The series “Ripley”: a new film adaptation by Patricia Highsmith
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A new adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley has been released on Netflix. It’s eight suspenseful black-and-white hours, shot by the outstanding cinematographer Robert Elswit and performed by the amazing actor Andrew Scott. The author of the series, Steven Zaillian, unlike his predecessors, dares to trust the source material and leaves the unpleasant hero of Patricia Highsmith unpunished.
In the classic film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s first Tom Ripley novel, In the Bright Sun (1960) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), rich, bright colors helped to feel the beauty of Italy, which made Ripley a hedonist. The new adaptation looks delightfully old-fashioned and also classic (in accordance with the concept of instant classic): it is black and white, matching the Italian films of the 1960s. The present-day Ripley seems to live in an old black-and-white movie, somewhere between La Dolce Vita and Antonioni’s viscous pseudo-detectives about escapes and disappearances of people. The author of the current “Ripley” Steven Zaillian is the screenwriter of “Schindler’s List”, “Gangs of New York”, “The Man Who Changed Everything” and the director of the series “One Night” – made the story of Ripley’s fall just as viscous, as if in defiance of today’s neurotic scripts, where the action rushes between times, because the screenwriters have forgotten how to tell stories sequentially.
Only at the very beginning does Zaillyan run ahead – as a primer. In the first shots, a man is struggling to drag a body down the stairs, which is banging its head on the steps – a cat with tassels on its ears calmly watches this sickening activity. This is how things stand with us: it seems that the wrong creatures are called beasts. Patricia Highsmith didn’t like people, but she did like animals. She made her Ripley a man without qualities – he has no biography (his parents drowned, he was raised by an unloved aunt – this is not a biography), there is no “character”, there is nothing that would allow us to assume how he came to live such that he is now carrying corpses on the stairs. In this part, the series is also old-fashioned: in modern television drama, it is customary to voluptuously study the backstory of a maniac in order to understand what childhood traumas made him a monster. But Ripley is from a different story, he is a mysterious character about whom nothing is clear.
In 1961, we find Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) in New York forging debt letters in order to get hold of small sums. But his petty scam is in danger of being exposed – the bank has already sounded the alarm because of the forged signatures. Tom’s salvation is a generous offer from shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan). He takes Ripley for a close friend of his unlucky son and offers him a job: to go to Italy, to the resort town of Atrani, where Dickie Greenleaf is wasting his life, spending money from the family trust fund, and persuade him to return to America.
In the old film adaptations, Dickie, played by Maurice Ronet and Jude Law, was irresistible: a rich and attractive lucky guy, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It was clear why Tom wanted to take possession of this spoon. In Zaillian, Dickie (Johnny Flynn) is a worthless, untalented wimp who imagines himself an artist, a rich nonentity. Ripley’s motivation for taking over his sweet life is simple: this worm is simply not worthy of it. This is a class feeling, the hostility of the lumpen towards the master of life. We see Tom’s awakening hedonism, a craving for things that he never had, but Dickie does.
Zaillian’s entire production rests on the lead actor – and Andrew Scott is already forty-seven, this is not the young ambitious Ripley he was portrayed as before, but a man who has vegetated for half his life, and this makes the story look heartbreaking. Scott is a unique actor who made Moriarty as beloved as Sherlock and played the “hot priest” in “Fleabag”. He can turn the charm on and off, the way his hero turns on the light in the alcove of a church by throwing a coin into the machine to view a painting by Caravaggio – a genius and a murderer. Here Scott plays a reptile, so Zaillian describes his actions in great detail and carefully: only by being drawn into Ripley’s scrapes as if they were our own can we root for him. Ripley doesn’t like people, he likes things (like Patricia Highsmith herself) – maybe he wouldn’t want to kill anyone. Neither hitting Dickie’s annoyingly rich and cantankerous friend Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner) over the head with an ashtray (a beautiful thing!), nor pushing Dickie’s girlfriend, the equally untalented Marge (Dakota Fanning), into a Venice canal. However, realizing that Marge is safe, he doesn’t push. He is a calm, cool-blooded reptile. This is where, apparently, Caravaggio, who was not in the book, came from in Zaillian’s plot: he clearly lacks passion, the same one that Caravaggio had more than enough of, which is why he became a murderer – and Ripley’s fetish. It must also be said that cinematographer Robert Elswit is a full-fledged co-author of Zaillian: the black and white palette of the series does not in the least prevent him from admiring every thing in the frame and showing Italy irresistible – Patricia Highsmith would be pleased.
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