The Darkest Ripley Yet

Now Scott’s on home screens around the world, appearing as Tom Ripley, the hollow con man turned murderer Patricia Highsmith introduced in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first of five novels now known as the Ripliad. Alain Delon was twenty-five when he starred in the first adaptation of the 1955 novel, René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), and Matt Damon was twenty-nine when Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley was released at the end of 1999. Though he may look ten years younger, Scott is forty-seven, which gives Ripley, the eight-episode series now streaming on Netflix, a less playful—but perhaps more urgent—tone.

Tom is a low-level fraudster in New York when Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), a shipping magnate, hires him to fetch his errant son, Dickie, from Italy. Dickie is played by Johnny Flynn, who is forty-one, “and although the show makes only glancing references to their more advanced age,” writes Sam Adams at Slate, “they’re clearly past the point of youthful dalliance, edging into the stage where who they will be is who they’ve been. Dickie seems sanguine about the prospect of being a trust-fund kid for life, surrounding himself with younger hangers-on so his failure to mature is less glaring. But Tom’s clock is ticking, loudly.”

Ripley is written and directed by Steven Zaillian, who wrote Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) and cocreated the HBO series The Night Of (2016) with Richard Price. It’s shot in stark black and white by Robert Elswit, who won an Oscar for his work on Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), though the more apt credit here is his collaboration with George Clooney on Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), another mid-twentieth-century story shot in black and white.

The new Ripley “feels like what you might get if the early-’60s Antonioni or Resnais had directed a season of The White Lotus,” suggests Mike Hale in the New York Times. It’s “the darkest Ripley yet,” writes Laura Miller at Slate, “lonelier and darker even than Highsmith’s, and deeper, too.”

With very few exceptions, reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Ripley “not only avoids making a misstep along its cunningly winding journey, but it also manages to exceed expectations at every turn, such that there isn’t a gesture or suggestion in its eight episodes that doesn’t enhance its overpowering overall effect,” writes Nick Schager at the Daily Beast. “Ripley is the platonic ideal of television.” Don’t binge it, advises Vulture’s Roxana Hadadi. This show 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.”

“It also moves incredibly slowly,” notes Lucy Mangan in the Guardian. “For those who can lean in and appreciate the capture of a sensibility summarized in Graham Greene’s description of Highsmith as a ‘poet of apprehension,’ this will be one of the best things about it. The careful mapping of Tom’s every move, whether in furtherance of his deceit or the covering up of his crimes, allows the tension to mount exquisitely.”

Time’s Judy Berman, though, finds Ripley “gorgeously realized yet torpid, ultimately a bit vapid.” But Scott “has nonetheless given us the first definitive onscreen Ripley. Delon’s performance is a study in glamorous cruelty, yet it offers no glimpse of Tom’s evolution from awkward and aggrieved petty crook to worldly and polished criminal mastermind. Damon’s Tom does transform, but the actor’s aw-shucks wholesomeness in early scenes fails to persuasively foreshadow the protagonist’s violent potential.”

Tom Ripley is “a mystery, which is what makes him so primed for reinvention,” writes the NYT’s Alissa Wilkinson. “A close look at the various Mr. Ripleys suggests something both confounding and fascinating: Ripley is less character than cipher, an outline of a figure onto which filmmakers (and audiences) have projected their cultural moments. Watching them all is like watching eras swing past you in living color. (And, eventually, in black and white.)”

“When it first came out in America, Purple Noon was like an advertisement for a life of luxurious sensuality, with hints of La dolce vita–style decadence and New Wave–style modishness, pristinely opulent hotel rooms and lobbies, and large helpings of sand and sun,” wrote Geoffrey O’Brien in 2012. “Purple Noon is the very opposite of film noir.”

In 1977, Wim Wenders cast Dennis Hopper as Ripley in The American Friend, an adaptation of Ripley’s Game (1974), the third book in the series. “If Highsmith’s Ripley is a cool customer, a fraud and maniac so skilled at what he does that (by the time we catch up with him) he has managed to secure himself an enviable (if ultimately precarious) existence,” wrote Francine Prose in 2016, “Wenders and Hopper give us, in Ripley, a hopped-up elf from hell, simultaneously calculating, goofy, and demonic.”

Liliana Cavani made her own Ripley’s Game in 2002 with John Malkovich, “who I remember striking me as too eccentric and cerebral by nature to be an accurate Ripley,” recalls Ty Burr, “although he did capture the character’s fundamental chill. Ripley should be the type who can blend into the crowd—a pleasant fellow you meet at a cocktail party and only later sense the disturbance left by the moral vacuum in his wake.” Scott “can play vulnerability very well, but he was born with the black eyes of a shark and he puts them to excellent use in Ripley.”