Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous drama The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), based on the 1955 psychological thriller by Patricia Highsmith, scans almost as a manual for faking your way into the upper echelons of the American elite. Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a lowly Manhattan piano tuner, dons a borrowed Princeton jacket at a black-tie fundraiser and convinces an industrial mogul to hire him to fetch his only son, Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), from a life of leisure on the Italian Riviera. Before his cross-Atlantic journey, Tom studies Dickie’s likes and habits, learning to recognize jazz artists by sound alone. Despite lacking a proper suit jacket and skiing skills, Tom establishes himself in an opulent expat community anchored by Dickie and his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), as Mr Greenleaf foots the bill.

Revisiting Ripley nearly twenty-five years after its release, and almost seventy-five years from Highsmith’s novel, it occurs to me just how well-suited a pre-Bourne Damon, then twenty-nine, was for the role: handsome in a corn-fed, sheepish sort of way, mole-speckled and big-toothed, the same height as Law but less delicate around the jaw and brow bone. Damon plays Tom perfectly in that he plays him hungry (and not just because Damon wasn’t jacked yet). Hungry to assimilate, to ascend, to crack the uncrackable code of class.

“Who are you — some imposter, some third-class mooch?” Dickie demands of Tom during one combustible scene, ultimately their last together. “Who are you to tell me anything?” Part of the movie’s brilliance is that, by the end, we’re still rooting for Tom, even after he’s done the unthinkable. It feels plausible that someone as creatively shrewd as Tom could scam his way into the libertine upper class. What’s more, we want him to, because Tom’s upward trajectory via cultural and social capital reflects the tempting idea that one can rise through the ranks if only one learns the rules and emulates the manners of those at the top. Since anyone might prove cunning and charming, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, Tom’s class assimilation — at least at first — sustains the fantasy of meritocracy.