tiny and fragile and heartbreaking -- has stayed with me. This theme develops into the song, "Lullaby for Cain", which Gabriel and I wrote for the title sequence and which Sinead O'Connor performs with unadorned grace over the film's end credits. Ripley's compact with the Devil, the tragedy of his ambition, also needed to be charted in the score. Gabriel found a theme of mischief, voiced with vibraphone, cool and disassociated, and speaking of the period. We began to experiment with using the human voice, developing the idea of temptation, of finding some equivalent to the witches in Macbeth, or to sirens, luring Ripley onto the rocks of his folly. These voices, unreliable and tantalising, ridicule Ripley's alienation; delight when he sells his soul; then mock his tragedy when, after having given everything not to be alone, he finds himself imprisoned in the solitary confinement of his mind. Such ironies and musical games are central to the film's architecture, and they are written into the screenplay as a kind of code. The music has huge entertainment value but is also, I believe, a character in its own right. The current obsession in the movies to have everything explained is often mirrored by music, which tells you what to think and feel at any given moment, and just as this movie wants to believe that an audience is happier extrapolating meaning and moral rhythms from what it sees, so this movie's music is used with the faith that the audience can also extrapolate from what it hears." - Anthony Minghella
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