In breathtaking Ripley, a terrible beauty is reborn
You wait ages for one new streaming drama to have an Irish actor as its star, then two come along at once. Andrew Scott and Colin Farrell respectively play the titular characters in Ripley on Netflix, and
Sugar on Apple TV+, both of which dropped this week. Ripley is, of course, a fresh version of The Talented Mr Ripley, though with eight hours to play with, rather than the two hours 19 minutes in the Matt Damon film version, there is much more time to delve deep into the psyche, and psychopathy, of Tom Ripley as he originally was written by Patricia Highsmith.
Maybe a little too much time for some, as it happens, because some friends have described it as turgid, but I prefer to think of it as languid, and languidly gorgeous with it. Filmed in absolutely luscious black and white, it delivers scene after scene of breathtaking beauty, conjuring up framing and off-kilter angles reminiscent of cinematographer Gregg Toland’s work in Citizen Kane (and, no, I don’t make the comparison lightly).
The decision to stick with monochrome makes sense when you realise the writer and director is Steven Zaillian, who won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Schindler’s
List, a movie made all the more powerful for looking more like a newsreel of the wartime era than a Hollywood epic.
This intimacy greatly suits Ripley, which opens with the anti-hero dragging a body down a flight of stairs in Rome, before switching the action back to New York. You probably know the story. Ripley is a petty crook who makes money soliciting cheques from the gullible by posing as a debt collector. With the Internal Revenue Service on his heels, he seizes upon an offer from shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to travel to Europe to persuade the errant son and heir, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn, so good recently in Sky’s excellent romcom, The Lovers), to give up his playboy lifestyle and return home.
Immediately seduced by a life of wealth and privilege he could previously only have imagined, Ripley slowly comes to understand how he can have that life himself, through violence.
Where Damon’s Ripley came across like a howdy-doody hick from the sticks, Scott takes an altogether different tack. In the likes of Fleabag, he can use his charm to appear impish and subversive, but he also has a face that can project blankness. It actually makes you look to his eyes, where the tiniest of movements convey something mighty. It is a performance as impressive as it is impassive, and the series overall is compelling viewing, a latter-day film noir that plays out as an enormous treat.
Sugar, starring Colin Farrell as private detective John Sugar, aims for noir too, but ends up a little beige. As it happens, the opening sequence is shot in black and white, as Sugar tracks down a missing Japanese boy in Tokyo who is the son of a Yakuza crime boss. Finding missing people is his beat, so when he returns home to Los Angeles after successfully reuniting the lad with his family, he is hired by film producer Jonathan Siegel (the ever reliable James Cromwell, of Babe and Succession fame) to locate his granddaughter, who hasn’t been seen for a month.
Where Ripley revels in black and white, Sugar looks ravishingly beautiful once it switches to colour, making full use of California sunshine to present a world of manicured Beverly Hills lawns and opulent hotels.
Sugar is enigmatic, but it feels grafted on, not organic. He has a condition that means his body metabolises alcohol 50 times faster than normal, and therefore can drink any amount he likes without ever getting drunk. He speaks many languages, and he is obsessed with movies, mostly from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and film noir in particular.
Interspersed are scenes from some of those classics, but it all seems like nice icing on a stale cake. The best 1930s private eye movie arguably was one made in the 1970s – Roman Polanski’s Chinatown with Jack Nicholson. Trying the same trick, but leaving it set in the present day, is quite a stretch, and one that doesn’t really pay off.
More to the point, I have unfortunately seen much social media commentary on the fact that a plot twist in the fourth episode is so ludicrous, it undermines everything that has gone before, so the only reason I’ll stick with it is for Farrell, whose mid-life career sees him as an actor of mature depth. Just as well, since he’s in every scene.
Finally, Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen passed me by when it landed on Netflix a few weeks back, but I’ve been catching up and enjoying it greatly. Theo James plays an English aristocrat who inherits the family pile, only to find there’s a cannabis factory under the cowsheds, and his cokehead brother is £8m in debt to a Liverpool criminal gang for his personal drug supply.
Like all of Ritchie’s work, it is playful, wordy, and occasionally spectacularly violent, but when it is funny, it is hilarious. The great strength of it is Kaya Scodelario as Susie Glass, minding her father’s criminal empire while he is in prison. Susie is a great negotiator and a fixer. If you ever killed someone, you’d want her in your corner to coolly clear up the mess, though whether she could work her magic with Sugar remains doubtful.