Great Scott!
Irish actor delivers a mesmerizing — and less than talented — Mr. Ripley
Ripley Netflix
Reactions to the news Andrew Scott would anchor a new adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley followed a predictable script: The hot priest from Fleabag is playing Tom Ripley!
The anticipation was understandable. Those familiar with Anthony Minghella's 1999 film remember the erotic edge with which it showcased Jude Law, Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow at the height of their youth and beauty. One could only imagine what Scott — whose magnetism made his Moriarty the most memorable part of Sherlock, and whose electric turn as Fleabag 's love interest (and confessor) in Phoebe Waller-bridge's beloved series catapulted the Irish actor into a sensation seemingly overnight — would do with the role. He'd become a dreamboat, the object of the whole internet's crush. What sensual heights would he achieve as Patricia Highsmith's most popular literary creation, that charismatic con artist whose predilection for murdering obstacles to his social ascent she chronicled over the course of five novels?
Scott's answer is characteristically compelling, but in a way likely to disappoint his thirstier fans. In Steven Zaillian's Ripley, a gorgeous, witty, cinematic extravaganza chronicling the charlatan's journey from a bleak existence in New York City to a luxurious one in Italy, the actor expunges every trace of his considerable charm to produce a dour, awkward Tom Ripley whose joyless smile is as false as the signatures he fakes.
This is, to be clear, a fantastic (and pointed) choice. One understands why this man wants to escape his grim surroundings and himself. And why his genial American target, a rich would-be artist named Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), offers to put him up in Italy: Scott plays the character as so overtly bland and unoffending he's technically unimpeachable even if he's a little repellent — as Dickie's girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), a middling memoirist from Minnesota, discovers while trying to turn Dickie against him. One thing Scott's choices clarify is that Tom, like his target, and pace the novel's title, isn't especially talented. Facing potential charges in New York for a fraud that was rather easily detected, the depressed con artist accepts a lifeline — in the form of a commission (from Dickie's wealthy father) to persuade Dickie to abandon his life of leisure on the Italian coast and come home. Tom's main trick, such as it is, is never saying more than he must. In this instance, his habitual taciturnity saves him from correcting the elder Greenleaf 's mistaken impression that he and his son are friends. (Later, it very comically spares him from needing to express an opinion of Dickie's “art.”) Tom's gains thanks to his abilities as a decent and sometimes compulsive mimic are dwarfed by the advances he makes by simply riffing on the ineptitude of others — and by performing a kind of embarrassing semi-transparency in social situations that ironically earns him Dickie's trust.
Compensating for Scott's restraint is the camera, a wildly expressive agent that quickly establishes itself as the show's biggest character. Robert Elswit's black-and-white cinematography has no chill. Sometimes pretentious, sometimes playful, the show rejoices in making almost every shot into a painterly wonder. Approaches vary. The lens might settle briefly for virtuosic stillness — letting the subject wander through a gorgeously composed and static frame instead of following them through it, with everything in technically brilliant focus — then swing into maniacal motion, dramatizing the act of typing a letter (for instance) by swooping through so many different focal planes and angles that the scene starts to feel unreal, hyperstylized, absurd.