Being John Malkovich got to the question first — well, not first of course, but first as far as the late-1999 movie season was concerned. The question: What would it be like to be someone else — and how do you get there? Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was, and is, one of the most trenchant works to address this question, and director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella's film of that book is a strangely wondrous achievement. Far superior to Minghella's last, much-touted effort, The English Patient, Ripley doesn't flinch for a minute at the unsavory implications of the aforementioned question, and that makes this movie about as discomfiting a "prestige film" as one could imagine. Minghella's loose but emotionally focused reimagining of the plot — in which a desultory young Tom Ripley is recruited from a dead-end life in 1950s New York and dispatched to a glamour-drenched Italy to fetch back a fallen son, whom Ripley decides he'd rather replace than return — successfully hits a lot of risky notes, including the homoerotic attraction Ripley feels for his eventual prey, the beautiful but shallow Dickie Greenleaf.

But the real beauty of Minghella's treatment of this ultimately horrifying story is the way he allows his actors to run away with it. Matt Damon's Ripley is a revelation, and not just as far as Damon's talent is concerned — there's never been a movie character quite like this before. Ripley has been adapted previously by Rene Clement with 1960's Purple Noon, starring Alain Delon. But with Delon being Delon, audiences knew he was the Devil the second he stepped into the frame. Damon does something completely different, and terrifying: He delineates the path from wannabe to sociopath as he assumes the identity of Greenleaf. Jude Law gorgeously incarnates Greenleaf as the strange hybrid of beauty and insipidness. Gwyneth Paltrow demonstrates not merely her talent but also her modesty in the mostly unshowy role of Marge, Greenleaf's girlfriend. Philip Seyour Hoffman stuns once again, nailing a certain species of American vagabond, the comfortable heir of Ivy League privilege. These phenomenal talents enact a scenario that, in its own quiet way, is as wrenching as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho — more wrenching, in a way, because Ripley's class and status envy is a lot easier to empathize with than Norman Bates's mother love. "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," Flaubert once said of his spectacularly shallow creation. Minghella's — and Damon's — triumph here is in making Ripleys of us all.