Abstract
In one of the final scenes of Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) sits at the piano playing the first movement of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater in f-minor, as his lover Peter (Jack Davenport) leans over his shoulder and says: “Now there’s the music talking.” From the very beginning of the film, the music does just this: it speaks. Together, director Minghella and composer Gabriel Yared have created a score of both original and compiled music that serves as a narrative tool just as important, if not more so, than the action transpiring on screen. Through the thematic treatment of the genres of Jazz and Classical music themselves, melodic and orchestration relationships between leitmotifs and imported pieces, the connotative meanings associated with them, their calculated dispersal throughout the narrative, as well as the constant transitioning between nondiegetic and diegetic scoring, the score masterfully foreshadows and heightens the suspense in this psychological thriller by blurring the line between reality and fantasy, sanity and insanity, and between the characters’ identities themselves, thus offering a glimpse into the twisted mind of the talented Mr. Ripley.
