Photo © Netflix
Andrew Scott in ‘Ripley’
Andrew Scott in ‘Ripley’
The Talented Mr. Ripley was among the most remarkable films of the ‘90s. Anthony Minghella’s production starred Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, a directionless young man on a slippery downward stairway where deceit becomes sociopathic and homicidal. Jude Law costarred as Dickie Greenleaf, a feckless son of East Coast aristocracy leading a comfortably financed expat life in Italy, with Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge Sherwood, his girlfriend.
Minghella wasn’t the first filmmaker to adapt Ripley, a character created by American expat author Patricia Highsmith. French director Rene Clément came first with The Purple Noon (1960), followed by Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977). And Minghella wasn’t the last. Italian filmmaker Liliana Cavani’s underappreciated Ripley’s Game (2002) gave John Malkovich his greatest role as Tom Ripley, an aesthete willing to kill to maintain his lavish life.
The newest version of the Ripley saga (Highsmith wrote five novels about him) isn’t a feature film but an eight-part series streaming on Netflix. “Ripley” is written and directed by Steve Zaillian, best known from his Oscar-winning screenplay for Schindler’s List. Working with Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), Zaillian filmed “Ripley” in black and white, a stark contrast to the bright colors of Minghella’s version. The limited palette makes palpable the moral twilight of Tom Ripley and somehow makes vivid the world of 1960, where Zaillian sets the story. Unlike many shows streaming these days, “Ripley” is historical fiction that knows its history. In Zaillian’s “Ripley” the past is a strange country with its own codes, unamenable to 21st century sensibilities.
The spaciousness of eight episodes of around 50 minutes each allows Zaillian to follow the contours of Highsmith’s novel, moving at the measured pace of an age when messages came by post or on land lines. To summarize the story, a New York shipbuilding magnet sends Ripley to Italy to bring his son, Dickey, home after years of wasting his trust fund on the beaches. The father is under the mistaken impression that Ripley was Dickey’s college friend, an error Ripley does nothing to correct. In Italy, Ripley attaches himself to Dickey and Marge. His unspoken desire for Dickey, and Dickey’s rejection, leads to the first of two murders whose consequences the resourceful Mr. Ripley must dodge.
In Minghella’s film, the major characters are flawed yet somehow sympathetic. Jude Law’s Dickie is arrogant and inflated by the entitlement of wealth, yet spirited and generous in his best moments. Matt Damon’s Ripley is a tragic figure, a poor boy seduced by his encounter with unlimited money and what it can purchase. He wants Dickie’s life, and without forethought he takes it.
Zaillian’s cast play most every move in low key. His Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) is already an accomplished criminal, a sociopath, before he meets Dickie’s father in New York. His eyes are dead; he’s charmless but facile. Lies come to him easily. Ripley’s only limitations are physical, not moral. He’s winded by the exertion of killing and hauling the victim down a stairwell. He has bad dreams, but do they result from anxiety over being caught or a trace remnant of conscience? The settings are full of mirrors and Ripley is often in them, as if trying on a mask. Marge, played with great warmth by Paltrow in the film, is tiresome and irked as acted by Dakota Fanning. She is wary of Ripley from the get-go. As Dickie, Johnny Flynn is a rich kid who can’t be bothered. The drama of Minghella’s film is supplanted by subtlety as Ripley calculates his next moves.
Artful in composition and editing, “Ripley,” like the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and other vanguard European directors of the ‘60s, demands that the viewer watch closely as details gradually accumulate. Suspense is understated but effective, as when Ripley hears the creaking of an old elevator and knows the police are on their way. Silence can be pregnant with malice. Ripley goes searching across Italy for the paintings of Caravaggio, the Baroque painter who murdered and got away with it. Caravaggio appears to be Ripley’s only hero, and he seems strangely moved by the art itself, not only the artist. Fans of Ripley’s Game will be glad to see John Malkovich in a cameo as a jaded aesthete—Ripley’s new role model?
