Patricia Highsmith was a notoriously difficult personality — misanthropic, racist, and anti-Semitic — yet she remains one of the most formidable crime novelists of the twentieth century, capable of plumbing the psychology of murderers with unnerving precision. Does it take a killer to know a killer? That is one of the provocative questions at the heart of A Talent for Murder, in which Helen Mirren inhabits Highsmith with all her scowling, devious brilliance.
While the film remains faithful to Highsmith’s contentious character, its narrative is entirely fictional. Alden Ehrenreich plays the invented Edward Ridgeway, a young representative from Highsmith’s New York publisher, dispatched to persuade her to produce a sixth novel featuring Tom Ripley. In reality, Highsmith wrote five Ripley novels, with The Talented Mr. Ripley her most celebrated. Building on that iconic creation, A Talent for Murder spirals into intertwining storylines that become a cat-and-mouse game — or perhaps a cat-and-cat game — between Highsmith and an uninvited guest she has grudgingly admitted into her home.
A Talent for Murder
The Bottom LineAn engaging riff on an author and her most famous creation.
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
Cast: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson
Director: Anton Corbijn
Writer: Joanna Murray-Smith
Rated R, 1 hour 46 minutes
Joanna Murray-Smith’s screenplay, smartly expanded from her two-person play Switzerland, fuels a psychological thriller that Anton Corbijn (A Most Wanted Man) directs with taut, stylish precision. The film looks sumptuous and unfolds at an absorbing slow-burn pace, gradually revealing itself to be a meditation on doppelgangers and identity, the porous boundary between fiction and reality, and whether all of us harbor the capacity for murder.
Ridgeway arrives in Switzerland, where Highsmith has lived in isolation just outside Zurich for years. It is 1995 — in reality the year she died at 74. He knows she is rumored to have poisoned a neighbor’s noisy dog, and that the publisher’s previous emissary has mysteriously vanished. Traveling by train, he sits across from a young woman named Clementine (Olivia Cooke, invariably natural on screen). He is reading The Talented Mr. Ripley and, in a clever meta touch, notes that Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train became a Hitchcock film. She counterdrops the information that she is an orphan visiting a wealthy aunt. As in any Highsmith novel, some details prove far more significant than they initially appear.
Mirren, naturally, is a master of the role. She deftly renders Highsmith a formidable piece of work — smoking, drinking, steely-eyed as she snarls at Edward, threatening to throw him out, confessing that she left New York to avoid “the Jews and the Blacks and the Puerto Ricans.” (The line acknowledges Highsmith’s most despicable traits, yet constitutes the film’s only reference to them.) Throughout, Mirren subtly conveys that Highsmith is testing him, probing for weaknesses in this mild-mannered young man. When Edward confides that a car accident killed his parents in his childhood, Ehrenreich plays him with just enough slipperiness to leave us wondering whether he is fabricating the truth. It is a story that is perhaps too neat.
Edward ingratiates himself partly through his encyclopedic knowledge of Highsmith’s work and partly because he has brought items she requested: Brooks Brothers shirts, cans of soup, and a large knife to add to the collection she has affixed to the wall. Dimitri Capuani’s production design serves as an essential, telling element throughout — from the pill bottles atop the refrigerator to the rows of poisons in the pantry that Highsmith knows will catch Edward’s eye.
Although the opening stretch and Mirren’s commanding presence may suggest a straightforward character study, the film quickly pivots into its other narrative threads, interspersed with Edward’s visits to the author. As she begins imagining a plot for a new novel, she draws on his ideas. We see that story unfold, set in Rome, with Ehrenreich as a far better-groomed Ripley — a performance so seamless he could genuinely embody the character — and Cooke as a slightly fictionalized Clementine. The Ripley references are pointed: in this new narrative, as in Highsmith’s originals, he is a poseur and a fraud who cozies up to the wealthy in order to kill them and assume their luxurious lives. And while you cannot out-Highsmith Highsmith, this story-within-a-story is a clever facsimile.
The first murder in the potential novel was Highsmith’s idea, and she charges Edward — who insists on himself as an expert on her work — with inventing the next. He departs for the day to do so and encounters the real Clementine, spiraling into yet another plotline that ultimately leads him to a party at her aunt’s grand estate. In this art-filled mansion and throughout the film, Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is glorious and richly textured, from the crystalline skies beyond Highsmith’s windows in Switzerland (actually shot in northern Italy) to the Roman sequences on city streets and within lavish sitting rooms. Juliet Stevenson plays the aunt with elegant precision — a woman who is, naturally, a ripe target for a Ripleyesque killing. By now Edward Ridgeway and Tom Ripley have begun to merge. Highsmith’s language is admirably precise when she asks Edward, “How are you going to murder her?” — the “you” conflating the editor and the fictional counterpart they are jointly constructing.
At the very outset, Mirren’s voiceover describes a young man boarding a train, just as Edward does, before the voiceover disappears entirely. Was this Highsmith’s imagined story all along? Perhaps. That possibility is dangled but somewhat underdeveloped. And ultimately, the film cannot fully support the existential weight of the questions about murder it raises. Still, this playful, sleek little homage is so entertaining that such lapses hardly matter.