Matt Damon: Behind the Candelabra clip, Tom Ripley's guarded sexual identity

EXCLUSIVE CLIP: Matt Damon Talks About 'Behind The Candelabra', Starring Michael Douglas As Liberace 'Behind the Candelabra', on home release today, sees him turn convincingly into a teenage hot-shot Scott Thorson, drawn into the extravagant world of Vegas star Liberace. The couple's long relationship, through various trips to the drug dealer and the plastic surgeon, is the subject of 'Candelabra', which won Best Movie at the recent Emmys, and another gong for director Steven Soderbergh. Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

With appropriate fin de siècle melancholy and the relentlessness of a thriller, ''Ripley'' nails both the wonder that has attended our century's celebratory version of the American dream and the anxiety that is stirred up by that dream's stealthy doppelganger. ''Ripley'' asks us to identify with an American man who, like so many before him, believes in the democratic ethos that says anyone can jettison the past, wipe the slate clean and with pluck and luck be whoever he or she wants to be. The earnest, upwardly mobile Tom Ripley, played by Damon, isn't particularly greedy or ambitious, but he does want to rise above his drab circumstances to grab the right, socially acceptable lifestyle, along with love and money.

Dickie Greenleaf -- a dazzling all-American golden boy and a role very likely to confer stardom on the British actor Jude Law -- is off idling in Italy, sybaritically pursuing a dilettante's calling as a jazz saxophonist and a romance with Marge Sherwood (Paltrow), an aspiring writer from his Park Avenue set. Dickie's disapproving dad offers Tom $1,000 to visit his son in Italy and bring him home to take his rightful place in the family business.

In ''Vertigo,'' James Stewart was John (Scottie) Ferguson, a smart, emotionally remote detective whose psyche plunges into voyeurism and sexual obsession once he is sent by a shipping magnate on a mission that tosses him into a bizarre plot of mistaken identity, murder and suicides both real and faked. In ''Ripley,'' Damon, only recently seen as Steven Spielberg's American Everyman, Private Ryan, portrays another smart, emotionally reticent Peeping Tom, and his parallel assignment for another shipping magnate tosses him into similar horrors.

Where Scottie wants to remake the Novak character into his dream girl, Tom wants to remake himself into his dream boy. He wants to duplicate Dickie -- in looks, in savoir-faire, in Gucci accessories -- until he can pass as being to the manner, and perhaps even to the Greenleaf manor, born. ''I always thought, Better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,'' Tom says, and no matter what the human cost, including the annihilation of his own self, he will not be denied.

Damon is in every scene of the film and, with his initially bookish and wholesome presence, serves as its irresistible bait. There's much to like about Tom. He's cultured (he travels with the collected Shakespeare and Blue Guides), talented (he plays Bach at the piano) and sensitive (he seems to care for Dickie's variously ill-treated women more tenderly than Dickie does). ''Everybody's not been invited to the dance at one time or another,'' says Damon, who took on the gutsy and demanding assignment -- for which he lost weight, studied piano and modulated his vocal pitch and posture -- in part because of his identification with the character's ''total discomfort in his identity'' and his compassion for the character's ''deep, intense loneliness.''

Blanchett, intriguingly, plays a character that didn't exist in Highsmith: another expatriate East Side socialite who gets caught in the Tom-Dickie web. In a witty inversion of Ripley's efforts to trade up in social class, she uses an assumed name to disguise her identity as a textile heiress. As written and acted, the role adds a shimmering Jamesian portrait of a trapped American woman to the canvas, and it is but one of many significant alterations Minghella has made to the novel. Minghella, who is not gay, also had to figure out what to do about the book's use of Ripley's guarded sexual identity. In the novel, Marge says dismissively of Tom: ''All right, he may not be queer. He's just a nothing, which is worse. He isn't normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean."

During their final weeks on the film, the director and editor kept tinkering subtly with the closing footage of Damon so that Minghella could land the cathartic blow he wanted, in which the audience is left alone with Ripley in an inky psychological no man's land. Source: www.nytimes.com