A masterful Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley, in a brilliant film adaptation of the novel.
Photo: Netflix
The path to the top is long and difficult for people from far below. That doesn’t apply to Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), of course. The scion of a major New York shipping company looks down on the Mediterranean from his luxury villa, but apparently never has to climb up himself. In complete contrast to Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott). At the beginning of this fabulous Netflix series, the con artist struggles up the stairs to Dickie’s home, then down, uphill, downhill. Over and over again.
It is a strenuous battle against the capitalist height difference that he wages with himself and his ambition. After all, it could be worth it: Tom is commissioned by Dickie’s father to persuade his son to give up his life as a living ne’er-do-well and return home. For Tom that means: first class to Italy. Fees and expenses included. A tempting offer for someone who would otherwise help ordinary consumers out of small amounts.
And one that will be familiar to movie buffs: When Anthony Minghella filmed Patricia Highsmith’s thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1999, Matt Damon slid from one disaster to the next while trying to be someone better. Two years after his mafia epic “The Irishman,” Steven Zaillion is now sending the even more talented Andrew Scott back to the Swinging Sixties. And one wonders: Can television gain something from the novel that was hidden from the cinema?
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Answer: It can. What’s more: It not only extends the length of the feature film to eight times 30 to 60 minutes, but also makes it perhaps the best fiction of 2024, if not of all time. Because “Ripley”, as the series is called in short, achieves something almost unique: dramatic depth and acting brilliance, paired with aesthetic perfection and narrative stringency, which, despite a well-known story, is captivating to the breaking point.
The fact that the supposed student friend of the amateur painter Dickie is planning to slip into his role becomes clear early on, but does not take away from the tension of the story. Until then, Ripley has to climb stairs. In order to gain other people’s trust, he takes up residence in their house high above Naples and turns from a visitor into a friend, manipulating his host so expertly that neither Dickie nor his girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning) notice anything.
Where Matt Damon plays his intruder as an impulse offender who ends up in the escalation spiral by chance, showrunner Zaillion stays closer to the book and can rely on his leading actor. In his figure, 70 years ago, Highsmith sketched a class society that is so hermetically sealed that one can only escape it by taking a crooked path – or an endlessly curved spiral staircase – upwards. And Andrew Scott plays this zeal with an invisible complexity that leaves you speechless.
From innocent naivety to malicious infamy, he only has to move two or three facial muscles and thus varies his facial expressions more in one second than Heino Ferch did in his entire career. However, the actual stars aren’t even in the picture: Robert Elswitt and Jeff Russo. While the cameraman turns each of his black-and-white shots into a painting that belongs in a film museum in itself, the composer creates a soundtrack that is both impressive and incidental.
In its unobtrusive attention to detail, which often seems to take snapshots of the surroundings over a period of minutes, “Ripley” is reminiscent of masterpieces from “Lost in Translation” to “Smoke”, in which the optics take on the tasks of the content without replacing them. Zaillion creates a breathtaking urban-rural-river portrait of an elegant era whose visual beauty contrasts gracefully with the social inequality all around, bringing both to perfection. But even though every single image here seems hopelessly overloaded, none of them ever beg for meaning.
The outstanding thing about this unique production is that the 1960s never seem costumed here – as if Netflix were digitizing Super 8 films from those years instead of recreating them. For the German Louis Hofmann, it is the greatest honor to be able to play alongside John Malkovich – even if only on the sidelines. “Ripley” is probably the best thing that everyone involved can expect from their careers. But with Andrew Scott you can’t be too sure. Although he is already one of the greatest of our time, he has not yet come close to exploiting his potential.
Available on Netflix
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