‘Deep Water’ Is The Best Book-to-Screen Adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Dark, Nihilistic Body of Work

Patricia Highsmith tells the story of finding two snails once, in a standoff, bobbing and weaving in a fish market in preparation for either a fight or a dalliance decidedly more amorous. She took them home and put them in a fishbowl where she watched them for hours, transfixed. It was sex. She began breeding them. She would bring a purse full of snails to parties sometimes on a head of cabbage to reveal to her friends to their surprise and, I have to think, dismay. She said of the snails that “they give me a sort of tranquility, it is quite impossible to tell which is the male and which is the female, because their behavior and appearance are exactly the same.” That spoke to Highsmith, wrestling as she did for her entire life with her queer identity. She started incorporating snails in her stories after that. In a short story from 1947 called “The Snail-Watcher,” the hero Mr. Knoppert breeds a roomful of them. They cover every inch of it. The weight of them pulls the wallpaper off in snail-festooned strips. He strikes his head and is buried beneath the insistent weight of them. They muffle his cries. “He could feel them gliding over his legs like a glutinous river, pinning his legs to the floor.” As he dies, he notes on a rubber plant near the door “a pair of snails were quietly making love in it. And right beside them, tiny snails as pure as dewdrops were emerging from a pit like an infinite army into their widening world.”

My first great love of a Patricia Highsmith story was through Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951). The story goes that Hitchcock had the rights bought through an intermediary, resulting in Highsmith’s representatives letting it go for a paltry $7,500. The result is one of the great films of Hitchcock’s “masterpiece” period in the United States, the first of many of his films to deal with queer sexuality (a hallmark of Highsmith’s work) at a time where even mention of the topic in a popular medium would likely end with the artist in question on an FBI watch list (as Hitchcock was throughout J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure). In Strangers, wealthy Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) meets tennis player Guy Haines (Farley Granger) on a train one day where they exchange horror stories about Bruno’s miserable father and Guy’s harridan wife. Bruno suggests they switch murders, “criss-cross,” so that they take care of one another’s problems while having the perfect motive of murdering a perfect stranger. Guy thinks Bruno’s kidding. Bruno is not kidding. The film pulls Highsmith’s fascination with strange, askew Bruno from the source and, brilliantly, it also deals with Highsmith’s unnatural interest in politicians, the lie of a happy marriage, and the ugly pastimes of the very wealthy. She is always interested in the truth beneath the facade. For Highsmith, people must forever be hiding their actual selves, because whenever she showed her true self — either through her writing or the sharing of her interests — she was treated with horror at worst, surprise at least. She spent her life dealing with her depression (her 22 books are full of suicide and suicidal ideation) and then with the alcoholism she used to treat her black moods. She was a bundle of hate. She is one of the great American writers.

Despite the obvious success of Strangers on a Train, the dark psychological dysfunction and, indeed, the nihilism of Highsmith didn’t find strong purchase in Hollywood for decades. Early adaptations of Highsmith’s novels were left to the French and the Germans. The best of these is Claude Autant-Lara’s Le Meurtrier (1963), a take on Highsmith’s The Blunderer that follows the drastic disintegration of a marriage leading into suicide, murder, and an invasive, possibly psychotic, police investigator. Andy Goddard gave The Blunderer another go with 2016’s A Kind of Murder starring Patrick Wilson and Jessica Biel. It’s a handsome film, professionally done, but despite all the things to recommend it, it feels rushed – an attempt to capitalize on the recent success of Carol, I think, that is its best in a breathless final fifteen minutes where all the cards building this period house come tumbling down in hysterical pops of sudden violence. There are things to like about Claude Miller’s Dites-lui que je l’aime (1977), an adaptation of Highsmith’s The Sweet Sickness and Die giaserne Zelle (1978) a take on her The Glass Cell. The first is a tale of unrequited, obsessive love and the other is a social justice film about the toll of incarceration on the wrongly-accused. A “wrong man” conceit that would’ve been perfect for a Hitchcock adaptation, but alas. Hans W. Geibendorfer adapted Highsmith’s astonishing Edith’s Diary as Ediths Tagebuch (1983) – an almost entirely internal monologue about the gap between how a housewife appears to the world set against the maelstrom of diseased thoughts and tumultuous emotions inside her head.

