WEB HEADLINE: ‘A Talent for Murder’ stars Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith
A Talent for Murder is a movie that cried out to be made for a very simple reason: Helen Mirren is capable of looking, sounding, moving, and behaving just like Patricia Highsmith. That Mirren delivers a good performance here — subtle, engaging, full of unseen depths — comes as no surprise since the actress is an Oscar winner who has made an impression in everything from The Long Good Friday (1980) to The Mosquito Coast (1986) to The Comfort of Strangers (1990).
No, I choose to focus on the remarkable physical transformation. What few could have anticipated, least of all Mirren fans who had followed her in her younger days, is the degree to which she could have been made to resemble an aging, indeed dying Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train (1950) and the Tom Ripley saga, including The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955).
In real life, Highsmith actually was what Joan Didion idolaters can only wish their heroine might have been: a literary figure with such startling, if bookish, panache that her image risks overtaking her accomplishments. And it is this image, with the aid of able costumes and hair and makeup design, that Mirren has summoned forth. She is the incarnation of Highsmith, with all her distinctive features: the blunt haircut, the eyes that seem to strain to open fully, the unchangingly morose countenance, and the preference for sensible clothes, namely, dress shirts, vests, and slacks. In fact, while watching A Talent for Murder — which is based on the play Switzerland, starring (inconceivably) actresses other than Mirren as Highsmith on the stage — my knowledge that Mirren was playing Highsmith, that I was not really watching Highsmith, seemed to float out of my head. That almost never happens to me.
Mirren’s remarkable presence adds some much-needed verisimilitude to a genre that is often as fake as they come: the literary biopic. Few movies — very few movies — have plausibly recreated the working life of a major writer. In The End of the Tour (2015), Jason Segel played David Foster Wallace as a dork; in Wildcat (2023), Maya Hawke played Flannery O’Connor as a feminist icon. To state the obvious, Wallace was not a dork, and O’Connor was not a feminist icon, but something in the genre encourages gross simplifications of its subjects.
A Talent for Murder is not entirely free from such miscues: Highsmith is never seen typing, but she is often encountered while smoking, drinking, and philosophizing, since, in the minds of moviemakers, those actions are more synonymous with a writer’s life than the creative act. (Perhaps as compensation, we are treated to repeated glimpses of her unused Olympia typewriter.) Nonetheless, Mirren’s performance is so persuasive that we forgive the periodic displays of dumbness in the screenplay by Joanna Murray-Smith, who adapted her own play.
In fact, perhaps the greatest strength of A Talent for Murder is that it, apart from Mirren’s transformation, makes few claims on reality. The basic scenario — that, just before Highsmith’s death in 1995, a whippersnapper of a junior editor from New York City, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), comes knocking at the author’s door in Switzerland to induce her to write a sixth Ripley novel — is a complete invention, and the movie itself turns out to be the work of an increasingly overactive imagination.
In the early scenes, Highsmith is presented as a writer so tethered to her material (that is to say, murder) that she is suspected, at least by callow Edward, of being a murderess or near-murderess herself. There are hushed references to what became of the last editor to call on Highsmith, and in his first 24 hours at her home, Edward suspects his host of grazing him with a knife while sleeping and using a dash of arsenic while whipping up his scrambled eggs for breakfast. This is utter fiction but quite fun. Director Anton Corbijn even deploys obvious cinematic jump scares — Highsmith emerging from the shadows while accompanied by jarring music — that would not be out of place in, say, the Friday the 13th franchise.
The film’s appeal in these eerie establishing scenes is to incorporate outrageously macabre touches alongside actual details about the real Highsmith, including her bizarrely tender feelings toward snails and her noxious antisemitism (a nasty biographical detail just barely alluded to). In presenting a version of Highsmith made up of unpleasant behavior and attitudes, both real and fictive, the movie has concocted a fearsome character. “I wouldn’t murder a little nobody from New York City, would I?” Highsmith asks Edward, but we wonder.
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Ehrenreich is somewhat less credible, playing Edward as such a goofy, obsequious fellow that the only wonder is why it takes Highsmith even five minutes to dismiss him as “right out of kindergarten.” She is certainly right when she states that he “dresses like an intern.” The script asks us to imagine that Edward is intrepid enough to extract a new novel from Highsmith, but we only believe their interactions when she adamantly refuses to be guided by this lad. Finally, the film demands that Highsmith and Edward, unlikely a pair though they are, put their heads together to come up with a story outline, which is visualized by depositing Edward into the role of Ripley. A lady friend whom Edward met on a train, Clementine (Olivia Cooke), shows up in these imaginary scenes as Ripley’s unfortunate object of affection. The movie settles into a rhythm that shuttles between supposedly real scenes between Highsmith and Edward, and scenes from the novel-in-progress between Edward/Ripley and the character inspired by Clementine. The denouement, meant to suggest Edward’s evolution into (or revelation as) a man capable of homicide, is completely unbelievable.
This movie ought to be seen for Mirren’s interpretation of Highsmith, although every time I see a performance that so accurately resurrects a real figure, especially a writer whose works we can revisit, part of me wonders: Why bother with the imitation when we can just go to the real thing? I may never see A Talent for Murder again, but I think I’ll spend the weekend rereading Strangers on a Train.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.