The Remorseless Mr. Ripley

In Ripley, the wealthy can’t quite place how they know the titular character. These heirs and failsons repeat “Tom Ripley?” as if trying to jiggle a memory loose; they squint at his face, as if peering at it long enough will cause it to materialize from their past. It rarely works, because as Patricia Highsmith’s con-man creation, Andrew Scott is an obstruction, a figment, a shadow — materializing out of nowhere to hover over their lives and steadily elongate his reach. The rivetingly remorseless, mesmerizingly monochromatic Ripley isn’t exactly an eat-the-rich story; it has more complicated aims than Robin Hood economics. But its sneering meanness toward the upper class is delicious.

This eight-episode miniseries ostensibly adapts Highsmith’s five Ripley novels published between 1955 and 1991, although it primarily covers events in first book The Talented Mr. Ripley and was originally made for Showtime and then shifted to Netflix, although you’d be better off not binging it. Patience is the move, because Ripley is so painstakingly constructed, so dense with narrative and visual references, and so luxuriously immersive with its cinematography that to zip from one installment to the next would be doing the series a disservice. Director and writer Steven Zaillian has a long, heralded filmography, and Netflix is marketing Ripley by highlighting his work as the writer of Academy Award heavies Schindler’s List and The Irishman. But look to the rest of Zaillian’s work, like Gangs of New York, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and the exemplary HBO miniseries The Night Of, and you’ll see the through-line questions that also guide Ripley: Does desperation push a person into crime? Or are they driven to it by the suspicion of others toward those who are different from them in some way, be it their class, gender, or sexuality?

From its opening scenes establishing Tom as a low-level New York City con man running a fake collections agency, Ripley has an omnipresent, almost oppressive air of paranoia that feeds this framing. Long takes follow Tom as he’s sure he’s being watched or pursued, and close-ups focus on Scott’s face as it vacillates between the tightly wound control with which Tom protects himself and the blasé politeness he slides into when interacting with others. When a private investigator (Bokeem Woodbine) approaches him on behalf of ship-making magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan!), Tom treats him with a clearly practiced blend of puzzled disinterest and polite courtesy — until he learns that Greenleaf wants to offer him a paid gig tracking down his son Dickie (Johnny Flynn), who left home for Italy years ago and hasn’t been back. Greenleaf heard from someone who heard from someone else that Tom and Dickie were friends, and Tom becomes the family’s last hope to sever their wayward son from his hopes of being a painter, and from his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), and bring him home to run the company that is his birthright.

The reality is that Tom doesn’t know Dickie at all. But the opportunity for a payday, for a fresh start, is alluring enough to get Tom to set off for Italy. And once he arrives at the beachside town of Atrani and meets the clannish Dickie and Marge, vacuous Americans tied together by their shared privilege and certainty that Tom is not one of them, Ripley shifts into another gear. Scott plays Tom with such emotional remove that he becomes almost alien; his deadpan delivery of the line “I like girls” when Dickie compliments a pretty young woman is a nod to Tom’s implied closetedness but also an expression of his refusal to admit anything personal to someone he’s trying to work over. That disaffection is a mask until Tom sees something he actually does want: Dickie’s fountain pen, Dickie’s signet ring, Dickie’s Picasso. Then Scott lets a few split seconds of longing break apart Tom’s face, transforming it from bland deference and canny chumminess into something raw, covetous, recognizably human, and aware of how to make other humans hurt. Each time it happens is a phenomenal moment.

Ripley sets these glimpses Scott gives us behind Tom’s curtain against a moody milieu whose tangible luxury can’t quite obscure its innate mercilessness. Individual episodes can be slow, almost languid, and are often heavy with long stretches of dialogue and silent sequences of voyeuristic pursuit. But the pacing works overall because Ripley nails moments of violent catharsis that puncture the prevailing tension, and because it’s simultaneously so wickedly funny. Most of the series’ incredibly dark humor is at the expense of Tom’s adversaries: at Dickie daring to compare his horrible paintings, which evoke that botched Jesus portrait restoration, to Picasso, or Marge talking about all the work she’s put into a book about Atrani when her entire year’s worth of research can be spread out in a single layer over a kitchen table. Ripley mocks them with its editing choices, with Italian characters who practically roll their eyes at these self-absorbed Americans, and through Tom himself, whom Scott enlivens with barely contained glee when he’s needling Marge, Dickie, and their arrogant friend Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner). Fanning and Scott make for particularly fantastic frenemies, their simmering toxicity fueled by Marge’s haughtiness and Tom’s amusement at her certainty that she has him figured out. A scene in which Marge is leaving town still suspicious about the nature of Tom and Dickie’s relationship, and Tom yells out, “Marge! Bye!” with a little wave and shit-eating grin, is one of the funniest things you’ll see on TV this year. This is peak petty behavior, and Scott excels at it.

That purposefully belligerent framing for the series’ protagonist helps differentiate Ripley from previous adaptations of this story, in particular Anthony Minghella’s beloved 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley. A seminal queer work featuring Matt Damon at his most facetiously perky, Jude Law at his most beautiful, Gwyneth Paltrow at her most frigid, and Philip Seymour Hoffman at his most gloriously bitchy, The Talented Mr. Ripley is all golden light, aquamarine ocean, and sticky sweat. It made the mid-century inheritance crowd look like they were living in a blissful idyll made real by the ability to do whatever the hell you want because you always have the funds to start again. It emphasized Tom’s jealousy and equated it with lust, and ended with the implication that his constant yearning after what others have was a tragic, self-imposed prison.

The Talented Mr. Ripley’s final moments suggest that Tom is crossing forever from the light into the dark, from a place where he could perhaps be redeemed into irreversible and doleful gloom. Ripley all but literalizes that same binary in dazzlingly evocative black-and-white, its chiaroscuro approach in line with its many references to the Italian painter Caravaggio, who factors into the narrative in an unexpectedly inspired way. But where The Talented Mr. Ripley positioned wealth as the foundation for an exciting, verdant, but ultimately empty life, Ripley sees it as a means of anonymity, as a way to disappear into hotels where clerks don’t ask questions of penthouse guests. Damon’s Tom was driven by a desire for love and acceptance; Scott’s version is best defined by his contempt for the lies other people tell about what satisfies them, especially if they pretend money isn’t part of it. One of Ripley’s recurring patterns is the courtesy and capitulation offered to the haves versus the constant surveillance and skepticism of the have-nots, and the series wants us to notice how that imbalance nurtures those in the light and impoverishes those outside of it. There’s myriad shades of gray here, and whatever morality The Talented Mr. Ripley tries to wield in its final moments, Ripley rejects with coy flair. There’s an unapologetic cunning at the heart of this series, and a mercurial spirit that’s as slippery as blood on an Italian marble floor.