The con man gets the art house treatment in “Ripley”
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” sets its dark action in a succession of colorful Italian locales: the Amalfi coast, San Remo, Rome, Palermo, Venice. Movies based on the book, like René Clément’s “Plein Soleil” (released in the United States as “Purple Noon”) and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” have taken the opportunity Highsmith gave them to capitalize on sun and scenery. The audience gets its brutal murders and brazen deceit wrapped in bright visual pleasure.
For “Ripley,” an eightepisode adaptation of the book that premiered on Netflix last Thursday, Steven Zaillian has decided to do without the color. Shot — beautifully — in sharply etched black and white by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”), “Ripley” offers a different sort of pleasure: the chilly embrace of the art house.
Reflecting what the more high-minded filmmakers of the show’s time period (it is set in 1961) were up to, Zaillian, who wrote and directed all the episodes, takes an approach that harmonizes with Elswit’s austerity. The entire season moves along sleekly — you could say somnolently — at the same measured pace, with the same arch tone and on the same note of muted, stylish apprehension. Highsmith’s pulpy concoction, with its hair-trigger killings and sudden reversals, is run through a strainer and comes out smooth. It feels like what you might get if the early-’60s Michelangelo Antonioni or Alain Resnais had directed a season of “The White Lotus.”
And Zaillian appears to have asked his actors to practice a similar restraint. Their overall affect isn’t flat, exactly, but it’s within a narrow range, with physicality tightly reined in and the eyes asked to do a lot of work. When you have the eyes of Andrew Scott, the gifted Irish actor (“Sherlock,” “Fleabag”) who plays Tom Ripley, that’s not a big problem.
Zaillian has been faithful, in broad outline, to Highsmith’s story. Ripley, a slacker and a con man grinding out a living in postwar New York, is sent to Italy to try to persuade a trust-funded idler to come home and take over the family business. He has only a passing acquaintance with his target, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), but in the first of a long series of misunderstandings and lucky strokes that go Ripley’s way, Greenleaf’s father thinks they are good friends.
Highsmith’s novel is a training manual for the sociopath: Once Ripley sees the indolent lives led by Greenleaf and his sortof girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), in a picturesque fishing village on the Amalfi coast, he ups his game from tedious grifting to full-contact identity theft. Wedging himself between Dickie and Marge, he becomes obsessed — an obsession in which the lines between befriending Dickie, sponging off Dickie and becoming Dickie are progressively erased.
The novel is both a psychological study and, in its second two-thirds, a parlor trick, as Highsmith maneuvers Ripley into and out of one seemingly disastrous setback after another. “Ripley” stays more firmly on the surface, and Zaillian makes a number of changes, small and large, that maintain the tension while making the story’s convolutions more believable. (At one point Ripley actually dons
a disguise, something he never bothers to do in the book. And his successful forgery of a will, which severely stretched credulity, is dispensed with.)
Rationalizing the plot does not make it more enjoyable, however, and Zaillian’s elevation of the material takes some of the low life out of it. There is also an overlay of condescension — Zaillian is not kind to his characters, especially Marge, who is now equal parts tasteless, uptight and mercenary — and occasionally a knowing, simplistic humor that feeds into the patronizing tone.
The greatest effect is on the character of Ripley. To be fair, it was easier for Highsmith to suggest the operatic intensity of Ripley’s aspirations and the desperate need he feels to escape his previous life and his previous self. But in Zaillian’s conception, Ripley is simply less interesting — more pitched toward cunning and greed, less toward passion. The charm he requires to carry out his schemes is less evident, and the sympathy for him that
Highsmith drew from her readers is harder to realize.
Within those confines, Scott does an admirable job. He can’t give the character the vivid life you would like in someone who is on screen for most of an eight-hour series. But he does a meticulous job of portraying Ripley’s transition from shifty timidity to insolent confidence, from lost boy to aesthete, through subtle shifts of expression and posture. As Ripley’s schemes keep meeting with success, Scott’s eyes somehow become both softer and more challenging. Flynn is also good as Greenleaf, well meaning but, in today’s terms, trapped by his privilege. Fanning, a fine actress, is perfectly capable as Sherwood but the character is a hollow shell.
Zaillian and Elswit’s “Ripley” certainly has its good points — it is gorgeous to look at, in its own way, and within the cool approach there are ideas that pay off. Ripley’s sexuality is undefined but heavily hinted at, as it was in the book, but Zaillian brings the question to the surface in the final episode in a way that is both chilling and poignant. Zaillian also creates a thematic link between Ripley and artist Caravaggio — both murderously angry and jealous, each supreme in his field of art — that is not especially interesting but that involves a lot of screen time for magnificent paintings.
Those with a nostalgic love for a certain sort of cinematic experience are likely to be strong fans of the highly controlled, hermetic “Ripley.” (A cameo by John Malkovich, playing a character from Highsmith’s second Ripley novel, “Ripley Under Ground,” is a promise of more seasons to come.) A clue to what the viewer is in for comes at the end of every episode, when the credits begin “Directed by Steven Zaillian,” “Written for television by Steven Zaillian” and “Created for television by Steven Zaillian.” Auteur auteur!