NEW YORK, NY.- Patricia Highsmiths 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 Cléments Plein Soleil (released in the United States as Purple Noon) and Anthony Minghellas 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 eight-episode adaptation of the book that premiered on Netflix on 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 shows time period (it is set in 1961) were up to, Zaillian, who wrote and directed all the episodes, takes an approach that harmonizes with Elswits 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. Highsmiths 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 isnt flat, exactly, but its 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, thats not a big problem.
Zaillian has been faithful, in broad outline, to Highsmiths 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 Ripleys way, Greenleafs father thinks they are good friends.
Highsmiths novel is a training manual for the sociopath: Once Ripley sees the indolent lives led by Greenleaf and his sort-of 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 storys 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 Zaillians 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 Ripleys aspirations and the desperate need he feels to escape his previous life and his previous self. But in Zaillians 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 cant give the character the vivid life you would like in someone who is onscreen for most of an eight-hour series. But he does a meticulous job of portraying Ripleys transition from shifty timidity to insolent confidence, from lost boy to aesthete, through subtle shifts of expression and posture. As Ripleys schemes keep meeting with success, Scotts eyes somehow become both softer and more challenging. Flynn is also good as Greenleaf, well meaning but, in todays terms, trapped by his privilege. Fanning, a fine actress, is perfectly capable as Sherwood but the character is a hollow shell.
Zaillian and Elswits 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. Ripleys 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 Highsmiths 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!
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.