From the outset of Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s seminal work, The Talented Mr. Ripley, it’s pretty clear why the title of the series was altered to the plain and simple Ripley. That is to say, because this version of Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) hardly seems talented at all (or deft, or graceful, for that matter). In fact, he seems like a middling criminal at best and a bumbling con man at worst. This, of course, is a far cry from the onscreen version of Ripley that Matt Damon made the most famous in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation. In this edition, Tom comes across as someone with slightly more finesse. Someone who knows how to better wield good fortune in his favor. Scott’s interpretation of the character, however, is much more blundering (fittingly enough, Highsmith does have a novel called The Blunderer).
This is something instantly detectable in the first few minutes of Ripley, with Tom incompetently dragging a body down the stairwell of his apartment building. Elsewhere, compared to Damon’s Ripley, Scott’s is one with no vibrancy or aspirations. This is partially due to the age difference between Damon and Scott when each played Ripley. The former was twenty-eight when The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed, while the latter is forty-seven. It makes for a much more wizened Ripley in this regard. And that’s something to note in terms of Damon’s Ripley being more aspirational. Not only is it obvious that he wants to be a pianist (in fact, one of his gigs is what allows him to encounter Herbert Greenleaf [James Rebhorn] in the first place), but it’s also made clear that he works a number of legitimate jobs to help pay the rent. Scott’s Ripley appears to have given up on that waste of time long ago, relying solely on his various scams to get by. In addition to some help from a previously unmentioned Aunt Dottie (Cristina Fondi), who goes to the dentist for teeth extractions to give him a few extra dollars here and there.
But it’s evident that Ripley’s tricks and schemes are running dry, with one bank already immediately onto his forged signature in the first episode, “A Hard Man to Find.” It’s the realization that it’s all getting too difficult in New York that leads him to go back to the business card of Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan), given to him by the private detective named Alvin McCarron (Bokeem Woodbine) hired to find him. For whatever reason, Herbert is convinced that Tom is an old friend of Dickie’s (Johnny Flynn) who can convince him to come back to America after years spent bumming around Europe. At present, his whereabouts are in Atrani. A real place on the Amalfi Coast in contrast to The Talented Mr. Ripley’s fictional Mongibello (an overt stand-in for Positano). Game to do anything that involves leaving New York (arguably the only sign of his intelligence), Ripley departs for Italy.
While he plays it closer to the vest than Damon’s Ripley (that one going so far as to outright tell Dickie when he asks, “Everybody should have one talent. What’s yours?”: “Forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody”), he’s still a little too transparent when it comes to his covetousness of the privileged man’s lifestyle. In contrast, Damon’s Ripley appears more enamored of Dickie himself, this accented by an effective montage of the two bonding as friends, rounded out by a super homoerotic joint performance of “My Funny Valentine.”
Highsmith being gay herself, the frequent subtext between the characters in her novels is alive and well here. And it is the jocular ribbing between Jude Law’s Dickie and Damon’s Ripley that perhaps makes their potential for a homoerotic rapport more believable. Dickie is, indeed, much rougher around the edges in Law’s hands. Not only a philandering cad, but also someone blunt enough to joke in front of Tom, “Such little class, Marge. Does this guy know anything?” Enough to “get by,” as it is said. Enough to successfully kill a man and assume his identity.
In many ways, it’s also easier to kill Law’s Dickie in that he’s much more of a boor. The type of man so careless with people’s feelings that he ends up prompting one local woman’s suicide (she got pregnant with his child and he wouldn’t give her the money for an abortion). The type of man who provokes Tom on the boat in San Remo with his cruel assessments (including “You can be quite boring” and “You can be a leech”) until Tom’s true inner freak show finally unleashes. It’s here, too, that the differences between Damon’s “cooler,” more competent Ripley shines through in that, unlike Scott’s Ripley, he’s not too daft to understand how to more rapidly sink a boat after killing Dickie on it. Incidentally, just before Damon’s Ripley kills Dickie, he remarks, “The funny thing is, I’m not pretending to be somebody else and you are.”
It is in this sense, too, that viewers are given an understanding that Damon’s Ripley was far more overtly in love with Dickie, while abhorring the phoniness (Holden Caulfield-style) of those in his privileged circumstances. In truth, it appears to genuinely pain Damon’s Tom to kill Dickie, opting to lay with his body for a while afterward as the boat sloshes back and forth. Scott’s Ripley, instead, is more in love with Dickie’s money, even if not his friends. Freddie Miles (Philip Seymour Hoffman) included. The Freddie of Ripley (played by Eliot Sumner), however, is slightly less brutish…if for no other reason than he’s British and not American. He’s also much more direct about accusing Tom of taking over Dickie’s life. But Tom is quick to the kill, and does it in a manner less messy than Scott’s Ripley, who drags the body about in such a way as to leave traces of blood everywhere. Worse still, he simply leaves Freddie’s corpse in the front seat of his car rather than taking it out and making it look more like some kind of car accident.
While both Ripleys rely on improvisation to execute whatever their schemes of the moment are, the manner in which Damon’s Ripley speaks is generally more confident and quick to the draw, which makes him far more believable and, frankly, less smack-worthy than Scott’s version.
Indeed, there are so many more moments during Ripley when one wants to scream at the character for being so stupid and slow in his actions. It is only in the final episode, “Narcissus,” that we start to see something resembling Ripley actually hitting his pathological lying stride. And, in the same way that Damon’s Ripley talks about Dickie as a cover for talking about himself, Scott’s Ripley tells the private detective, “He wondered if he would ever be good at anything. Everything about him was an act. He knew he was…supremely untalented.” And yes, Scott’s Ripley is definitely that, whereas Damon’s Ripley can at least play the piano and keep all of his lies straight. Even though, as he admits to his eventual gay companion, Peter (Jack Davenport), he’s had to lock away a lot of his past in order to cope. Which is why, when Peter asks how Dickie could live with himself if he murdered Freddie, Ripley answers, “Whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? In your head. You never meet anyone who thinks they’re a bad person.”
Ripley certainly doesn’t. Neither version of him—the one in color or the one in black and white. And yes, Zaillian’s decision to enlist Robert Elswit for the B&W cinematography becomes almost more interesting to watch than Ripley himself. While there are any number of reasons for the choice to avoid color, some might posit that the ongoing thread of Caravaggio is a factor (initially mentioned by Dickie as being a man on the run for murder, and who did some of his best work as a fugitive). After all, what’s better for reflecting the chiaroscuro of the maestro’s paintings than black and white? The stark duality of these colors—being at opposite sides of the spectrum—also mirrors the dynamic between Tom and Dickie.
With Ripley, Zaillian has created a different version entirely of the man many came to know best not through Highsmith’s novel, but through Damon’s portrayal. Alas, even with so much more time to develop Ripley as a character within the span of eight episodes, it’s ironic that, naturally, we still don’t really know him at all. For it’s impossible to “know” a cipher. Someone so mutable and, therefore, as Marge (Dakota Fanning) puts it, “vague.” Granted, not so vague that he can’t still read as flying by the seat of his stolen pants when it comes to executing his so-called strategies. However, in the ultimate defense of Scott’s Ripley, he does actually speak some Italian. Call it a testament to his “quick study” nature.
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