The Living Room Bijou: Ripley (2024): A Great Gleaming Thriller

Patricia Highsmith’s great literary devil rides out again in Steve Zaillian’s masterful Netflix series.

(Credit: Netflix)

Of the dozens of “difficult men” who’ve dominated “Peak TV” dramas in the last twenty-five-years, Tom Ripley stands out and apart. Some would call him a perfect Dracula for our secular age. A demonic creation of noir writer Patricia Highsmith, who followed his adventures over five novels, you can count among his successors Hannibal Lecter, especially as a symbol of aestheticism’s moral emptiness (though Ripley would haughtily disdain eating his victims).

Ripley carries himself with well-tailored self-possession, as smooth as nightfall, and as sharp as a scalpel. He’s a seductive leech, not out for sex, but for your money and your soul. When circumstances require he’ll take your life and make it his. And, to the envy of many of us, he gets away with it. He is freedom unbound and amoral.

Ripley’s story has been told on film several times since the first Ripley novel was published in 1955, starting with Purple Noon (1960), adapted from The Talented Mr. Ripley, directed by Rene Clémént and starring Alain Delon. Wim Wenders adapted Ripley’s Game as The American Friend (1977), starring Dennis Hopper, who plays Ripley with the grit of a wandering cowboy, not unlike the bounty hunter in Sergio Leone’s Dollar films.

In 1999, Anthony Minghella directed the second version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, cleverly casting baby-faced Matt Damon, who plays Ripley as a young criminal coming into his own. John Malkovich plays him older and may have been the best Ripley of all in a second, and gorgeous, version of Ripley’s Game in 2002, assisted by director Liliana Cavani, cinematographer Alfio Contini, and composer Ennio Morricone.

A nearly forgotten version of Ripley Underground, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Barry Pepper came out in 2005. After a soft reception, it vanished from sight as quietly as Ripley would. Its most interesting element seems to be the co-writing credit for novelist Donald Westlake who, under the pen name Richard Stark, created his own Ripley, the cold-hearted thief of the classic “Parker” novels. Ripley-like figures occasionally show up in other films, such as 2023’s *Saltburn*, starring Barry Keoghan, whose character sets his traps with a pitiful loser’s facade.

And now we have what can be counted among the best adaptations ever and a splendid series on its own: writer-director Steve Zaillian’s eight-episode version, simply titled Ripley.

Adapted from The Talented Mr. Ripley, Zaillian’s version begins with Ripley (Andrew Scott) well into his career as a middle-aged, small-time crook in early 1960s New York, a place captured by cinematographer Robert Elswit in exquisite black-and-white noir style, with bleak silver light, grimy coal shadows and sharp corners; a crook’s world through and through.

Ripley is scraping by with a series of complex swindles, including check forging and embezzlement, schemes that tend to unravel, keeping him on the run. His string of luck has nearly played out when wealthy shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan) reaches down from far above to hire Ripley for an expensive errand: persuading Dickie (Johnny Flynn), his wastrel son, to come home from his endless vacation on the Italian coast to run the family business. With Ripley, Greenleaf peré seems be scraping the bottom of the barrel of Dickie’s friends, possessed by the notion that they were once, at least, very good acquaintances.

Ripley barely remembers ever meeting Dickie, but he’s no honorable fool, not with all the money Greenleaf puts on the table. After a knuckle-biting bus ride on high roads that hug sheer cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean, Ripley arrives in Atrani, a tiny but breathtaking renaissance-era village on the Amalfi Coast, south of Rome. The town is built to the vertical, and Ripley can only find Dickie’s villa after an arduous climb up an endless maze of stairways that leaves him, and us, teetering with exhaustion. The sequence is an ominous foreshadowing of the enormous efforts Ripley is willing to expend. This man has a strenuous work ethic and is a hustler to his bones.

He no sooner reaches the top than he must turn around and stagger all the way back down to the beach hundreds of steps below, where, after a stop to purchase a too-skimpy bathing suit, he finds Dickie lazing in the arms of his girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning). Ripley pretends their reunion is purely coincidental while Dickie scowls over Ripley’s claim they’ve met before.

Like the best con artists, Ripley’s surface is charming, amiable, and borderline unctuous. Dickie invites him home and introduces Ripley to the lifestyle he’s always craved. It’s like a fairy castle. Dickie has everything Ripley wants: the best clothes, the best furniture, the best Art, including an original Picasso hanging on his wall. As an added gift, Dickie introduces Ripley to Caravaggio, the violent Renaissance painter, whose turbulent, bloody life and nightmarish visions mirror Ripley’s own inner world and outer aspirations.

