After binging Netflix’s darkly triumphant eight-part mini series Ripley (2024) over the weekend, this dramatisation of Patricia Highsmith‘s wicked, intelligent masterpiece The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), her Baroque introduction to the life and crimes of one Tom Ripley (con-artist, connoisseur of fine art, murderer), left me deeply impressed, and pensive, as I rarely witnessed a piece of filmmaking so timeless and yet perfectly timed. Taking this ur-Machiavellian character, living in our collective shadows, and making him slowly zig-zag, then daintily tiptoe, and finally forcefully slide into the full spectrum between light and darkness, the chiaroscuro of good and evil, in lush black-and-white photography, each frame as if a Robert Mapplethorpe still, each crime a prolonged agony, made sense to me in the way all previous screen versions of Ripley failed to do.
As I am yet to read Highsmith’s book, I am still unable to tell what she wanted Ripley to truly be. Nevertheless, her creation is so potent that having watched several ways this unique trickster type was embodied in the cinema, I built him from the ground up, in my own mind, inevitably.
So, who is Tom Ripley, as told on screen? As Highsmith, herself, has said — she quite liked Alan Delon‘s take in René Clément‘s Purple Noon (1960), a stunning Ripley, with an omnisexual feel to him, emanating a tainted beauty that allowed a glimpse into the depths of his depravity. An inner hollowness is shared by all incarnations of the character, so well depicted by Matt Damon, with his boyish demeanour, in Anthony Minghella‘s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), but lacking the seductive edge that a con of that caliber should exude in spades. John Malkovich in Liliana Cavani‘s Ripley’s Game (2002) has that sort of charisma, but lacks the ordinariness necessary for us to believe him insanely desirous of another’s skin. Malkovich also appears briefly in Netflix’s version, as Ripley’s fellow traveller in Venice, an apt homage to the meta-aspects of the character. Highsmith found the first draft of the script for Wim Wenders‘s American Friend (1977) — an adaptation of Ripley’s Game (1974), her third book in the series (with Dennis Hopper the cowboy version of Ripley), initially annoying, and too off the mark, although she liked Wenders when they met. But she warmed to the second version of it, re-done following her objections.
The screen double of Tom Ripley, the brainchild of the author both beloved for her work and frequently reviled for her attitudes, in this manifestation, begins as small-time con artist in early 1960s New York City, living in poverty in the Bowery, an orphan, friendless, jobless (other than his criminal pursuits in forgery), coming from what seems to be an abusive family background, his dreaded aunt appearing only as a memory to stick mental pins into. Then, he gets his opportunity at the grownup’s poker table when a private eye finds him in a nondescript bar, and makes him an offer he cannot refuse. He is to go to Italy, and persuade a rich man’s prodigal son to return to the fold. The fact that he is chosen for this task is due to some peculiarities in mis-identification, but, as we find out, this is the kind of devilish luck Ripley receives from the beyond, from time to time. Of course, before he embarks on the voyage, he first befriends the lofty industrialist Greenleaf family, who hired him.
And off he goes, to the Amalfi coast, finding his handsome prey on the beach, with an equally fetching girlfriend, lounging, doing nothing, and being incredibly stylish in the process. Richard Greenleaf, called Dickie, movingly portrayed by Johnny Flynn, is a self-proclaimed painter, who cannot paint, his siren-like, shrewd girlfriend Marge Sherwood, played by a wry, striking Dakota Fanning — a self-proclaimed writer, who is struggling to write a travel book on the small town of Atrani, where the couple holds court. Dickie is trust-fund rich. Marge, much less so, but still effortlessly comfortable in the refined, causally rustic settings. Tom falls for Dickie, instantly, in the only way he apparently can — by osmosis, wishing to become the object of his adoration. To Tom Ripley, the handsome Greenleaf, is not just a mere object of lust, as there is scant evidence of a formed sexuality throughout the story, he is a lifestyle, a gesture, an “air”, an essence, something to dress up as (and he famously does) — a substance the parasitical Ripley inhales as if Dickie were a bag of cocaine. The resentment and outright jealous rage he builds towards Marge, when confronted by her intimate relationship with Dickie, speaks of a sort of warped kinship in rivalry.
Marge and Tom have a bond that is one of intense dislike, but the way their relationship unfolds, to the bitter end, when the despised competition is spared from death by Ripley, was a psychological coup, for both actors.
Yes, Tom is queer-coded and fluid, and not easily defined, but there seems to be an entire part of him missing, and that might be the exact space where his life force used to exist. Not having one, he violently attaches himself to what he perceives the ideal to be, and stops at nothing in acquiring and assimilating his host, sucking them dry of their very essence.
Andrew Scott‘s extraordinary rendition of Ripley, the everyman who can both blend in and stand out, exceptional in a certain light, quite plain in another, his mind a rollercoaster, never rested — his motivations a mystery, possibly even to himself, pinpoints this inner void surgically, and with a great deal of empathy, despite the horrific deeds his character is willing to commit. Or, perhaps, precisely because of them.
