Matt Damon may be pulling off a role of a lifetime in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, but his early performances were stranger and more character-driven. After co-writing Good Will Hunting with best friend and collaborator, Ben Affleck, Damon became a hot commodity and starred in the adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s gripping thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley. The ensemble cast had all the stars of the day, including Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Cate Blanchett, but the real power of the film was in Damon’s performance.
Damon portrays Ripley as almost an accidental confidence man as he finds his way into Dickie Greenleaf’s life through a series of happenstances. The Talented Mr. Ripley film version differs from the book in this way because it must. The only real way to tell the story of Ripley as Highsmith intended is in a long-form miniseries, which Netflix’s Ripley accomplished to an almost terrifying degree.
‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ Made a More Sympathetic Monster
In 2024, Netflix put out a stark black-and-white miniseries called Ripley. Starring Andrew Scott as the titular con artist, the limited series wasn’t a remake of the film, but rather the version that the movie could never make. In 1999, antiheroes weren’t quite the trend that they are today. The Sopranos had only just come out at the time, and it would be a decade until criminal kingpin Walter White committed the worst acts of Breaking Bad.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Damon’s version of Ripley was highly sympathetic, a fact that Netflix’s Ripley starkly rejected. In the book, the title character is already a confidence man, and his actions are much more calculated. Scott’s portrayal was closer to the psychopathic character in Patricia Highsmith’s book. Not only would this not have been accepted by audiences in the late ‘90s, but it would also have been nearly impossible to implement in a feature film.
A miniseries lays the groundwork for the character who is a cold-blooded killer. When there is more time to spare, a show on Netflix could contextualize who Ripley is and not need to make him so sympathetic. The limited series was instead a character study of a psychopath, just as he was in the book. Scott played a very different version of Ripley from Damon because he was allowed the time to explore the character.
The Talented Mr. Ripley film was already so chock-full of plot that it would have been extremely difficult to convince audiences to empathize with such a cold character. Damon imbued Ripley with empathy, portraying him as a person who yearned for more than he was given. As he states in the film, he doesn’t see himself as a bad person. This isn’t because he’s emotionless but because his desires are understandable. He wants what Dickie has, and when he is rejected, he commits the ultimate sin.
The film adaptation also delves into the homoerotic subtext in a way that makes Ripley a tragic character. He believes that he can’t live as himself and kills because of it. This is a much sadder interpretation of the character, but to be true to the source material, any adaptation would have to go truly dark. As beloved as The Talented Mr. Ripley is, only a miniseries could fully realize the details of the plot perfectly.
