Netflix’s “Ripley”, the Highsmith Novel, and Anthony Minghella’s Movie
Steven Zaillian’s Gorgeous Black-and-White Retelling of a Grifter's Story
This contains plot spoilers
“The Talented Mr. Ripley” is one of my all-time favorite movies, so I welcomed the arrival of Netflix’s new eight-part series “Ripley”. Though “Ripley” mines the same material, I knew that in the hands of writer-director Steven Zaillian and actor Andrew Scott the result would be anything but redundant. Having watched six episodes—the first three on a big screen followed by a Q&A with Zaillian—I can say that I like the two Ripleys equally, and also that they are nothing alike.
Both the new series and the 1999 film are based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, in which a budding psychopath named Tom Ripley is sent to Italy to retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, the only son of a wealthy New York ship builder, whose post-college Grand Tour shows no sign of ending. After finding Dickie, Tom ingratiates himself bit by bit, and then—after murdering him—assumes his identity.
On the run from south (the fictional town of Mongibello in the movie, and the real town of Atrani in the series) to north—Rome and Venice—Ripley lies, steals and murders his way to freedom—if you can call constantly looking over one’s shoulder freedom. But it beats being an unsuccessful con man in New York, which Ripley is beforehand, both in the novel and the series. (But not in the movie, whose lovely opening sequence sets Ripley up as a poor rube whose borrowed Princeton jacket—and his willingness to deceive Greenleaf Senior that he and Dickie were college classmates—sets in motion his long, murderous career.)
In both the novel and the new series, Ripley is a liar and grifter from the start, eking out a living from small cons while living in a squalid room in the Bowery. He steals checks from a doctor’s mail and poses as a collection agent for the missing sums, forging signatures as he goes. The money is paltry and the police are in hot pursuit, so when Mr. Greenleaf hires Ripley to find Dickie, he burns the evidence and packs a bag.
Soon he’s inside a beautiful seaside villa, admiring Dickie’s Picasso and luxe wardrobe and helping Marge, Dickie’s girlfriend, with her travel book. In the movie, Dickie and Marge (Jude Law and Gwynneth Paltrow) are paragons of beauty and youth: they look like fashion models who’ve escaped the runway to join the Jet Set. In “Ripley”, Dickie and Marge (Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning) resemble an aging high school football player and head cheerleader, happily bonded since their stint as prom king and queen. Chunkier and less pretty than their movie counterparts, they’re also more sympathetic: a nice couple who want to be artists but lack the necessary talent and drive. In a hilarious sequence, we see Dickie’s studio from Ripley’s point of view, eyes darting from terrible landscapes to awful abstracts and ghastly portraits. Worst of all is a nude of Marge that looks vaguely canine, as if the painter had never seen human body. Even a simple academic still life—a vase and some bottles—lies beyond Dickie’s ability, but he is sanguine about his skills. “I know I’m not a great painter—yet,” he says, adding charmingly, “but I enjoy it.”
Marge is more aware of her shortcomings, particularly after Ripley takes a crack at her manuscript. Excising entire paragraphs, fixing grammar and syntax, and adding a new title and memorable closing sentence, he attempts to salvage something readable from her work. But it’s not enough: at one point Ripley scrawls, “This is not a word,” on a page, which seems to sum up the whole project.
Although Flynn and Scott are fifteen years too old for their parts—in the book they’re twenty-five—their maturity gives their characters a complexity that Law and Matt Damon’s performances lack. Terrific actors who aren’t afraid to mine their characters’ worst traits—Dickie’s laziness and entitlement, Ripley’s venality and violence—Flynn and Scott’s portrayals are closer to Highsmith’s characters than Minghella’s: less sympathetic and more profound.
Oddly, one actor in “Ripley”—Dickie’s friend Freddie Miles— is nothing like Highsmith’s description, apart from his snobbishness. Instead of a loud, overweight redheaded American—perfectly embodied by Philip Seymour Hoffman in “The Talented Mr. Ripley”—Zaillian has cast Eliot Sumner, an actor who shuns gender labels. This new Freddie is English and androgynous, but referred to as he/him. At first appearance I mistook Freddie as a butch woman—and a stand-in for Highsmith herself.
Although “Ripley” is set in the early 1960s, Highsmith’s novels—the Ripley trilogy—belong to the 1950s. Color rarely makes its way into her workmanlike prose—a reference to Marge’s “tomato red” bathing suit is a vivid exception—so Robert Elswit’s stunning black and white photography is more evocative of the source than Minghella’s sun-washed tones. Through Elswit’s eye, Italy—with its white buildings and marble sculptures, its shadowy rooms and Caravaggios—is a beautiful but shabby country whose recovery from World War II is far from complete. Into this exhausted paradise comes a psychopath, in pursuit of a naif who will never grow up. That the murderer and the murdered part ways on a boat is a final reminder of the Greenleaf shipyard, Dickie’s squandered legacy.