TV: Ripley (2024)
In 1960s Italy, a cunning American sociopath descends into stark transgression
Andrew Scott is taut and mesmerizing as the troubled, drifting Tom Ripley
Ripley (2024)
Streaming on Netflix, 8 episodes
No one opening the pages of a mystery wants to know right away who the dark deceiver is. But in her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith turns this classic premise on its head.
We’re invited to get on its shady anti-hero’s wavelength, to groove with him a bit, see how it feels to be sneakily two-faced.
In adapting Highsmith’s mid-’50s story into this sprawling, staggeringly beautiful eight-part series, writer-director Steven Zaillian has moved the chronicle slightly forward to 1961, but he’s omitted none of Highsmith’s calculated teasing of our expectations.
We meet Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), a nice-looking, smooth-talking petty thief, in New York. He’s barely scraping by in a small dingy apartment, collecting insurance payments under false names and forging checks. In the novel he’s 25; here his face seems to carry a tense, early 30s panic.
A piece of good luck drops in this grifter’s lap. He’s summoned by Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), a wealthy shipbuilder. Mr. Greenleaf believes Tom knows his son Dickie, who departed for Europe some years ago and shows no inclination to return to America and take his place in the family business.
Tom has no clear recollection of Dickie but pretends he does. Convinced that Tom could get through to his son, the elder Greenleaf offers Ripley a deal, all expenses paid. Will Tom go to Italy, where Dickie currently thrives on an independent income plus monthly checks from his father, and talk the reluctant heir into coming home?
Can do, Tom pledges, and makes his way to the small, rocky coastal hamlet of Altria. He finds Dickie (Johnny Flynn) lounging on the beach with his devoted girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning).
Dickie struggles to remember Tom’s name and can’t actually place him. Tom doesn’t force matters and is careful to conceal that he’s been dispatched by Mr. Greenleaf.
But Dickie the rich expatriate slowly warms to this pleasant-enough fellow American and invites Tom to stay in his artily furnished, multi-level white stucco retreat.
Its towering windows and piercing, enveloping Mediterranean light have allowed Dickie to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. With only a glance at his hideous canvasses, Tom realizes that Dickie has no future as an artist. But what dreams money can buy is the fancy we see dancing in Tom’s roving, covetous eyes.
Ripley is both transfixed and envious as he soaks up Dickie’s opulent lifestyle
As literary critics have pointed out, Highsmith’s sending Tom to bring home Dickie seems patterned after Henry James’ great 1903 novel The Ambassadors.
In that book an older man, Lewis Lambert Strether, is sent by a wealthy New England family to Paris to bring back a reluctant heir, who, thanks to independent means, is similarly defying his family’s wishes. Mr. Greenleaf even asks Tom if he’s read James’ novel.
But Highsmith draws a sharp distinction from James’ morality tale. While James asks whether Europe has had a corrupting influence on the dallying young heir Chad Newsome, Tom Ripley, we can be sure, isn’t corrupted by the continent.
His spirit was broken in his orphaned childhood and cruel rearing by a hateful Aunt Dottie, who mocked and derided him as a “sissy”, leaving him alone, misunderstood, unloved.
Such reasonless hurt, Highsmith makes clear, doesn’t build character. Quite the opposite. Early mistreatment has ultimately made Tom a cowardly flimflammer and thief.
That means he brings his own corruption, the dark night of his own soul, to Europe. He’s the bad seed. He re-plants himself there and waters his own bitter flowering.
Zaillian and his team have found just the right tone and rhythm to make Tom’s disintegration feel twisty and unpredictable — also unstoppable.
Zaillian deserves high praise for tackling Highsmith’s finely designed yet downright horrifying 1955 novel.
This series sticks to her mortified but unfazed vision. It’s not only crisply written and riveting to watch, but it also stakes out ground that I’d feared movies, and, these days, major television series, had left behind.
The 1999 movie starring Matt Damon was awash in color. Here cinematographer Robert Elswit builds unease with crystalline black and white, keeping our gaze investigatory and most of what we see at an alluring, cool remove.
