A Talent for Murder

November 9 – 12

Mon Nov 9 – 7:00 pm
Tues Nov 10 – 7:00 pm
Wed Nov 11 – 3:30 & 7 pm
Thurs Nov 5 – 1:30 pm LAST SHOW – NO EVENING SHOW

Rated 14A – 1hr 45min
Mystery / Thriller

We’ve grown so used to seeing Helen Mirren imperiously slumming her way through boilerplate grande dame roles in recent years that it’s a genuine thrill to see the actress bare her teeth in A Talent for Murder — playing no less compromising a character than Patricia Highsmith, embodied here as a woman every bit as vicious and cold-blooded as her celebrated crime novels.

Patricia Highsmith was known to have a nasty personality: misanthropic, racist and anti-Semitic. She was even better known as a brilliant crime novelist, able to delve into the minds of murderers. Does it take a killer to know a killer? That is one of the tantalizing questions bubbling up in A Talent for Murder, in which Helen Mirren embodies Highsmith in all her devious, scowling genius.

Although the film is true to Highsmith’s character, the story is entirely made up. Alden Ehrenreich plays the invented Edward Ridgeway, a young representative from Highsmith’s New York publisher, sent to persuade her to write a sixth novel about Tom Ripley. In reality, she wrote five, with The Talented Mr. Ripley her most acclaimed. Playing off her Ripley character, A Talent for Murder spins out into two other storylines as it becomes a cat-and-mouse game — or maybe a cat-and-cat game — between Highsmith and the guest she has reluctantly allowed into her home.

Mirren, of course, is a master. She deftly makes Highsmith a piece of work — smoking, drinking, steely-eyed as she snarls at Edward, threatening to throw him out, telling him she left New York to avoid “the Jews and the Blacks and the Puerto Ricans.” (The line acknowledges Highsmith’s most despicable traits, but is the film’s only reference to them.) All the while, Mirren subtly lets us know that Highsmith is testing him, teasing out who this meek-looking young man is. When Edward tells her about the car accident that killed his parents when he was a boy, Ehrenreich plays him as just slippery enough to make us wonder if he is lying.

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.