This combination of the conventional and the subversive also partly describes the hero, Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), who is first seen hammering away at a piano accompanying a soprano singing an aria for an audience of tony Ivy League types. In his Princeton sportscoat and horn-rims he seems a budding upper-cruster himself, and that's what Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn) of Greenleaf Shipping takes Tom for when he offers him $1000 to go to Italy for the Henry Jamesian task of bringing back his prodigal son. Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law, in a charismatic role ranging from buff demi-god to well-groomed rodent) has fled his legacy to pursue his ambition to be a jazz musician -- this is the meticulously re-created late '50s of late Charlie Parker and early Miles Davis -- and daddy's patience with this whim has run out.

What Greenleaf doesn't know is that Tom's jacket is borrowed and that the bright young thing is a cipher. In the tradition of Jay Gatsby, however, Tom seizes the opportunity, sensing that the first step to becoming a self-made man is not so much being a nobody as being a phony. And at that he's far from polished, which makes his act the more convincing. He stumbles onto the beach at Mongibello in the goggles, bad haircut, loafers, and unfortunate bathing suit that announce a movie makeover is in the works. He introduces himself to Dickie and Dickie's "fiancée," Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow), as an old Princeton classmate. Bemused, Dickie replies, "You're so white!"

Indeed he is; Tom's a blank page onto which he imprints his idealization of Dickie, borrowing Dickie's clothes, absorbing his mannerisms, imitating his dilettantish fetish with jazz. For his part, Dickie finds Tom a temporarily amusing adorer, a respite from the clingy Marge. Only Dickie's plummily boorish pal Freddy (Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of the great comic performances of the year) perceives this new friend is a mooch and a sycophant; he will prove Tom's nemesis. But Tom has his charm, an appeal to the hapless neophyte in everyone -- and perhaps the narcissistic Dickie is attracted to and repelled by Tom because he recognizes that Tom can play Dickie's life better and more earnestly than Dickie can himself.

That abyss of selfhood and the need to fill it with identity is what drives Ripley, despite its canny guises of homoeroticism and homicide. And in the leading role, Matt Damon masterfully evokes the terror, pathos, and conniving that underlies everyone's search for the figment of who he or she is. Damon is both self-reflexive and spontaneous, calculated and ingenuously vulnerable, as he creates the character of "Tom from Princeton," or as he engages in amusing mimcry of Mr. Greenleaf, or Chet Baker singing "My Funny Valentine." Even when his mummery turns sinister, as he practices before a mirror his biggest performance as Dickie Greenleaf, Damon's eager ingenuousness arouses sympathy that only increases as the stakes grow higher. Paradoxically, in this film in which the hero's self is only a mirror of the world he desires, the world depicted aches with that hero's inner turmoil.

Not since Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now has a film used the patina'd beauty of Italy to such intense psychological effect. Cinematographer John Seale captures a sense of alienation and liberation, of grimy decadence and shimmering purity that mirrors Ripley's protean but always shrewd state of mind. It's a world in which catastrophe is always immanent, whether lurking in a tiny crimson sports car in a murky square at dusk or in a tiny white boat in a swelling lake at noon. There, and in every aspect of Anthony Minghella's rendition of Highsmith's most disturbing novel, from Gabriel Yared's icily complex and insinuating score to the wry tragedy of Cate Blanchett and Jack Davenport in throwaway roles as people who genuinely love a man who never was, Mr. Ripley is the consummation of many talents into one triumphant, subversive illusion.