Also, gorgeous. In an immersive noir style, the wet streets glisten, dark alleyways admit just enough light to frighten, rooms brimming with storied art and furnishings are shadowed. Tom looks both amazed and stranded.
So, he draws Dickie closer. American bros, they go off together in jaunts through the hillside, or on shopping trips to Rome and San Remo.
Marge, absorbed in writing her first book, fears Dickie may be tiring of her. She can hardly begrudge him some male companionship but is wary of Tom. How has he gotten such a hold on Dickie?
Dickie is cannier than she imagines. Unbeknownst to Marge, Tom has taken to imitating Dickie in front of a mirror, aping his voice and gestures, even donning his clothes.
Dickie catches him in this act, confirming what he’s suspected, that Tom is sexually attracted to him. Dickie bluntly informs Tom he’s “not queer” but isn’t ready to terminate the friendship.
Until he is. He explains that he can’t let Tom constantly hang about, with nothing of his own to do or commit to. At sea on a small motorboat they’ve rented, Dickie regretfully tells Tom they’re not going to be able to remain close.
With this rupture, Tom feels betrayed, and his designs turn irremediably dark.
The visuals of the cobbled Italian streets, the modest hostelries as well as the grand hotels, the ancient statuary, all these sights exert a sinister tug on Tom’s consciousness and ours. The impeccably researched production design is hypnotic.
Ace production design and painterly compositions make ’60s Italy vibrate
We’re absorbed in Italy of 1961, from cramped taxis to gigantic, fitfully operating elevators to newsstands billowing with newspapers, which are everyone’s lifeline to the world.
We’re also plunged into the psyche of a darting, scurrying sociopath. If we didn’t before, we now clearly see that Tom searingly, sadly envies Dickie. The young scion’s wealth, carefree lifestyle and sleek wardrobe are what Tom has long desired for himself.
The cynical, irritatingly “polite” police Inspector Pietro Ravini (Maurizio Lombardi in a suave, witty performance) becomes intrigued by Tom’s rapid crisscrossing from Rome to Palermo to Venice.
The story slowly turns into an alert but languid police procedural, leading we’re not sure where, and Tom stays slick and unflustered, keeping just out of reach.
We’re reminded that a psychopath succeeds because he understands his own vulnerabilities even better than those tracking him.
Astonishingly, Andrew Scott maintains this about-to-be-discovered posture in face, voice and body for all eight episodes.
We watch Ripley lie, steal, forge, cheat and pretend with appalling élan. Yet Scott also lets us see how essential dissembling is to Tom. Dodging the truth is his basic, most durable skill, like typing is to a secretary.
Deception, he keeps finding, seems to work out for him. Being honest doesn’t hold a candle to it.
It’s one of the more accomplished depictions of guile I’ve seen. I like to think I’d spot this Tom Ripley and not be conned by him. But so unruffled does Scott make Tom, jousting with him seems like it could actually be exhilarating.
Johnny Flynn, scary and compelling as a Chicago hit man in The Outfit (2022), makes an attractive, self-assured Dickie.
Disarmingly, Dickie’s privilege and taste for luxury don’t seem arrogant. He may be blind to his ineptitude as a painter, but he’s not a spoiled rich wastrel. Flynn gives Dickie substance and a distinctly masculine assurance, with a nice touch of courtliness toward Marge.
Dakota Fanning brings just the mix of ardor and shrewdness that Marge needs. Deeply smitten by Dickie, she understands he’s not in love with her, but Fanning makes it clear she’s profoundly loyal to him. Fanning’s Marge holds the story’s most dependable, if finally ineffectual, moral compass.
Dakota Fanning as Marge and Johnny Flynn as Dickie in a fragile, fated romance
Zaillian has had a remarkable screenwriting career, including an adapted screenwriting Oscar win for Schindler’s List (1993), a finely condensed adaptation of the mystery novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Scorsese’s long take on unions and the mob, The Irishman (2019).
