The Cutprice Guignol

Ripley isn’t going to be for everyone.

And I say this from a place of love, because I truly adored Netflix’ recent adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Starring Andrew Scott as the titular talent and written and directed by Steve Zaillian, it is, from the get-go, very obviously a show that’s not going to hit for every viewer. It’s meticulous in a way that can read as slow, it’s internal in a way that can read as flat, it strains incredulity in a way that can read as self-serious ridiculousness – even if you get everything it’s trying to pull off, it’s just not going to work for everyone. One of the main featured characters in the second half of the show is a cat, for goodness sake. It’s a lot.

But God, does it work for me. I mean, these visuals, to start with – the black-and-white colour palette on digital photography gives everything a crisp, clean, almost unreal sense, like each detail in the frame has been outlined in ink, as if the Italian setting wasn’t beautiful enough to begin with. Andrew Scott’s leading performance as Ripley is predictably brilliant, but the distinctly restrained script allows him to flex his acting chops in an internal but fully-formed character. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent – including the cat – with Maurizio Lombardi putting in an outrageously fantastic turn as the Italian inspector on Tom’s case and Dakota Fanning as Marge engaging Tom in a silent social bloodbath every time they’re together. It’s noir, it’s drama, it’s class warfare, it’s homoerotic obsession, it’s really good suits and broken lifts and bloodstained boats: it’s a meticulous, rewarding story that bucks the need to go for a big ending and sticks to its guns till the closing credits, and I truly do love it for that.

But it’s not the first adaptation of this story – far from it, in fact. The 1999 adaptation of the same book is perhaps the most famous, but Tom Ripley has been appearing across film and TV for the better part of sixty years now. Even outside of direct adaptations of Highsmith’s character, he’s influenced plenty of other stories about fraudsters, perhaps most significantly in recent years in Saltburn.

And watching Andrew Scott’s version of this character in Ripley really brought home to me just why that character has been such an enduring and fascinating one since his inception in 1955, and that’s because of how malleable he is as a character. Not just in a literal sense, bending to fit the mores of the people around him in order to get what he wants, but in terms of what he represents as metaphor. Ripley’s amorphous form, though obviously taken to extremes within Highsmith’s stories and their adaptations, is, at its heart, easy to fit to so many real-life situations – the experience of having to conceal a part of yourself to better fit into the mould of what you think the world wants from you is one that applies to so much, from gender to class to sexuality and so much more.

And that, I think is what makes it easy is to relate to and even root for Tom at times, despite his awfulness and the harm he causes. So many creators and audiences are drawn to him not just because Highsmith’s stories are bloody great, but because Ripley as a character is always relevant to the shifting social demands that so many of us have to conceal or invent parts of ourselves to fit. And this adaptation, with such brilliance, is a reminder of why this character endures as well as he does. Ripley might not be for everyone – but Tom Ripley, to some extent, at least, is.

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(header image via Netflix)