Not since Never on Sunday has the Mediterranean ever looked so very… black and white.
Yes, thanks to an artistic decision by director Steven Zaillian, that’s how the new eight-part Netflix “limited series” called Ripley was shot. And while we’ll always love the endless variations on blue that are the Mediterranean, that decision now comes across as a stroke of genius. At the simplest level, it sets Tom Ripley’s evil actions in 1960 Italy securely within the Hollywood traditions of noir. Most of those films, of course, were shot in black and white, beginning in the 1930s.
It also seems the intent was to give us an Italy devoid of the standard “tourism pretty.” Familiar sites do turn up, especially in Rome. But the No. 1 thing missing here is… tourists. Streets are empty, piazzas are empty, buildings are empty, cafes are empty, and all seem to be visited by the main characters moments after a hard rain. There are many outdoor closeups of polished shoes splashing through puddles, and many indoor shots of people (mostly Tom Ripley) carrying a suitcase up endless marble stairs with no one else going up or down. Italy becomes a different place, black and white and depopulated, still carrying the shadows of its destruction by the Allies in World War II.
There are few actual jobs on display, only newsstands and coffeehouses, even as the action shifts from the small but picturesque seaside town of Atrani south of Naples to that city itself, plus Rome, San Remo along the coast up north, Palermo and Venice. The slate-gray sea is almost always there or nearby, even on the long train rides Ripley takes through open country as he struggles to keep one step ahead of his crimes – and especially one step ahead of a dogged police inspector named Rivani.
So… Tom Ripley is a very smalltime con man, a grifter, living in squalor in New York City. He is contacted by the wealthy father of a young man his age named Dickie Greenleaf, who is living off his generous trust fund in a stark white villa many steps above the sea in Atrani. He has a writer/photographer girlfriend named Marge, ostensibly perfect for a young man trying hard not to do what young American men in 1960 typically did: go home, work for your father, get a mortgage, acquire a wife and kids. It does seem that Marge has as little interest in that future as Dickie. She certainly never mentions it.
Dad sends Tom Ripley to find Dickie and “talk to him,” all expenses paid. But that’s not what happens. Tom is a con man, after all, and maybe he doesn’t have to be so small-time anymore. There’s money coming from the trust fund every month, there’s a mostly easy lifestyle when you have U.S. dollars to exchange for pre-euro Italian lire in 1960, and there might even be a girlfriend in waiting named Marge. All Tom has to do is become Dickie Greenleaf, even if, alas, Marge would be the last person who would accept him as such.
Tom Ripley was “morally bankrupt” long before conservatives in Congress started tossing the phrase around. Tom is the very definition of amoral, and as he moves naturally from theft to murder, we see nothing of remorse in his eyes. He does what he does with a born killer’s focus and a born actor’s ease, whether it’s ending a life, forging a traveler’s check or signing the guest book at yet another hotel.
Andrew Scott, who first turned heads as the crazy/psycho/dangerous Moriarty in the Sherlock series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, brings an even more menacing version of those qualities to the role of Tom. He becomes the latest actor to try his hand, after Patricia Highsmith published the first of her Ripley novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley, in 1955. Matt Damon made a fine Ripley in the theatrical release by that same title in 1999, with Jude Law as Dickie and Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge.
This time out, the two victims are played by Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning, both of whom shine with the narrative arc of carefree fun with money, distrust, suspicion, concern and finally fear as Ripley doesn’t seem to be who or what he says he is. Special praise is due Eliot Sumner as foppish friend Freddie Miles, and especially to Maurizio Lombardi as the savvy, very stubborn detective Rivani. You’ll love the way he loudly clicks open his ink pen at the start of each interview with a suspect and loudly clicks it closed at the end. And we’ll never know exactly what he’s writing in that little black notebook.
