Netflix’s Ripley haunts a beloved movie like a shadow

05.04.2024 - 15:25 / polygon.com

Just because a movie is iconic and beloved doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be remade, particularly if it was itself based on another work in the first place. That’s as true of the 1999 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley as it would be of anything else. Anthony Minghella took sweeping liberties in his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel — itself a genre-defining classic — about a young conman who first infiltrates and then cannibalizes the life of a rich American playboy whiling away a carefree existence on the Italian coast. There’s room for another take to access different parts of Highsmith’s book than Minghella did, especially in the more expansive medium of an eight-part miniseries.

But something has gone wrong with Ripley, an austere, black-and-white retelling of the story starring Andrew Scott and written and directed by the celebrated screenwriter Steven Zaillian, which is now streaming on Netflix. Zaillian (who wrote Schindler’s List, among many other great movies, and wrote and directed the gripping HBO miniseries The Night Of) is clearly trying to be more faithful to Highsmith’s sour, misanthropic, internalized tone than Minghella’s more busy and melodramatic movie. But strange casting decisions, overly fastidious direction, and inert performances sink any chance it might have of muscling its way past the movie in anyone’s imagination. It’s a beautiful dud.

In the story, Tom Ripley is a clever grifter living a grimy existence in New York when he’s recruited by wealthy shipmaker Herbert Greenleaf to travel to Italy. Greenleaf wants Ripley to persuade his son, Dickie, to stop wasting money and time “studying painting” and return home to the family business. Dickie is only a vague acquaintance of Ripley’s, but Ripley hungrily grasps the opportunity to live another life. Once in Italy, he becomes obsessed with Dickie, a dissolute golden boy, and sticks to him and his privileged existence like a limpet. When Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, becomes suspicious and Ripley senses his new life being threatened, things take a dark turn.

Casting Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley is a brilliant idea on paper. Ripley is one of literature’s great sociopaths: an outwardly charming, morally empty shape-shifter with a talent for mimicry and an insatiable hunger for other people’s experiences. In roles like Fleabag’s hot priest, Sherlock’s Moriarty, and the lonely writer of All of Us Strangers, Scott has a way of being warm and distant at the same time, his impish charisma and sensuality visible, but held at bay by some inner safety lock. That works for Ripley, whose opportunism and manipulation is all aimed at faking an inner life he knows he doesn’t really have.

Highsmith wrote five Ripley novels spanning over