Helen Mirren plays Patricia Highsmith as a genius who despises the public she seduces, and she does it in a film where reality and fiction blur beautifully. That is the core of Anton Corbijn’s A Talent For Murder, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The movie is a two-hander set in 1995. Highsmith, then 74, lives in exile in Zurich, smoking heavily on her veranda. Her publisher wants one more Ripley novel, so they send Edward Ridgeway, a junior staffer played by Alden Ehrenreich, to coax it out of her.
Highsmith’s Home In Zurich
Highsmith sits at her typewriter, a single blank sheet of paper in front of her. Ridgeway brings gifts — notebooks, shirts, and six tins of soup — that buy him a little more time with the old lady. He also has a trick up his sleeve: he knows about the bottle of arsenic she has placed in her kitchen.
Highsmith is not a nice person. She is known locally as “The Texas Battleaxe,” and she is the prime suspect when her neighbor’s dog is poisoned. She is bigoted and racist, saying of the French, “They may be repulsive but they know their stuff.” She also loathes New Yorkers, especially rich, pretentious ones. These details matter, because they explain why she writes the way she does.
The Game Of Wits Begins
The film opens with a game of wits. Highsmith threatens to throw Ridgeway out, then relents and lets him stay for a beer. Ridgeway tries everything — flattery, insults, amateur psychology — to get her to write. She responds with a deliciously mean, spiteful face that pops up in humorous jump scares.
Over breakfast, she discusses the efficiency of poisons. “Unoriginal but iconic,” she teases about the arsenic. The film plays almost like a horror-comedy at first, then becomes farcical as Ridgeway keeps pushing.
The Girl On The Train
Inspiration strikes when Highsmith starts freestyling a new story set in Rome. Ridgeway remembers meeting a well-to-do American student named Clementine Balfour on his way. Olivia Cooke plays Clementine, and her appearance is a subtle callback to Highsmith’s 1950 debut, Strangers on a Train.
Clementine splits into two characters. In real life, she is the girl Ridgeway met and will meet again in town. In Highsmith’s fiction, she becomes prey for the ruthless Tom Ripley. The blurring of truth and fantasy is fascinating but often blurred, which is exactly the point.
Ridgeway Becomes Ripley
Sometimes the blurring works brilliantly. Ridgeway loses his better nature, just as Highsmith predicted he would, and becomes infected with her bitterness and cruelty. But the parallel story-within-the-story, where Ridgeway marries the other Clementine for her family’s money, is more problematic. It is not terribly cinematic, with Highsmith dictating everything we see and hear at the same time we see and hear it.
Mirren is a revelation here. She plays wildly against type as the troglodyte genius who seduced the public with their own dark reflections and resented them for the success they gave her. The performance is mesmerizing.
Ehrenreich’s job is harder. The role of Ridgeway/Ripley would be a stretch for any actor, and he seems a little out of his depth when Corbijn’s film takes off in a meta new direction. But he rallies for the film’s enigmatic conclusion.
The Ending Explains Everything
The film’s ending is strange and satisfying. It turns out this is not a film about Highsmith but about Tom Ripley, her 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? 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 is a fascinating question, and it is very well posed.
A Subgenre Of Its Own
A Talent For Murder fits a unique subgenre of literary biographies. Authors are investigated through the prism of their work:
- Shirley Jackson 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
Similarly, Highsmith communes with the spirit of her most famous character, Tom Ripley, as she waits for inspiration to strike. The framing device recalls classic stage-to-screen thrillers like Sleuth and Death Trap, both one-location cat-and-mouse games where the power balance constantly changes.
What Works And What Doesn’t
The film is flawed but very entertaining. The humor works. The performances are strong. The blurring of truth and fantasy is the engine, but it is not always smooth.
The parallel story-within-the-story is the weakest part. It is not terribly cinematic, with Highsmith dictating everything at the same time. That is a real problem, but it is also a fair trade for the rest of the film.
The Verdict
Mirren is the reason to watch. She is a revelation, perfectly inhabiting the troglodyte genius who seduced the public with their own dark reflections and resented them for the success they gave her. The film is a flawed but very entertaining two-hander that belongs in a unique subgenre of literary biographies.
A Talent For Murder is a fascinating look at a writer who despised the public she seduced. It is a mesmerizing portrait of a genius who could not escape her own creation. The ending is strange and satisfying, and the question it raises is worth asking.
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