The talented Miss Highsmith
The author behind rogue Tom Ripley was the master of psychological suspense
Nearly seven decades after creating one of literature’s great charlatans — and 29 years after her own death — Patricia Highsmith is being exhumed yet again, this time on Netflix. Ready, baby, for her close-up.
“The poet of apprehension,” as Graham Greene famously called her.
One of the sweeter ways, actually, the American writer was characterized both in life and in wide-spanning biographies later. A lush, a nymphomaniac and a malcontent: some of the others.
The woman behind Tom Ripley — the rogue who defined her masterwork “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which led to four sequels, a.k.a. the so-called “Ripliad” — was psychological suspense. The kind, arguably, that’s never been more influential than now, given the number of times her books continue to be reworked for the screen, how their DNA is in myriad other indirect projects (think “Saltburn”), the influence she wields on all of the current mistresses of the genre (the Ruth Wares, Lisa Jewells and Gillian Flynns), and how real-life occurrences continue to draw from her (“The Talented Mr. Santos,” chimed one Washington Post headline when dwelling on the deceptions of disgraced ex-congressman George Santos).
“I love Patricia Highsmith so much. I love how she can manage to juggle both the beauty of lies and the desires of lies with their evil underside as well … I think it captures so much about the American personality …” is the way novelist Christopher Bollen, who also counts her as an inspiration, has put it.
All of which is a long way of saying this: As much as Andrew Scott (that supremely talented Irish actor) stuns, I think, in this mesmerizing new “Ripley,” an eight-part series, and our guy Tom remains the anti-hero we love to watch, it is Highsmith who is perhaps the truest star of the show. Something kinda tells me this is the adaptation she would have most favoured!
Not only does it capture the check-behind-your-shoulder aspect of her stony prose — the isolation, the menace — but it also just looks so … beautiful. The most cinematic thing to come out of Netflix in years! (Ever?)
Verdict: choosing to film it in liquid black-and-white was perhaps the best decision, in that it not only transports you to this Fellini idea of Italy, where it’s set, but also gives shivers of classic film noir (think films like “Sweet Smell of Success”).
In doing so, it also immediately creates a distinction from the Anthony Minghella version from 1999. While everyone loves that Matt Damon film (I sure do!), it was mounted as a technicolour opera of sorts and this is a chiller thing. All shadow and light. By taking its time, and tracing all the little decisions that yield other decisions, and dead-ends that beget more dead-ends, we see the workmanship of Ripley. The talent. Moreover, where Damon in the role was a decidedly more tortured take on the character, Scott here is much more impenetrable. Placid. Sly like the proverbial fox.
“I think the great achievement of this version of the story is how it teaches the audience to watch the show,” is what Scott noted recently. “We live in an age of television — not just television but in social media — where you have to say everything really quickly … but when you’re reading a novel, you can take real pleasure in the description of something over five or six pages.” The black and white cinematography “marries in some way with the pacing and the tone of the show, also means that it allows us as actors just to be.”
Letting be: its creator, too. Watching Ripley, it hit me how it would take someone with the skill of Patricia Highsmith to come up with a broad like Patricia Highsmith. She was something, having read tons about her! The kook who famously kept a colony of pet snails on a head of lettuce in her handbag. The Dostoyevsky devotee who once toiled as a publicist for a deodorant company. A onetime comic writer, too (psssst … she once went on a blind date with Stan Lee!). The girl who survived the Spanish flu at four. The nihilist who, amazingly, was the first person to also pen a lesbian novel with a “happy ending” (1952’s “The Price of Salt,” published under a pseudonym, later repurposed as “Carol,” inspiration for the 2015 film).
The Highsmith-aissance delivers us a writer not afraid to look into the grotto of the human mind, but one who remains a conundrum: the liberal who had some pretty reactionary ideas and the Texan who favoured Europe (in America, sales of her books never topped 8,000 in her latter years, her fame only growing after her death … why her vast archives ended up in her adopted Switzerland).
Ms. Congeniality? Nahhhhhh. Edmund White once put it this way: “Patricia Highsmith was Tom Ripley without the charm.”