What Highsmith does in her work is impossible for me to quantify in any meaningful way. I can say that her books are about characters desperate to escape from themselves without striking at the suffocating dread that they engender in the reader. Halfway into any of her novels and it’s easy to admire the cleanness of her prose, the clarity with which she outlines her characters’ profligate neuroses, the way her plots are meticulously laid out like a surgeon’s instruments on a table. It’s the last half that you need to worry about. It’s the last half where those carefully made plans fall apart, where her characters reveal themselves to be helpless to the ebbs and flows of the insect-like (gastropod-like?) hardwiring that drives them, how the clarity with which she writes was always a distraction from the ineffable horror underpinning her stories. She was never a crime writer, she was always an anthropologist. I think of her as an insect anthropologist reporting on the behaviors of human beings as an insect would understand them. As she was observing her snails, in other words, she must have imagined what they saw when they observed her back.

Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January was adapted in 1986 in Germany by Wolfgang Storch. Difficult to find, the version I watched didn’t have English subtitles, but I was familiar enough with the book to mark that it hewed fairly faithfully to the story’s broad strokes. In brief, a con man on vacation with his doting wife are trailed by debtors and assassins. In their flight, they pull in an American grad student into their declining orbit of bad choices and a series of terrible betrayals, accidental murders and ironic tragedies. It was made again in 2014 by Hossein Amini starring Viggo Mortenson as the con man, Kirsten Dunst as his wife, and Oscar Isaac as the grad student. Alive with the star power of its leads, there are hints in this adaptation of a true understanding of how often Highsmith bent reality through fantasies and nightmares to illustrate the toll that sexual jealousy takes on a man’s sanity. I love a scene after Mortenson’s McFarland wakes from an image of his wife seducing their friend where he runs his finger along a rumpled bed and smells it to try to detect evidence of sex that probably didn’t happen. That right there is Highsmith’s grotesquerie in a nutshell. McFarland’s subsequent nighttime odyssey through an unfamiliar country is as terrifying as anything in After Hours or David Fincher’s The Game. Without a lot of contortion, you could see it as a sensory hallucination inspired by what he smelled on his finger. What’s missing from the film is more of Highsmith’s special misanthropy. The Two Faces of January is a largely conventional thriller. A good one, but not a special one.

The Cry of the Owl has also been twice-adapted with, I would say, more success. The first time by Claude Chabrol in 1987 as Le cri du hibou and then again in 2009 by Jamie Thraves and starring Paddy Considine and Julia Stiles. I love the Highsmith book. Of her non-Ripley work, it’s the one I recommend as the best example of Highsmith’s extreme distrust of people coupled with what is the blackest depiction of her depression. Written after an acrimonious split with her lover, it is a merciless tale of a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown, then begins stalking a woman he ends up having a relationship with briefly before her suicide, and then is accused of a series of murders that he isn’t literally responsible for but has some part in nonetheless. Its vision of the world is bleaker than bleak. Chabrol saw in this material the opportunity for one of his meditation on the sensuality of voyeurism and the life of the mind. In Thraves’ version, there is all of that, plus a deep irresolvable despair for not just the doomed Jenny, the object of Robert’s fantasies of domesticity, but for Robert himself who loses everything in his life because he can no longer hide that he is wrong on the inside. In her life, Highsmith saw herself as Robert. After an encounter with a blonde shopgirl that led to the writing eventually of The Price of Salt which Todd Haynes made into a queer Douglas Sirkian melodrama (an exceptional one) with 2015’s Carol, Highsmith followed her to her home and watched her for a while at a distance. The shopgirl would kill herself about a month later – one of a couple of Highsmith’s former lovers or just temporary obsessions who attempted, or succeeded, at the same.

Still, Highsmith’s greatest character is Tom Ripley: an autodidact, a nouveau-riche pretender to the arts and culture elite, a remorseless killer that another generation would have called “sociopath” or “psycho.” He is the hero of five Highsmith novels, the first three of which have been adapted to film. Ripley is charming, brilliant, and greedy for acceptance amongst the upper crust. Whenever he’s discovered to be “common” he lies, gaslights, manipulates and when all those tactics fail, he murders anyone who might have the means to call him out. General audiences would be most familiar with the character through Anthony Minghella’s handsome, lavish The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) starring Matt Damon as Ripley,. In the film, his assorted friends and victims, oft one and the same, are played by a coterie of young luminaries at the height of their impossible beauty and charm: Jude Law, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

