Patricia Highsmith’s famed identity thief, the master social chameleon, is presented in a new mould in the eight-episode series
There’s something about the way Patricia Highsmith views men through her writing. The male figure in her work often struggles, both psychologically and physically, and the struggle persists till the very end, as it pushes them ever-so-gently over the edge. This period also marks intense self-reflection for this said male who only grows more and more morally ambiguous as he manically pursues his goal, wrestling dark desires that only he is aware of for the most part.
It’s the perfect test of fluidity that Highsmith puts her men through, and unlike most of her contemporaries — the Raymond Chandlers, the Dashiell Hammetts and the Mickey Spillanes — she finds joy in exploring the timid and the unremarkable. Highsmith exposes the male insecurity like no other and she pitilessly stays detached from their mischances, abandoning them for doom with a soft smile.
Perhaps that is why she derives so much pleasure from Tom Ripley, who is a bit of an outlier in her oeuvre. At first glance, Ripley isn’t all that different from a lot of the other Highsmith protagonists — charming, congenial and level-headed. But once you dig a little deep, you see there lies inside a rotten moral core that urges them to go to any lengths to get what they want. Ripley is exactly as irredeemable and unscrupulous as the rest, but Highsmith fascinatingly celebrates this character instead of punishing him. She hands him these alluring powers to improvise and reinvent himself at will, and then to manipulate people whenever the need be.
Quiet study of an insidious man
For Ripley, the rest of the world is simply a pawn to negate the bad hand that life dealt him and for Highsmith, there’s nothing more pleasing than seeing him in his element. Fittingly, Steven Zaillian, the creator, writer and director of the latest series Ripley, remains as fascinated as the author herself and, in fact, he doubles down on the obsession with the character. Based on the novel, The Talented Mr Ripley, the first of the five Ripliad books, the eight-episode Netflix show stars Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley and comes as a methodical, feverishly quiet study of an insidious man and his first major exploit as a social chameleon.
The year is 1961, the location is Rome and the photography (by the master Robert Elswit) is beguilingly black-and-white because nothing about what Ripley does through the narrative is vibrant or motley. Ripley has just assumed the identity of Richard ‘Dickie’ Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), the son of a wealthy New York businessman named Herbert Greenleaf (played by Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan). Tom met Dickie not very long ago in Italy and was so drawn to him and his casual-luxury lifestyle that his mouth almost watered at first sight. He wants to be in Dickie’s shoes, maybe quite literally.
A few days prior to meeting him, Ripley finds out that Dickie hasn’t returned home for a while now and has been burning away his huge trust fund in a quaint little Italian town named Atrani. The young man believes he can be a painter or a writer but his aging father believes more confirmedly that he is not good enough to be either. Soon enough, Ripley finds himself sitting on the other side of Sr. Greenleaf's office desk and is offered a paid proposition to ‘convince’ Dickie to come back to New York. For a failing grifter like him, who can tell lies, forge signatures and adopt new demeanours on a whim, this is the gig of a lifetime.
Much of the charm of Ripley comes from the ominosity that Steven Zaillian generates. His gaze, unlike the previous two movie adaptations of the book — René Clément's Purple Noon (Alain Delon as Ripley) and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (Matt Damon) — is cold and way less flamboyant and 47-year-old Scott’s performance is suitably ‘weird’ for the tone and the treatment. Each small diegetic sound in the show — the rustling of papers, the closing of a wooden drawer and the striking of a blunt object on a human skull — is exaggerated for an eerie effect. Robert Elswit's frames, elegantly juggling light and shadow, are restrictive of what we see of picturesque 1960s Italy and remain limited to Ripley’s mental purview at any given moment. Everything we see, from the mood to the factualities, is what Ripley wants us to see.
The reptilian charm of a sociopath
Zaillian, along with Richard Price, proved in The Night Of (a crackling limited series starring Riz Ahmed) that he clearly understands how evil seeps in. In Ripley, he renders the titular character as a highly strung, self-loathing young man but unlike the other two versions, Ripley comes off a lot more calculated and prepared for what’s to come. It helps incredibly that Scott exudes masterful control and dials up or down the character’s reptilian charm depending upon the situation at hand. In one moment, he is the sophisticated social elite conversing with Italian Inspector Pietro Ravini (a wonderful Maurizio Lombardi) and in the other, he is the meek, coy and equally reproachable American sitting at a Roman cafe with Dickie’s girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning). Simultaneously, Scott’s performance becomes a great tool to discuss Ripley’s supposed sexuality which the show refers to on multiple occasions.
In a sense, Ripley sees himself as nothing less than an artist whose musings are enkindled when he first learns about Italian painter Caravaggio. Ripley feels quite passionately that both Dickie and his other deep-pocketed playwright friend Freddy Miles (a wonderfully cast Eliot Sumner) are shams as artists but, just as well, he knows one could easily scheme the world (and oneself) into seeing them as an artist. Ripley’s brush strokes on the canvas might not be convincing yet but he knows his artistry lies in his sociopathy and enigma. Caravaggio is popular as both a painter and a violent killer and Ripley wants to straddle both identities with aplomb.
Highsmith’s plotting in The Talented Mr. Ripley is agonizingly simple and yet ingenious, though the famed novelist took a lot of convenience in her stride. Zaillian does the same with his take and doesn’t necessarily try to subvert the expectations of the fans of the book; instead, he wishes to elevate it with aesthetics and atmosphere. The result is a bewitching, meditative series that takes its time to creep up on you. More importantly, Ripley is lip-smacking fun if you are someone who likes to bide your time and wait for a kind of sinister pleasure to take you into its fold. And if so, you might find yourself binge-watching all eight episodes in one go without any sense of time or responsibility, just as I did.
Ripley is currently streaming on Netflix
