A Talent for Murder, director Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of playwright Joanna Murray-Smith’s theatrical mystery Switzerland (opening in Boca Raton Thursday), has much going for it. The blades are sharp, the settings are glamorous, and the herrings are red. And if the dialogue never sheds its obviously stagey origins, at least we have Helen Mirren to deliver its most pungent rejoinders.
Mirren is marvelously dyspeptic as Patricia Highsmith, acclaimed author of Strangers on a Train and creator of career criminal Tom Ripley. This version of Highsmith, a fanciful invention, wiles away the twilight of her life in a Swiss villa alongside countless pet snails, arrays of various poisons, and a serious knife collection—making for a veritable museum of murder. It’s 1995, and Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), an editor at her publishing house, is the unfortunate young man dispatched from New York, bearing gifts—cans of Highsmith’s beloved Campbell’s Soup, a pricey French dagger—and an unsigned contract. His unenviable job? To coax a final Tom Ripley book out of the ornery novelist.
A Talent for Murder is never better than in its first half hour, when Edward, timid and bespectacled and out of his depth, tries, fails, and tries again to flatter his way into his quarry’s good graces. Mirren’s Highsmith is impenetrably mean, having long shed any pretense of social decorum. When she’s not spewing racist, antisemitic, homophobic, xenophobic bile at the “dregs of humanity” she left behind in New York, she’s belittling her guest, and, soon, tormenting him in a manner both mental and physical. Ah, the compensations we make to pacify our mercurial geniuses—our “literary treasures.”
We learn that Edward isn’t the first editor to alight at Highsmith’s door. His predecessor, whose clothes still hang in the closet of his guest room, reportedly suffered a psychic break and has never been heard from again. Will Edward endure the same fate?
Possibly, but in the meantime, with Edward having apparently passed enough tests to survive a night in chez Highsmith, the two begin to conceive a Ripleyesque story together. This allows Corbijn to cut away from the frosty interiors of the manse and film their story as it’s germinating. Suddenly we’re in sun-dappled Italy, and Edward has cast himself as a more glamorous alter ego: a cosmopolitan art consultant with better cheekbones, 20/20 vision, and a confident gift of gab. Like the “real” Edward, he’s on a mission to persuade; this time, his prey isn’t an elderly writer but Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), a young and beautiful scion of a wealthy family. Clementine, who, like Edward, is an orphan, is in line to inherit a sizable trust fund, should a couple of inconvenient family members cease to exist.
And so A Talent for Murder becomes a fake Highsmith thriller wrapped in a fake Highsmith bio-drama, and don’t be surprised if you begin to miss the fake bio-drama. The film never recaptures the compelling, off-balance dialectic established in its opening third.
Ehrenreich may be faultless as the two Edwards, a Jekyll and Hyde by another name, effectively blurring our distinctions between his contrasting personae: the shy editor and the bold con man. But he’s not enough to carry the picture, whose plot-within-a-plot pivots on routine murder mechanics that feel like Mystery Writing 101, not the steel-trapped sophistication of Highsmith’s own modernist fiction.
Moreover, the longer we spend in the upper-crust Italy of the characters’ imaginations, the less we see of Helen Mirren, to the film’s increasing deficit. She becomes a background character in her own story, and she deserves more scenes to steal—perhaps at knifepoint.
A Talent for Murder opens Thursday at Cinemark Boca Raton, Cinemark Boynton Beach, and other area theaters.
For more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.