He’s also directed three features and co-directed an eight-part crime drama, The Night Of (2016).
Here he blends Fellini’s visual playfulness with Hitchcock’s potent cutting (there are bathtub shots that will fling you back to Psycho’s shower scene). Highsmith wrote four more Ripley novels after this one, and I hope Zaillian will consider adapting at least some of them. He already has a powerful leading man in Scott.
But for now, I think Zaillian deserves high praise for tackling Highsmith’s finely designed yet downright horrifying 1955 novel. Her supreme talent for subterfuge is shot through with the angst of Camus and Kafka.
This series sticks to her mortified but unfazed vision. It’s not only crisply written and riveting to watch, but it also stakes out ground that I’d feared movies, and, these days, major television series, had left behind.
Here’s what I’m getting at. Gore Vidal was correct when he called Highsmith a “high late modernist”. That's exactly the right label to attach to The Talented Mr. Ripley. When it was published in 1955, America’s male literary lions were about to descend, taunting and badgering, on the country’s serious readers.
Mailer, Roth, Bellow, even to an extent Updike, and surely Vidal himself, were determined to jolt and scold us into facing post-WWII cultural divides and political fatuousness.
And in doing so, without holding out much hope, they were, damn it, going to improve us. As of 2024, we can all begin to assess how their pious, self-admiring crusade has turned out.
Judging by this story, Highsmith wanted no part of it, or at least was unwilling to write in a hectoring, moralistic key. In the tone and execution of this book she harkened back to the high, bewildered, frankly pessimistic modernism of Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Post WWI, those writers saw no clear path of “improvement”, or even moral clarity, for the societies around them, given the horrors and inequities those societies had excused, justified and/or unfeelingly continued to perpetrate.
I’d suggest that Highsmith, with her own deep skepticism, didn’t buy into ’40s and mid-’50s post-war “optimism”. I wonder if she believed societies on either side of the Atlantic actually could be “improved”.
That doubt finds expression in Tom Ripley’s amorality, the “motiveless malignity” sometimes assigned to Shakespeare’s villains.
What made us think, Highsmith seems to ask with the character of Tom Ripley, that we were now better human beings after the horrors of the first half of the 20th century?
It’s been suggested that in this book and her 1950 novel Strangers on a Train Highsmith was tricking us into “rooting for” Ripley, and, in Strangers, the cold killer Bruno.
This misunderstands Highsmith’s art. Wondering when a psychopath’s luck is going to run out, and waiting with bated breath for it to happen, isn’t remotely the same as “rooting for” him.
Actually, we need to ask how it comes about that so many are taken in by these hellhounds. I’d suggest Highsmith believed it was because our own transgressions persist just below the surface.
Tom Ripley’s deeds are heinous, but the bad in him, and the frantic need to cover it up, isn’t so far from some alarming instincts we harbor.
I admire the way Zaillian hasn’t stepped away from that dark river that still runs underneath today’s social “order”. He gives the shameless Tom Ripley a vibrant depiction, while eliciting a chilling performance from Scott that may even enlighten us a bit.
That’s no mean achievement in an industry that mostly portrays evil as fanged monsters and vicious or comic thugs. That is, not like anyone we find next door or in the mirror.
Ah :) I finished watching this yesterday and followed it up with Minghella's adaptation. I was floored by the cinematography of the new series. The Hitchcockian series Hitchcock never made. It reminded me of Rebecca and The Birds. I thought perhaps Ripley would dethrone the original one from my list of Highsmith adaptations but rewatching the original one last night made me rethink. Perhaps the 2024 is a psychological autobiography of Tom (my favorite episode being the fifth one...I just couldn't stop laughing) and an extension of Highsmith's literary pathos. This is missing from the Minghella movie because it runs of colorful rhythms of Italian vista and American expatriate lifestyle along with the story. So, I stopped comparing them and enjoyed them both. Although, a huge plot hole in the 2024 series remains a bone in my throat but other than that absolutely fantastic. Love Freddie. And major Seymour Hoffman missing last night. As always, loved the review, Ivan!