Why The Talented Mr. Ripley succeeds where Saltburn fails

I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley for the first time about a month ago and I loved it. I added it to my top 4 on Letterboxd like right after I watched it. I watched Saltburn two days later and hated it, despite it being extremely similar. I have grievances with Saltburn’s writer and director, Emerald Fennell, that I talked about in my Wuthering Heights review, but Saltburn I dislike for special reasons, one of them being that it is so similar to Mr. Ripley... It’s like its choppleganger. Here’s why I think it fails when Talented Mr. Ripley succeeds.

Sympathy for the devil

Part of the reason that Talented Mr. Ripley, or TTMR as I’ll call it, works so well is that you actually spend time with Tom Ripley before he meets Dickie. You follow him from New York to the airport and all the way to Italy. He is actually the main character of the movie. In Saltburn, on the other hand, you kind of don’t see Oliver without Felix. You do a little bit, but it’s just a few scenes of him being bland at college and observing Felix from afar. TTMR makes you sympathize with Tom, that’s part of the horror of it, you find yourself kind of rooting for him throughout the movie even though he’s objectively a shitty person and also like, a murderer. When I was watching Saltburn, I noticed that I actually did not give a single shit about Oliver. He could’ve drowned in that nasty ass bathwater for all I cared.

Also, in TTMR, the main two characters, Tom and Dickie, are kind of… gray. The movie manipulates you into rooting for Tom like I said up there, but he’s also not just a stone cold stencil-drawn villain. He hates himself, he thinks of himself as a nobody, he has his own twisted reasons for doing everything he does. That’s kind of like, a titular theme of the movie. Take this quote from Tom himself: “Well, whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? In your head. You never meet anybody that thinks they’re a bad person.” This is exactly what I’m talking about. Tom doesn’t think he’s a bad person, nobody does, he has his own crazy ass reasons for killing Dickie, killing Freddie, killing Peter. To him, it’s all for self defense, not just like… the love of the game. He’s built a life, or stolen a life I should say, and in his head, anybody that threatens the life he’s built essentially threatens to kill him, to make him into a nobody again, to throw him back into purgatorial obscurity.

Oliver, on the other hand, isn’t given that much reasoning for what he does. He kills mad people seemingly just because He Wanna be Rich, which is, on the surface, kind of like what Tom Ripley does, but Oliver doesn’t have any of that underlying motivation for wanting to keep his lifestyle. He actually has NO motivation for it, because it’s revealed in the middle of the movie that he’s actually like, upper middle class. He’s not poor for shit. This erases the one motivation that he seemingly had to defend his lifestyle at Saltburn so viciously, and is also eradicates any class commentary that could’ve been made in this movie, but I’ll talk about that later.

So Tom is terrible but the movie shows us why. He’s not just Disney villain evil, everything he does makes sense to HIM. The other side of this coin is Dickie. He’s the “good guy” of the movie if there is any, but he kind of sucks. Like, he’s not a villain by any means, but he’s a douchebag. He has affairs, he gets girls pregnant and then proposes to other ones, he picks up friends and kind of treats them like pets. He’s a complicated character just like Tom. He doesn’t deserve to DIE, and in contrast to Tom he seems great, but he’s not like, good. This is the final puzzle piece in this movie’s kind of manipulation, the final reason why you find yourself sorta wanting Tom to get away with it all, and that’s what makes it so good. You hate everyone but you sympathize with everyone, even a spree killer.

(Also cannot discredit young Matt Damon upside down smile for its role in sympathy garnering)

Saltburn does not do this. Like I said, you don’t really get to know Oliver before he meets Felix, and he also has seemingly no motivation for doing the stuff he does. (This is a problem Fennell repeatedly has, and I talked about it in my Wuthering Heights review. Her characters do stuff for no apparent reason, no underlying motivations are ever present.) And Felix, Saltburn’s Dickie counterpart, does not suck in any way. The movie tells you he does… kind of? Felix is shown treating girls mildly unfavorably and characters tell Oliver about how he likes to kind of adopt poor people as friends sometimes, but the movie never frames him really as a sucky guy. He’s just a college boy doing things college boys do. If anything, he’s framed as just a tragic figure. A guy who accidentally picked the wrong friend. You don’t dislike Felix and you don’t care about Oliver, so the movie ends up extremely black and white. The very thing that makes TTMR so interesting is just completely missing from Saltburn, the moral grey areas. Oliver sucks, Felix does not, and that’s just kind of the end of it. But it could have had a saving grace in the form of class commentary, but obviously…

Rich people can’t make class commentary

Emerald Fennell is a nepo baby. Her dad is a high end jewelry designer and her mom is a profitable writer. She grew up rich, she stays rich. That being said, she keeps trying (keyword: trying) to make class commentary. Saltburn is a movie that is inseparable from class, a movie that is clearly trying to say something about class, but it doesn’t succeed… at all.

If done better, it could have been a movie about the lengths people will go for money, which is a theme in TTMR. But, since Oliver doesn’t actually need money and comes from a very comfortable suburban family, he is essentially just a leech. A dude taking advantage of a wealthy family’s generosity when he doesn’t need it. Saltburn is just a rich person’s nightmare play with nothing to say. The choice to make him middle class was so bizarre I can’t think of a plausible reason for it. Maybe Fennel didn’t want to come off as classist, but she wrecked her commentary in the pursuit. Or maybe she just wanted him to lie about something about his life but didn’t know what else to make him lie about… then that’s just plain lazy. I do think that she was really trying to say something, but she’s scared of it. Whether that’s because she’s rich (probably,) because she’s trying to make marketable movies (probably,) or just because she’s a coward (also probably) I don’t know, but it’s disappointing every time. She wants to come off as an intellectual, but she doesn’t actually have anything to say, so she makes movies that are essentially just empty shells.

Relationships and tension

A quick final section because I had a couple more thoughts that I wanted to fire off but I didn’t know where to put them.

First, Oliver and Felix’s relationship is not developed nearly as well as Tom and Dickie’s. Fennell loves a montage and I… do not. I don’t think montages are a good way to show a relationship developing! A sequence of short little scenes of two characters hangin’ out does not register in my mind as “they’re best friends now” but I don’t know, maybe that’s just a me thing.

Also I have to mention that Fennell is a huge shock factor abuser but I was not shocked during Saltburn. Not in the slightest. Not intrigued, titillated, anything. I’m not a hater of the in-your-face but I think sometimes subtlety is just better, and TTMR does subtlety extremely well. I was shiveringggg during the scene where Tom smells Dickie on the train. I don’t know maybe this is just personal bias but the like 2 seconds where he dips his hand into Dickies bath (this is right before he just straight up stares at his ass in the mirror so you know, grain of salt on the subtlety comments here) was way more effective than the bathwater scene in Saltburn. Notes, take them! You can’t make this suspenseful kindagay thriller while also trying to be crazy out there in your face shocky. That’s just not the place for that.

Final thoughts

Anybody that knows me knows this is an extremely biased article. Talented Mr. Ripley is in my top 4 on Letterboxd, whatever. I also don’t HATE Saltburn, as much as it sounds like I do. I gave it 2 stars on Letterboxd which is not a… horrible rating for me. Well, kind of, but I don’t think its irredeemable. I think it’s a very beautiful movie and Fennell very clearly has a talent for visuals, but she doesn’t have a talent for writing, which is sad because I think she has great ideas and pretty good taste.

Anyway, if you want to watch Saltburn, just watch TTMR. Bye.