"The Talented Mr. Ripley" first takes Tom Ripley to Italy as an emissary for the rich playboy’s father. Then, as the killings occur and Ripley’s lies and crimes mount, the story follows him as he darts all across the country trying to stay one step ahead of the police – and anyone else who might expose him. 

For all its suspense, however, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" is no ordinary thriller. 

Tom, without seeming to realise it at first, wants Dickie's life as his own.

But the charismatic Greenleaf is also a moody man with some heavy baggage of his own to answer for. Worse, Tom begins to feel more and more on the outside looking in on this idyllic party, especially after Dickie's boorish friend Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman) arrives on the scene. One day, while he and Tom are alone on a rowboat, Dickie begins taunting Tom as a prelude to cutting him off entirely. In a violent fit, Tom slashes Dickie's head with an oar and can't stop pounding.

From that moment, "Ripley" shakes loose of its gilded reverie and becomes an intriguing, unsettling cat-and- mouse game in which Tom assumes Dickie's identity, sending everyone around him, especially Marge and Freddie, into confusion and suspicion. Complicating matters is the presence of another young American aristocrat, Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), whom Tom met off the boat from America and told her he was Dickie

2000 Paramount