A Talent For Murder: A Fictionalized Patricia Highsmith Plays Mind-Games with a Young Publisher
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B+
My understanding of a chamber thriller is that it operates within certain limitations: A confined location, a small cast, a handful of characters, and not much room to manoeuvre.
But limitations are relative, when the location is a mountain-view home in Switzerland, the central character is a fictionalized Patricia Highsmith, and the actor playing her is Helen Mirren.
Director Anton Corbijn makes good use of these modest resources in A Talent for Murder, opening up the chamber thriller to accommodate a story within a story, a mystery within a mystery, and a celebrated crime novelist who might just as easily have wandered out of one of her own books.
Alden Ehrenreich and Helen Mirren concoct a murder plot in A Talent For Murder
Highsmith, whose novels include Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, was hardly a woman renowned for her sunny disposition. Famously reclusive, viciously frank, and apparently untroubled by the possibility of offending people, she seems an ideal candidate for the kind of character she herself might have invented. Although, given her opinion of humanity, she probably wouldn't have liked her much.
Australian playwright and novelist Joanna Murray-Smith takes full advantage of the possibilities, placing a fictionalized Highsmith at the centre of a mystery built around the very literary creation for which she is best remembered: Tom Ripley.
Enter Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), an ambitious young editorial assistant from a New York publishing house, dispatched to Switzerland with the unenviable assignment of convincing Highsmith to write one final Ripley novel. It's a task his more senior colleagues have already failed to accomplish, although why they imagine an underling might succeed where they couldn't is a mystery in itself.
Highsmith is predictably unwelcoming. She resents the intrusion, disputes having agreed to the meeting, and makes little effort to conceal her contempt for the young man standing at her door. Eventually, conceding that she may indeed have consented to the visit, she allows him inside.
Having gained entrance, Edward begins the considerably more difficult business of getting Highsmith to listen to him.
What follows is a battle of wits in which the balance of power shifts, suspicions mount, and the purpose of Edward's visit becomes increasingly difficult to pin down. Highsmith, apparently amused by the challenge, proposes a bargain: if Edward can devise the perfect murder plot, she'll sign the contract.
Now, I have trouble imagining the real Patricia Highsmith entertaining plot suggestions from a junior publishing assistant, much less offering to write a novel based on one. But this isn't the real Patricia Highsmith, and Corbijn isn't particularly concerned with pretending otherwise.
What interests him, and what makes the film so enjoyable in its best moments, is the possibility of placing Highsmith inside the kind of elaborate deception she might otherwise have constructed on the page.
There are echoes of her fiction everywhere: wealthy families, opportunists with questionable motives, strangers whose chance encounters prove anything but accidental. The spirit of Ripley is never far away, nor is the premise of Strangers on a Train, famously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock. The pleasure comes from watching these familiar ingredients find their way into a story in which their creator may no longer be entirely in control.
And then there's Mirren.
Corbijn wisely gives her room to dominate the proceedings. Mirren doesn't so much imitate Highsmith as inhabit the less agreeable qualities associated with her reputation. She's abrasive, suspicious, impatient, and capable of delivering an insult with the casual indifference of someone asking for another cup of tea. There's something enormously entertaining about a character who makes no effort to be liked, particularly when played by an actor who knows exactly how to make that unpleasantness irresistible.
Ehrenreich makes an effective adversary, giving Edward just enough youthful confidence and apparent innocence to suggest that he may be considerably less outmatched than Highsmith assumes.
The film is strongest when the two are together, testing each other's patience, intelligence, and motives. Less successful are the moments when Corbijn ventures beyond the confines of Highsmith's Swiss home. The story grows more elaborate, but not necessarily more compelling. What began as a deliciously uncomfortable encounter between two strangers risks becoming a more conventional exercise in mystery plotting.
Whether Murray-Smith has wrapped fiction around the facts or allowed the facts to become entangled in her fiction hardly matters. This is a highly fictionalized Highsmith, and the film makes no great demand that we mistake her for the genuine article.
Mirren, meanwhile, delivers the kind of tour-de-force performance that can sometimes feel suspiciously designed to attract awards. Perhaps it is. But it's also a delight to watch.
And in the end, that's the film's greatest strength. Give Helen Mirren a room, an adversary, and a character with a thoroughly disagreeable disposition, and there's really very little need to go anywhere else.
A Talent for Murder. Directed by Anton Corbijn. Written by Joanna Murray-Smith. Stars Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich and Olivia Cooke. In theatres now.