The first time the novel was adapted to screen was as René Clément’s wonderful Purple Noon (1960), an acknowledged classic of world cinema in which an impossibly beautiful Alain Delon does what he does best: looks good while acting like a bit of an alien. Purple Noon is a much looser adaptation of Highsmith’s novel than The Talented Mr. Ripley in that Clement plays it as a largely conventional story about a rather pathetic young man embarrassed by someone he thought was a friend before being provoked into violence by this friend’s rejection. Delon’s Ripley does assume the identity of a man he’s murdered, but doing so seems more a requirement to facilitate his escape rather than an egoless cipher assuming a desired form. In the end, Delon’s Ripley isn’t even capable of outwitting the authorities. As a contrast, in Minghella’s (and Highsmith’s) version, Ripley effortlessly slides from deception to violent interlude, exchanging identities as easily as his sexuality in a portrait of a young man who is essentially an amorphous manifestation of hungry opportunism. For a big budget feature that won considerable mainstream acceptance, the sickness of The Talented Mr. Ripley still feels like a unicorn. The Talented Mr. Ripley found a third, again very, very extremely loose, adaptation with Jeeva Shankar’s Naan (2012) that while going through some of the broad motions of the plot, centers in on generational trauma as the cause for this Ripley’s (Vijay Antony) desperate desire to escape his birthright of shame and despair.

Escaping birthright isn’t something Highsmith ever seemed particularly interested in exploring. Her work largely eschews detailed backstory. Ripley, from novel to novel, proves an unreliable mythologizer of his own origins which is only appropriate for a character that is more a paranoid, and predatory, concept than a person. He’s a superhero whose special power is cutting a bloody swath through the financial and emotional lives of the people who can afford it the most. There’s an element of wish-fulfillment to it all, of course, a delicious transference of guilt in which we find ourselves rooting lustily for the obviously demented villain to get away with it. And it’s not for dislike of his victims – Highsmith is very careful to paint his victims as decent if cash-drunk and certainly not deserving of what Ripley does to them. I think what she does is cause us to see them as Ripley sees them as, indeed, Highsmith herself sees others, that is as something less than human. She does it subtly, deconstructing behaviors into bestial impulses that are not unlike the motions, the alien motivations of snails. Hoffman captures this in his first appearance as playboy Freddy in The Talented Mr. Ripley, appearing in what seems like a cloud of unctuous arrogance and expansive smarm. It’s all an act. We see through it as we see through the various guises Ripley assumes. Ripley is literally an actor in the second Ripley novel, Ripley Under Ground, that was adapted with verve and joy in 2005 by Roger Spottiswoode with Barry Pepper in the title role. Small wonder as a screenwriting credit goes to legendary crime writer Donald E. Westlake.

Ripley this time around is a member of a troupe of actors, artists, bon vivants who is about to be expelled from his acting school for falsifying every element of his application including his bank and even the city in which the bank is supposedly housed. Asked how he thought he’d get away with it, he tells the dean that he figured they would see how gifted an actor he was and thus offer him a full-ride. On the night of the gallery opening of one of their compatriots, Ripley meets a beautiful French girl Heloise (Jacinda Barrett) whom he has intended to rob, and an unfortunate death leads to a scheme to forge a series of paintings that raise the curiosity of a talented amateur collector (Willem Dafoe) and a suspicious Scotland Yard investigator (Tom Wilkinson). We desperately want Ripley to get away with it all: to become enriched by his many lies and schemes, to get the girl, even to get the scholarship to his European acting school because isn’t it the American Dream to do whatever it takes to be able to afford whatever you want? Pepper isn’t quite off enough for my tastes to make a truly great Ripley – he’s more of a conventional antihero than the actual devil – but he deserves more than he’s gotten in his career. He’s good and the film is a little better than good. A shame it’s as underseen as Liliana Cavani’s extraordinary Ripley’s Game (2002), an adaptation of the third Ripley novel and purchased for domestic distribution by Fine Line before being buried out of a desire not to compete with Miramax’s Cold Mountain. It stars John Malkovich as Ripley, an art dealer living in Italy with a beautiful Italian wife who overhears a terminally ill framemaker (Dougray Scott, choosing to do this rather than play Wolverine in Sony’s  X-Men films) insulting his taste and then spending the rest of the film torturing the frammemaker, Trevanny, with money through a variety of illicit opportunities. It’s delicious.