Although Highsmith wrote Ripley as an enigma, entirely lacking a morality, a human vacuum, essentially unknowable, writer-director Steven Zaillian‘s exquisitely staged and shot version made him strangely accessible. Perhaps, as an empty room would be (or series of empty rooms), or a museum of strange artefacts, crammed with the bourgeois-dream furniture Ripley so desires, covered in exquisite art, there to indicate means and good taste, and preferably — old money.
He becomes increasingly obsessed by the raw glamour of Caravaggio, whose work Dickie introduces him to, and whom he also seeks to emulate (he is Ripley’s creative deamon in this tale). Watching him adopt the pose of the infamous, wildly talented Italian Baroque painter (a murderer and fugitive himself), it finally clicked for me, what we were witnessing. Ripley is someone so deeply socially aspirational, so hungry for status and praise, so hedonistically driven, that his inner life exists only as a mirror to that which he covetously gazes upon. He dearly wishes to excel in something. And, as digging deep within could be fatal, only the outside world remains. So he perfects mimicking it.
Ripley might be a non-entity, a human lacking a formed character or a person forever building a character, but there is a balance of extreme points within him, an alchemy of the blackest variety, that needs to exist for him to be breathing exactly the way he does. Ravenously. At the same time, Ripley is fortunate. Incredibly fortunate. The way people who continuously get away with the worst of crimes must forever be the favoured children of malignant deities. He is the epitome of the injustice of our world, its commonplace presence, the darkness prevailing, unfolding — gaudy, triumphant, unrepentant — with each passing second, before our very eyes.
As he is bludgeoning and conning his way to riches, Ripley readily adopts the persona of an artist in his own right. Not only does he identify himself as a Caravaggio, he also compares himself to Picasso, the Cubism master’s work another sociopathic trophy hanging on his wall, an elevated piece of art which he stole from the tragic Greenleaf — whose life he envied, whose privacy he usurped, whose friendship he betrayed, whose friend he killed (the wonderfully stylised Eliot Sumner as Freddie Miles), and whose life he also brutally ended just before Dickie was able to quit their fraudulent friendship, throwing the young Greenleaf’s corpse into the deep blue sea. Unsurprisingly, the dead man’s ghost haunts him, while he continues adopting his late friend’s identity, crowbarring it open, perversely inhabiting its every pore — fully appropriating it, possessing it, in a overtly sexual manner, before dumping the shell of the man, as well.
Ripley is, in fact, a body-snatcher extraordinaire.
His cat-and-mouse game with Inspector Pietro Ravini, hot on his trail (in a gorgeous, yet austere, Rossellini-like depiction of Italy), played with incredible gusto by Maurizio Lombardi, becomes, almost literally, as if chasing of a ghoul, exchanging one person’s body and soul for the next, in a world peopled by vivid neorealist folk. One of which is Ripley’s no-nonsense Rome landlady, signora Buffi (a pitch-perfect Margherita Buy).
The astounding photography in Zaillian‘s version of Ripley, conjured by series cinematographer Robert Elswit, is almost a character in its own right, as Ripley is more a ‘setting’ than a ‘personality’, or rather his setting becomes his personality — a social media influencer’s dream. We are driven by the steady hand of the filmmaker, and the Stradivarius bravuras of Scott, towards (uneasily) analysing our own reactions to Ripley — at first, as penniless crook in NYC, then, an unsophisticated upstart on the Italian coast, followed by a rather clumsy murderer in Rome (more a butcher than a gunslinger), morphing into a bit slicker fugitive figure in Sicily, and finally, the reigning prince of thieves in Venice. As Ripley evolves, does our opinion of the character change as drastically as his settings do? Do we begin to admire him as he becomes successful in crime, just as much as we recoiled at the bloodiness of his less glamorous incarnations? And if we do, if we accept that Ripley’s worth is the reflection of the room he is currently in — are we not also culpable in his trickery?
The all-consuming, all-encompassing presence of social media, now co-joined with the advent of AI, makes this world a con artist’s dream, as everything can be faked, because everyone is so used to being fooled. Few seem to seriously question the constant stream of chimeric images, weaponised hallucinations of diseased minds that seem to inundate our social channels. It’s the jadedness and relativisation of the post-postmodern eye that creates a haven for the fraudulently inclined, as scams are easily discerned, but equally easily dismissed. Everybody cheats, so lies become omnipresent.
Our online alter-egos, alternate personas, different profiles for different platforms, compartmentalised and adapted to particular agendas, just like Ripley’s many aliases, passports, and personalities, equally drive us to fully absorb our individual qualities into the social expression necessary to succeed in the arena of our choice.
In a metaphorical sense, everybody is somewhat of a Ripley, these days.
He is the true (anti)hero of our time.
Which, in truth, makes him even more chilling — straight to the bone.
Author: © Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 