Seething with class resentment, Ripley also despises his benefactor as an indolent, no-talent painter, both unappreciative and undeserving of his privileges. He calls Dickie and Marge slaves for buying a refrigerator (which he has no trouble using himself). By his lights, he’s a better Dickie than Dickie, as he demonstrates in a scene where he tries on one of his host’s best suits. Not surprisingly, they fit. Everything about Dickie’s life fits Ripley.

Driven with greed, envy, and a bit of lust, he slithers elegantly through this glamorous, expatriate world, patiently coming between Dickie and Marge, despite Marge’s growing wariness and the warnings of Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner), a friend of Dickie’s who did meet Ripley once and knows perhaps too much for his own good.

Eventually, Dickie comes around to Marge’s point of view, but tragically picks the wrong time and place to confront the serpent who calls himself friend. The confrontation launches an extraordinary sequence, shot and paced with deliberate, heart-wrenching horror, an astoundingly detailed chain of agonizing reversals and counter-reversals that allows Ripley to escape but hardly free of the consequences. As in all great crime stories, every solution creates another problem to be solved.

Ripley is an artful work of gripping suspense for most of its eight episodes that demonstrates what genre cinema can achieve. As a director, Zaillian (who wrote Schindler’s List) made exactly the right decision to shoot in black-and-white. He and cameraman Elswit create a series of stunning visuals that cast Italy’s beauty in a silver-white glow, as lovely as if they’d shot in color. It weirdly illustrates how beauty is only skin deep. Within this light-filled environment, Ripley’s perfidy stands out even more.

Special praise also goes to composer Jeff Russo for his quiet insinuating jazz score that is interspersed with Italian pop songs of the period. The sound design team (too many to credit here) deserve even greater compliments for with their beautiful yet unsettling interwoven notes of ambient sounds. Ripley’s world is haunted by ghostly echoes of dogs barking, doors opening and closing, voices in the distance, the clacking of typewriters, the crisp scrawl of a pen across paper. Evil does its work, while everyday life goes on, making this one of the best films I’ve ever listened to.

At first, I resisted Zaillian’s choice to begin the story in Ripley’s middle-age instead of his youth, but by the second episode, Andrew Scott has us right in his curling fist. His Ripley is a master at hiding his inner self. He’s one of those “bland” villains, a guy you might easily forget; that is, until he takes an interest in you, whereupon he turns into a hypnotically amiable soul, irresistibly easygoing, even when your good sense whispers otherwise. His fastidiousness is forever in ironic tension with his madness.

Johnny Flynn is also excellent as Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie may be a no-talent layabout, blinded by privilege to the danger by his side, but he’s truly an innocent, sad but not despicable. Both Flynn and Zaillan make him sympathetic enough to feel horror at his end.

Dakota Fanning does fine work as the equally semi-talented Marge whom Ripley gives a boost without ever quite winning her over. She does fine work in capturing her character’s wavering attitude as her suspicions about him put her in danger. Solid support is provided by the Italian cast, including Margherita Buy as Ripley’s landlady who’s too charmed by his affable surface to face up to her discomfort; and Maurizio Lombardi as a dogged, if a bit too dim, homicide investigator. Finally, there’s a delightful cameo appearance by a Ripley of old. Even a hotel cat is put to good use, playing a crucial role and delivering as fine a performance as you could expect from a feline.

The flaws are few. Ripley and Dickie’s supposed past relationship is much too tenuous, making Greenleaf Sr.’s efforts to track Ripley down unbelievable. The pace in later episodes slows to where the story sometimes drifts. I also found Eliot Sumner as Freddie Miles a bit too oily. Finally, there’s a major and obvious misplaced clue to Ripley’s crimes that remains unnoticed until long after it should.

But measured against Ripley’s success, these are small matters. This show is the best cinematic experience I’ve had so far this year, on both big screen and small.

Thomas Burchfield has published short stories and articles in such publications as Mystery Tribune, Noir City magazine, and the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020). A novelist (*Butchertown and [Dragon’s Ark](http://www.blogger.com/goog_1438986906)) *and former screenwriter, he reviews movies regularly on Medium and writes mini-reviews on Facebook of movies, TV, and other ephemera not covered here.