Malkovich is the perfect temperature to play Ripley: he is reptilian, insectile in fact, the only time he betrays anything like passion is when he’s afraid that his rampage through a train might result in his priceless watch being damaged in the process. Ray Winstone proves an able foil, as well, a former conspirator who has a nasty habit of showing up where he’s not been invited and, worst of all, of being a bit of a boor. The truth is that Ripley is more boor than baron and any association with rudeness is unconscionable. The roots of Hannibal Lecter are in Tom Ripley. In many ways, Thomas Harris’ monster is the caricature of Highsmith’s elegant class vampire. Ripley’s Game was first filmed as Wim Wenders’ brilliant The American Friend (1977) which literalized Ripley’s ambitions with a jittery, nervous performance from Dennis Hopper in the lead role. The framemaker this time around is a broken, Germanic Bruno Ganz, making the collision between them play like a Henry Jamesian metaphor of the dying of the European civility in the fire of new American vulgarity. It comes at the end of a trio of “road” movies for Wenders after Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move and Kings of the Road – movies in which this question of moving from the past into the present is memorialized in Wenders’ lost chroniclers, projector repairmen, photographers and writers. With Trevanny he has a maker of frames, a contextualizer of art, in a struggle at the end of his life with a man whose only relationship with things that are beautiful is his desire to possess them. One is an archivist, the other is a philistine.

We started with Highsmith and her snails and we’ll end with them, too, as her great snail novel Deep Water finds its second adaptation with Adrian Lyne’s extraordinary, organic-feeling interpretation dropping on streaming after a long delay, a change in studio, and a denial of a theatrical run. I’ve missed Lyne — it’s been ten years since his last film, and I’ve missed the kinds of films Lyne makes. They’re for adults. Not in a pornographic sense, but in the sense that they deal with real and complicated adult characters who are in complex adult relationships in stories where the stakes are fidelity and faith rather than an entire multiverse of extraterrestrial invaders. Highsmith’s creatures are all of the Id. Deep Water was first adapted in 1981 by Michel Deville as Eaux profondes in which the great Jean-Louis Trintignant plays the frustrated husband cuckolded serially by his licentious wife Melanie (the great Isabelle Huppert). The way Vic manages his sexual jealousy is by cornering his wife’s paramours and suggesting to them that he has murdered their predecessors. He is a great collector and breeder of snails. He looks to them as a religious man looks to the gospel: for strength, courage, and a guide to better living. The lovers don’t think Vic’s veiled threats are very funny but Vic assures them that he’s not joking. Deville’s film deviates from the violent, destructively self-loathing ending of Highsmith’s novel with what I read as a defense of the traditional family unit. It’s a good movie, but I don’t like that it lands here.

Much better is Lyne’s take on the material that finds the auteur back in the same ground he trod with Fatal Attraction most gaudily, but mainly in his underseen and underappreciated Unfaithful. Lyne’s Deep Water is really a look at how people change during the course of a long-term relationship, not in the degree to which they love their spouses, but in how they love them. It’s wise, the product of an older, more experienced creator who sees in Highsmith the woman who believed from a young age that she was born a man, but was taught through her education and culture that feeling that way was a disorder the equivalent of pedophilia or satanism. One of her favorite books as a kid, Dr. Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind, said as much in so many words. She lived her life then in self-loathing, feeling the criminal, feeling the liar, the actor in all situations. Even a shallow perusal of her journals is a glimpse into a lifetime of pain and resentment while even a cursory read of her work sees a full expression of the bitterness of her existential crisis. Lyne gets that in Deep Water, pulling from his star Ben Affleck a performance of extraordinary yearning to be seen at last for the person that he is and the pain that he’s in through having to hide it from the world. Of all the Highsmith adaptations we’ve discussed, we see glimpses of this basic yearning to be known here and again, but it’s Adrian Lyne who just nails it out of the ballpark. He changes the ending from the book, too, but rather than offer a defense of traditional gender roles, he makes a defiant statement about the importance of identity, however ugly, however slimy, and most of all how vital it is for both partners in a relationship to see the other as they really are when all artifice is stripped away. We are animals, bugs. And civilization is just the tool we use to get away with all the things we need to get away with up to the very moment we’re caught and, because we deserve it, put away for good for our sins. If Deep Water isn’t the best film to be made from a Patricia Highsmith book (that remains Strangers on a Train), it is at least the best adaptation of Highsmith from book to screen. It’s better than the book, even, because it provides an analysis for the totality of an important body of work. It happens more than you think.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for pre-order. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.