Picking Nits
Father not going himself; coming clean on the boat; sparing Blanchett's character; Peter's body and the manifest; unchecked passport photo; missing newspaper or yearbook photo; two witnesses
In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 01:14:50Read transcript
- Why wouldn't Dickie's dad just go to Italy and drag him back? He is too busy with his ships.
- Could Ripley come clean about being Dickie on the boat with Blanchett's character? No, he would become a suspect.
- Why does he kill Jack Davenport's character instead of her? Because people saw him with her, while nobody saw Davenport.
- What does he do with Peter's body, presumably overboard, and how does he explain a second friend apparently killing himself when the ship's manifest is checked?
- In the 1950s nobody checks anything: officials compare a passport photo of Jude Law to Matt Damon and say it checks out.
- A related nit: some newspaper, or a Princeton yearbook, would surely have a real photo of Dickie Greenleaf, the famous shipping heir; the film has a lot of flaws and complicated plotting.
- The Amanda Knox story is called basically a remake of this film.
- This participant's middle name is Knox, which skewed their Google results for four or five years. — Amanda Dobbins
- The tangent continues with a joke about not being able to go to Italy for a couple of years and being 'mostly vindicated', drawing a 'We?' reply.
- Imagining being Ripley on the boat with Peter Smith Kingsley and Dickie's money, then seeing someone who knows them, would mean two witnesses; getting rid of Blanchett's character, even throwing her overboard, would at least be entertained.
- Going overboard is what happens to everyone else except Freddie Miles, who gets found, while Marge gets out of it.