How Ripley got even more talented: new series a must-see
If, like me, your main acquaintance with Tom Ripley is owed to the 1999 film The Talented Mr Ripley, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, brace yourself.
If, like me, your main acquaintance with Tom Ripley is owed to the 1999 film The Talented Mr Ripley, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, then brace yourself for the fact that Ripley, the new Netflix adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller, is … nothing like that.
My memory of the film is that it shimmered with lush Italian Riviera colours, turquoise seas and citrony gold beaches. Steven Zaillian’s adaptation, starring Andrew Scott in the title role, is unrelenting monochrome.
I kept expecting it to flick into colour, Wizard of Oz-style, when we switched to southern Italy so as to contrast with Ripley’s sparse, impoverished, low-level conman existence in 1960s New York. But no. Zaillian sticks to low-wattage black-and-white for the full eight episodes, using beautiful, poetic camera angles.
Often his style evokes Alfred Hitchcock. It took me a while to adjust my expectations. The pace is painstakingly, narcotically slow – minutes will be spent lingering simply on Ripley walking between rooms or checking into a hotel (there’s a lot of checking into hotels) or someone ambling to answer a telephone. Early on I was hungering for the warm colour I knew was on the other side of the lens, like a scurvy patient craves vitamin C.
But be in no doubt, this adaptation is stunning. It is a work of art. Scott, as you would expect, is outstanding – mesmeric as the polite, clever but ruthless psychopath. Repeated reference is made to Caravaggio’s use of light. Well, Zaillian’s use of it isn’t half bad either. Every shot is like one of those arty black-and-white postcards you can buy in galleries. There is a stark perfectionism to this production that convinces me it took a long time to film.
Spoilers ahead. Johnny Flynn is well cast as the handsome rich boy Dickie Greenleaf, who is living off daddy’s trust money in Italy doing his terrible paintings and happily hooked up with Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), a “travel writer” with no gift for writing. This is before Ripley, sent by the rich daddy to track down his son, arrives and, like a nomadic succubus, dismantles their lives. Modern viewers may make comparisons with Saltburn, the upstart interloper running rings round the wealthy.
Zaillian, whose presence is felt in every shot, almost like a character himself, refuses to be hurried at any stage. He doesn’t omit any second of the laborious job of disposing of a body.
There are no shortcuts. About half of episode three is devoted to this complicated, exhausting task at sea. It is a quite extraordinary episode, the violence slow and thus even more horrific. After another murder the mundane clean-up is almost comically grotesque, with much use made of sound, specifically the peerless, sickening “chock” of a dead human head hitting a hard surface.
I wondered why quite so much is made of ascending stairs, Ripley in his unstylish, cheap clothes panting and heaving as he hauls himself upwards towards Dickie’s apartment. Is it a metaphor for his social climbing? Or am I getting carried away? The scene in which Dickie finds Ripley trying on his clothes and mimicking his voice is so awkward it makes the toes curl.
Eliot Sumner is Freddie Miles (the part played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film), while John Malkovich pops up in a small role in the final episode, a nice touch since he played Ripley in the 2002 film Ripley’s Game.
It is a bold move by Zaillian to tell the story this way. It is so cinematic that it feels less like a TV series and more like a very long film. But once you have accepted you are not going to get yellow, sun-dappled Italian squares it is a completely hypnotic experience.
