The 1950s. Manhattan lavatory attendant, Tom Ripley, borrows a Princeton jacket to play piano at a garden party. When the wealthy father of a recent Princeton grad chats Tom up, Tom pretends to know the son and is soon offered $1,000 to go to Italy to convince Dickie Greenleaf to return home. In Italy, Tom attaches himself to Dickie and to Marge, Dickie's cultured fiancée, pretending to love jazz and harboring homoerotic hopes as he soaks in luxury. Besides lying, Tom's talents include impressions and forgery, so when the handsome and confident Dickie tires of Tom, dismissing him as a bore, Tom goes to extreme lengths to make Greenleaf's privileges his own.

The second film in as many years in which Jude Law plays an entitled young man impersonated throughout the movie by someone else. The other film is Gattaca (1997).

Tom Ripley:
I always thought it would be better, to be a fake somebody... than a real nobody.

Continuity: In the opening long shot of the sailing scene, the boat's jib is clearly luffing on a port tack. Dickie is yelling at Tom to pull in the jib sheet, and the next shot shows Dickie helping Tom pull in the port jib sheet. If the boat were on a port tack, Tom should have been hauling on the starboard jib sheet.

Music by Gabriel Yared
Lyric by Anthony Minghella
Performed by Sinéad O'Connor
Produced by Anthony Minghella & Gabriel Yared
Sinéad O'Connor performs courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corporation