The Artfully Talented Mr. Ripley’s “Ripley”

A Netflix TV series, 8 Episodes, 2024, written and directed by Steven Zaillian

The seductive limited series simply called Ripley opens with the sound of a clock ticking. The ticking runs under the opening credits and it is not until we’re 21 seconds in that the first image comes up. There are six still shots: three of religious statues and three of stairways. We hear a bell ringing 11 times and an object thudding against a hard surface 10 times. The first moving image we see is a pair of expensive shoes. The first time we see a complete figure is a man dragging a body down the stairs; then we hear a voice ask, “Who’s there?” and the moving figure becomes a still figure; cinema becomes photography.

We cut back six months earlier to New York and again we are seeing pictures, this time shots of the fire escape stairs that are a hallmark of the city’s architecture. When we move into an apartment, the images look like they could be interiors taken by American photographer Roger Ballen—they have about them the feel of the almost abject. We hear Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” on a transistor radio, and we see Tom Ripley in profile knotting his tie and getting ready for the con. When he walks out of his building, it’s as if a photograph of a Lisette Model tenement block has come to life. In another held photograph, just before Tom introduces himself to Dickie, who is sunning with Marge on the beach at Atrani, his shadow crosses over them in an image that mimics Lee Friedlander’s signature self-portraiture.

In every episode, the director, Steven Zaillian, and the cinematographer, Robert Elswit, use still shots the way writers use punctuation, to have control over the dynamics of the visual read. The favoured things are public statues, the intricacy of stairways (Piranesi seems to be an influence here), the street, subways and constant elevations. The postmaster in Ripley keeps telling people how to get to the villa. Apiedi. Scale, su, su, su. “Walk the stairs on and on and on.” It is good practical and aesthetic advice. There are two opposite perspectives used effectively in the series: the close-up and the up-high. The former has particular textures, typewriter keys and carriage, the impression the characters make on the paper, human hands. The latter gives us space through architectural and geometric frames.

This meticulously constructed opening fuses into place things to which the series constantly returns: the passage of time, narrative velocity, the integrity of a single image and the way that an image can frame space and mobilize it. The component parts of Ripley operate as much like photography as cinema. The aim of this reversal of moving image to still image is to slow us down and force us to pay attention to the details and delicacies of what we’re looking at. In episode 6, called “Some Heavy Instrument,” we are on the Via Appia Antica where Tom has parked the Fiat 500 with Freddie’s dead body propped up in the passenger’s seat like a sleeping drunk. On the surface, it is a picturesque, painterly image, where the large, flat crowns of the stone pines brush the sky and the road shines as if it were silver. The shot is held for eight seconds before we detect any movement. Time moves so slowly in Ripley that it is almost spatial.

All the film adaptations and the Netflix limited series have used various forms of art—painting, sculpture, music, writing—as a natural part of the world. I don’t mean the aesthetic quality of the films themselves, although they do share that characteristic. I mean the way that references to the intermingling of art and life turn up continuously in the work; in Purple Noon, 1960, directed by René Clément, Marge is working on a book about Fra Angelico and the link between Gothic and Renaissance painting, and the film takes its name from a line in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples”; in The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999, directed by Anthony Minghella, the Marge character is writing and taking photographs for a book on the perfect village of Atrani; Tom claims to have worked at Random House in New York and performs a kind of Pound-to-Eliot editing job on Marge’s manuscript, crossing out whole sections as “too long”; Dickie is an aspiring painter (he paints a portrait of Tom) who loves jazz, plays saxophone and has named his sailboat Bird after Charlie Parker; and Tom sings a pretty version of Chet Baker’s “My Pretty Valentine” in a Naples jazz cellar. He also has Dickie copy two lines from Macbeth—“Stars hide your fires, / Let not light see my black and deep desires.”—as a way of analyzing his handwriting, but the lines tell us more about the analyzer than the analysand. In two of the films Freddie Miles, a completely obnoxious character, is killed by being hit with a heavy piece of sculpture, in one case a classical bust and in the other, a Buddha.

The commingling of violence and art has some startlingly effective moments. A number of the Ripley stories evoke a subtle homoeroticism; in The Talented Mr. Ripley Tom is moved by the scene in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin where two best friends end up in a pointless duel that results in Onegin fatally shooting Lensky. His bleeding is indicated through an expanding red cloth that radiates around his dead body. After Tom kills Dickie (to some degree it is self-defence), he lies down on top of him in an embrace that is about remorse and loss and love. Beneath both of them is an enveloping pool of blood. The two death scenes echo one another. At the end of the final episode in the Netflix series, Tom characterizes Dickie in a wicked story told to the private investigator who has come from New York: “Everything about Dickie was an act. He knew that he was supremely untalented. He knew his father disapproved of him, and it weighed on him greatly.” The story is a total web of lies that is as artfully told as Christopher Walken’s “My father was a very big man” anecdote in The Comfort of Strangers, Paul Schrader’s 1990 film about another murderous psychopath operating in Venice. La Serenissima’s tranquility becomes torturous. (It is worth pointing out that in addition to the destruction that runs throughout these various adaptations, there is also a discernible level of comedy. It is mostly focused on the ongoing difficulty that Tom experiences in coming up with undetectable ways to dispose of the dead bodies he keeps producing. The other comic relief comes from the performance and character of Inspector Pietro Ravini in his investigation of the two murders. Played by Italian actor Maurizio Lombardi, Ravini is part Inspector Clouseau and part Leroy Gibbs from NCIS, all delivered in his delightful mispronunciations.)

