Patricia Highsmith — too good for the movies?

The punishment for those who love Patricia Highsmith’s best novels is that every work of thriller fiction by others can seem humdrum and sublunary by comparison. This Sweet Sickness, The Blunderer, A Dog’s Ransom, Edith’s Diary and the Ripley books are works of wonder: not just tales of crime, murder or detection (sometimes not even that) but intricate structures of fear, self-doubt and double personality.

The perennial questions for a Highsmith hero are: “Who am I?”, “How did I get into this?” (whatever “this” may be — crisis, imbroglio, criminal act) and “What must I do, or who must I become, to get out of it?” We might all love to have a choice of lives and personalities. This author’s heroes and anti-heroes seize that choice or manufacture it. In their heads, they feel they have to.

Not even cinema has quite done justice to the mazes of this writer’s imagination. There is no great Highsmith film, though Strangers on a Train (1951) comes close: Hitchcock was her nearest match in the movie world. And there are moments of magic in two versions of The Talented Mr Ripley (1955): Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), René Clément’s 1960 French twist on the tale starring Alain Delon, Highsmith’s favourite Ripley; and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, with its sprawly relish of scenery and the ornate psychological scenario. More cockeyed, if collectible, Dennis Hopper and John Malkovich made fruitily miscast Ripleys in two interesting Euro-Highsmiths: Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977) and Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game (2002).

Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) is a different creature. Adapting a 1952 lesbian-love novel, it’s faithful to the book in never hitting the Highsmith highs. A brave-in-its-day story, written when LGBTQ+ was an unheard-of and unimagined conjuration of rallying codes, it now seems a stolid sexual issues drama; on screen it has the sober kitsch we expect from the Far from Heaven director in his retro Douglas Sirk mode.

That’s a shame, because forbidden love — as it effectively was in her youth — may be the gateway transgression that inspired Highsmith to her thriller-empowering fascination with guilt, concealment and double lives. Eva Vitija’s new Loving Highsmith is a film about her, not from her. It’s a documentary on her life and her lovers, straying occasionally into literary comment and interpretation.

Some life. Early on — hilariously — we hear a question from radio host Roy Plomley on an ancient edition of Desert Island Discs. “Your childhood was a little unsettled, wasn’t it?” asks the presenter, po-voiced and polite. Highsmith gallantly summarises, or tries, the unloving, often cruel divorced mother; the rodeo-culture Texas family background (machismo essential, even for women); the all-but-orphaned growing-up. But as with all the film’s dug-up media exchanges, we begin to understand Highsmith’s comment in one of the excerpts from her diaries (skilfully voiced by Gwendoline Christie). She describes “the profound indignity of being interviewed”, comparing it to having to strip naked for a medical examination.

A private woman, chased out regularly into the limelight, she spent many of her later years living alone in France or Switzerland. The novels echo or pre-echo this need for reclusion. So often they are about the horror of lights flung on to expose, Third Man-like, a figure cowering in a doorway. A figure in Highsmith’s case wanting to cower. Not for her, or her protagonists, Orson Welles’s exultant sneer of playful irony.

We meet several women, from several countries, who became the author’s love partners. Yet the weakness of Loving Highsmith is that their memories don’t light up much about their subject. It’s too obvious, somehow, that the German lover steeped in Berlin cabaret culture should identify herself as the muse for The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980). Perhaps she was: it would explain this mildly demented late addition to the Ripliad, steeped in transvestism and sex tourism.

It’s more revealing — fascinating, indeed — to learn from Highsmith herself, in another bygone interview, that she modelled Ripley originally on a boy seen from the window of a hotel in Positano, on the Amalfi coast. A boy wandering along a beach looking lonely and introspective. “Rather shy and a little homosexual, in my opinion,” says Highsmith of the hero she developed from this brief sighting. The brevity may explain the bewitching eeriness of her anti-hero to be: a youth of off-kilter motivations, near-pathological reticence and an obsession with exploring the costume trunk of alternative identities.

No wonder he becomes a potential, then actual, murderer. And that “no wonder” pays homage to Highsmith’s genius. Matter-of-factness — a limpid yet forensic transparency — is the ace in her style deck. The best one-sentence summary of this writer comes in Andrew Wilson’s 2003 biography, Beautiful Shadow: “In Highsmith’s world, crime may be ugly, but it is also something born of psychological necessity and described in such a logical, detached manner that the reader is tricked into believing it is simply part of the continuum of normal behaviour.”

Wilson’s book is another reason Loving Highsmith seems a touch redundant. There aren’t enough fresh facts or interpretative insights to intrigue Highsmith addicts. At the same time, the film steps too far into addiction assumption — well, we all adore this writer, don’t we? — to entice new converts or initiates.

That said, why scoff? For completists at least, the world is not so encumbered with Highsmith docu-features that we should spurn a new one. And how wonderful it is to keep hearing that cautious, distrustful, darkly witty voice (Highsmith’s own and Christie’s perfect imitation) and to keep seeing that face, so startlingly beautiful in its youth, so stoically mischievous and slyly, spryly watchful in old age.

In UK cinemas from April 14