‘A Talent For Murder’ Review: Helen Mirren Is Mesmerizing As Tortured Genius Crime Writer Patricia Highsmith – Toronto Film Festival

This flawed but very entertaining two-hander belongs in the unique subgenre of literary biographies in which a cult author’s life is investigated through the highly specific prism of their work. Shirley Jackson, for example, was cast into a dark Gothic psychodrama in Josephine Decker’s Shirley; William S. Burroughs became a drug-addicted spy who reports to a big talking-ass beetle in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch; and similarly, as she waits for inspiration to strike, Patricia Highsmith communes with the spirit of her most famous character — suave psychopath Tom Ripley — in Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder.

The framing device recalls classic stage-to-screen thrillers such as Sleuth and, more pertinently, Death Trap, both being one-location cat-and-mouse thrillers in which the power balance constantly changes. Here, the year is 1995 and Highsmith (Helen Mirren) is at death’s door and in exile, smoking like a chimney on the veranda of her home in Zurich. A single piece of paper is parked in her typewriter, entirely blank. Now 74, she is known around the world for “The Ripliad”, a series of five books, starting with The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, following the adventures of a vicious but charismatic con man and killer.

The author went on to write four more, the last as recently as 1991, but as the film opens, the writer’s publishing company wants one more. To this end, the boss sends Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), an unassuming junior staffer whom Highsmith instantly mocks for his baby face and awkwardness (“I know a homo when I see one”). A heightened game of wits instantly begins; Highsmith threatens to throw him out then relents, allowing him to stay for a beer. Ridgeway has brought gifts — a few notebooks, several crisp white Brooks Brothers shirts, and six tins of soup — that buy him a little more time with the old lady.

Highsmith — known locally as “The Texas Battleaxe” and the chief suspect when her neighbour’s dog is poisoned — is a piece of work, revealing herself as supremely bigoted and an equal-opportunities racist: “They may be repulsive but they know their stuff,” she says of the French, a begrudging acknowledgment of The Order of Arts and Letters that hangs on her sitting-room wall. But more than foreigners, she hates New Yorkers and especially rich, pretentious upper-class New Yorkers, a minor detail at first but one that will become more significant over time as Highsmith begins to open up about the neuroses that motivate her.

The beginning plays out almost like a horror-comedy — Highsmith’s deliciously mean, spiteful face pops up from time to time in humorously effective jump scares — and the film becomes quite farcical when, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, she discusses the efficiency of various poisons, knowing that Ridgeway has seen the bottle of arsenic she has strategically placed in her kitchen (“Unoriginal but iconic,” she teases). But Ridgeway pushes on, trying various means — flattery, insults, amateur psychology — to cajole her into delivering a new Ripley book.

Inspiration seems to strike when Highsmith starts freestyling the beginnings of a fresh story, with Ripley in Rome. Ridgeway joins in, thinking back to his recent encounter with a well-to-do American student, Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), that he met on the way, a subtle callback to Highsmith’s 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train. From here, Clementine becomes two distinct characters, both the girl Ridgeway met in real life (and will meet again in the local town) and prey for the ruthless Tom Ripley in Highsmith’s developing fiction.

The blurring of truth and fantasy is fascinating but also exactly that: Blurred. Sometimes it works brilliantly, as the unassuming Ridgeway loses grasp of his better nature, just as Highsmith says he will, somehow becoming infected with her bitterness and cruelty. The parallel story-with-in-the-story, however, in which Ridgeway (as Ripley) marries the other Clementine for her family’s money — entirely confected, by the way — is more problematic, being, to put it mildly, not terribly cinematic, with Highsmith dictating everything we see and hear at the exact same time we’re seeing it and hearing it.

Mirren, playing wildly against type, is a revelation here, perfectly inhabiting the troglodyte genius who seduced the public with their own dark reflections and resented them for the success they gave her. Meanwhile, to put it bluntly, the role of Ridgeway/Ripley would be a stretch for any actor, and Ehrenreich seems a little out of his depth when Corbijn’s film takes off in a meta new direction.

It’s all up in the air for a while but Ehrenreich rallies in time for the film’s enigmatic but strangely satisfying conclusion: This, it transpires, is not a film about Highsmith but about Tom Ripley, her very own “master of seduction”.

Is Ridgeway real or is he a death-dream manifestation of Ripley, the monster she made from her own seething id, an avenging avatar created by a woman who hated life, hated people, hated herself? Is she being taken down by her own creation, playing the same duplicitous, sadistic long game she enjoyed imagining him inflicting on his victims? It’s a fascinating question, and it’s very well posed.

Title: A Talent For Murder
Festival: Toronto (Gala Presentations)
Director: Anton Corbijn
Screenwriter: Joanna Murray-Smith
Cast: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke
International sales: FilmNation Entertainment
Running time: 1 hr 46 mins