In the same way that the first episode opened artfully, so does the final, and longest, of the eight-part series. It is called “Narcissus” and, just as happens in the Greek myth, the conclusion of Tom’s story involves his falling in love with his own self-image. Tom’s passion for the painting of Caravaggio has become obsessive. He has made pilgrimages to the cities and churches where the Master’s paintings hang, and his most prized possession is an art book that reproduces all the known works by the Baroque artist. Caravaggio’s version of Narcissus, 1597–1599, shows the beautiful young man entranced as he gazes at his own reflection in the water. Tom is living in Venice and has dyed his hair black and grown a goatee. He has changed not only his appearance but also the atmosphere of his apartment. In studying a reproduction of The Calling of Saint Matthew (he has seen it and two other St Matthew paintings in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome), he remembers a priest who remarked that the meaning in Caravaggio is found in “the light, always the light.” As it is in chiaroscuro, so it is in covering your identity and your part in a homicide. Inspector Ravini is coming to ask him questions and he has to look different from the way he did in pretending to be Richard Greenleaf. He pulls down all the curtains, puts lower voltage bulbs in the lamps and creates a sense of light that mimics the painting. The room is like a tomb; no outside light gets in and all inside light is absorbed. His disguise works and the inspector thanks him for his candour. The case, from Ravini’s perspective, is closed.

It almost opens again when Marge turns up in Venice and stays with Tom. She spills red wine on his art book and while he pretends that it doesn’t matter, he is enraged. When he wipes the liquid off, it smears like blood on Isaac’s terrified face in the Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603. Later, when Marge is having a bath, she uses her foot to turn off the water. The underside of her foot is dirty, as if she were one of Caravaggio’s models. On two other occasions during her visit, Tom considers killing her, once by canal drowning and once by ashtray bludgeoning. On neither occasion does she know the trouble we, as viewers, know she is in. One of the effects of our careful watching is that we share some degree of psychological and ocular complicity.

This final episode opens not in 1960s Venice but in Rome in 1606. In the noirish dark, wet light, we see a dead body from which glistening rivulets of blood flow down the stone steps. Caravaggio has just murdered Ranuccio in a knife fight and the film cuts to the artist’s studio, where we see shots of brushes, pigments and a skull. Then we see the artist riding along the same road that Tom drove to deposit Freddie’s dead body. Caravaggio is on his way to hide out at the Palazzo Colonna; he sits in front of his Madonna Dei Palafrenieri, 1605, in which the Christ child steps on his mother’s foot, which in turn crushes the head of the snaky devil. He drinks a glass of red wine and has placed the bloody dagger on the table. Tom is hiding out in his palazzo; he sits looking at the Picasso he has stolen and drinks a glass of red wine, and has placed a heavy ashtray, like the one he murdered Freddie with (and with which he considers murdering Marge), on the table next to him. Murderers and tools, looking at one another’s reflection across time.

The characters in these adaptations are complicated; Matt Damon’s Tom moves from modesty to menace; Alain Delon’s incandescent beauty is an ideal mask for his relentless treachery. All the Richard Greenleafs have their own style of nasty; while all the Margaret Sherwoods have their own brand of fragility. But of all the casting, the Irish actor Andrew Scott is the most compelling; his performance as Ripley is a slow burn throughout all eight episodes. He never stops playing at playing someone else, including the various versions of himself he has constructed. In an instant, he can shift from being awkward and boring to being lethal and mesmerizing. He is like phosphorus.

The final section of the episode stays within the world of Tom’s artfulness. At a posh party at the Palazzo Araldi in San Marco, he meets a character with whom he immediately identifies. We hear only his initial comments: “It’s all very boring, isn’t it? So much money and so little else. The host races cars, the Contessa produces films; in other words, they do nothing.” The voice belongs to Reeves Minot, played with perfect world-weariness by John Malkovich. Minot is an art dealer, as Tom also claims to be, but they both recognize one another as hustlers. Reeves gets Tom a new identity; he is now both Tom Ripley and Timothy Fanshaw. Another useful doubling, another opportunity to be two selves, both of whom can look at one another in the mirror. What makes Malkovich a perfect choice is that he played Tom in Ripley’s Game, the 2002 film directed by Liliana Cavani. In that film he is an art dealer, a discerning psychopath with a heart of gold and a chequebook to match; in one scene he caresses the thigh of a woman in a painting with a gesture that rivals Pygmalion; in another he beats a man to death and on the way out of the office he stops to admire an Art Deco statue of Icarus. His wife is a concert pianist for whom he finds a rare harpsichord and has it restored just in time for her performance. As he tells an acquaintance, “I’m a gifted improviser. The one thing I know is we’re constantly being born.” Art is the canal that all the Tom Ripleys come through. For Ripley, art has come to represent complete freedom, even to the point of lawlessness. The final shot we see is his hand, close up, writing to the aunt whom he despises. “You’re free of me now,” the letter says and he signs it simply, Tom. ❚