Ripley delivers brilliance in its monochromatic shadows

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This article was published 06/04/2024 (924 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ripley, the new Patricia Highsmith adaptation now streaming on Netflix, is sombre, slow and austerely gorgeous. Perhaps picking up on the devious title character, series writer and director Steve Zaillian (known as the scripter of Schindler’s List and The Irishman, and the creator of The Night Of) seems to be running a long con, beguiling us with beauty while implicating us, ever so gradually, in moral corruption.

The eight-episode series is almost perversely withholding in its measured pacing and moody, monochromatic cinematography. This dynamic is mirrored by Andrew Scott’s brilliantly chilly lead performance. Fascinating but purposely frustrating, this feels like a Ripley for our time.

Highsmith was a supremely slippery writer. In five Ripley novels dating from 1955 to 1991, she manoeuvred us into sympathizing with her amoral antihero, even as he did terrible things.

In the 1999 film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon got us onside by capturing young Tom’s striving neediness. In 2002’s Ripley’s Game, John Malkovich seduced us with his take on the middle-aged Ripley, an elegant, epicurean, harpsichord-playing connoisseur.

But in 2024, with so many sociopaths, grifters and confidence-men on display in the real world, we are perhaps less likely to be charmed by them onscreen. Scott, known for playing Sherlock’s Moriarty, Fleabag’s “Hot Priest” and for his recent work in All of Us Strangers, isn’t trying to win anyone over, and his performance is all the better for it.

His precise, restrained approach to Tom is unusually dispassionate. At age 47, Scott perhaps lacks collegiate freshness — Tom likes to pretend he has just left Princeton — but his ability to convey cold-blooded, reptilian concentration is unmatched.

When we first meet Tom Ripley, he’s living in grotty poverty in New York, getting by on low-level medical mail fraud (definitely not a suave and sexy crime). Through a kind of social misunderstanding, Tom is tasked by a wealthy shipbuilder, Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), to travel to Italy and retrieve the man’s wayward son, Dickie (Johnny Flynn). Dickie is a pleasant idler who prefers lounging around with sometime girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning) and living off his private income to toiling in the family’s business.

Arriving at Dickie’s house on the Amalfi coast, Tom immediately understands Dickie’s position. Why should Dickie go back to America? Come to that, why should Tom? With a queasy mix of desire, envy and contempt, Tom takes steps to stay, employing deception, then violence and finally a form of identity theft that’s far more than financial.

As Tom’s insinuation into Dickie’s life takes on esthetic, erotic and emotional undertones, the series can be ruthless about both Tom and his marks.

We see Tom looking into the mirror, searching for some kind of centre and finding… nothing. We watch him as he observes the upper classes — their habits, their objects, their tastes — taking notes on their carelessness, their ease.

When it comes to Tom’s new friends, meanwhile, Zaillian is having some nasty fun, particularly with their insistence that they’re artists. Dickie paints, but his work is painfully awful. Marge writes but seems to be perpetually blocked.

And then there’s loafing English aristocrat Freddie Miles (played by Eliot Sumner, whose parents are Trudie Styler and Sting). This is a genius bit of stunt casting, hiring a certified nepo baby to play an entitled hotel heir who dabbles in playwriting, but it also happens to be an incredible bit of work. Sumner is stylish, sinuous and sneering, all at once.

Even when relations between Tom and his pals turn grim, there is a line of deadpan humour running through Ripley. Highsmith’s moral stance on murder sometimes seems unclear. In Zaillian’s hands, Tom’s first two forays into violent death are represented mostly as practical problems. The first involves a gruelling and gruesome amount of manual labour, the second becomes a sticky housekeeping concern. Each crime takes up nutty amounts of screentime, detailed in protracted sequences that combine unbearable suspense, exquisite boredom and an undercurrent of weird hilarity.

There seems to be so much pleasure on offer in Ripley — Rome, Naples and Palermo; espresso in the mornings, aperitivos in the evenings; Ferragamo loafers and Borsalino hats.

Zaillian purposely makes this beauty difficult. Even as he stretches the lines of the story, though, taking risks with almost painful pacing, with repetition — you won’t believe the amount of stair climbing — with the subtleties of Scott’s carefully controlled performance, the show remains compelling to the last minute.

Thankfully, the last episode even holds out the possibility of a followup. I can’t wait to be frustrated some more.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca