The Many Faces of Ripley
The Many Faces of Ripley
Comparing book, film and series
Until this year, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley had not been adapted to film or TV since 19991 when Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow starred in a gripping and gorgeously stylish adaptation directed by Anthony Minghella. Considered the definitive take on Highsmith’s classic thriller, it was easy to think that the last word had been spoken, until RIPLEY hit Netflix in April of this year. Coming in the form of an eight-part series shot in stark black-and-white and staying far closer to the book both in plot and feeling, a clean break has been drawn between these two takes on the novel. Audiences can expect a colder, more vicious experience - steeped in an atmosphere as bleak as the show’s greyscale palette - rooted in and experienced through the internal world of the enthrallingly amoral main character: auteur to a reality into which the vivid colours of empathy and humanity do not penetrate.
The two adaptations share the same basic plot as the book - an orphan nobody living in New York City gets sent to coax the errant scion of a vastly wealthy shipping magnate back across the Atlantic from his prodigal life in Dolce-Vita era Italy. The nobody in question, Tom Ripley, takes advantage of the father’s stipend, in league with the son, Richard “Dickie” Greenleaf, with whom he has become infatuated, Brideshead-style.2 Dickie’s lifestyle is “like one big love-affair”, as Damon’s Tom relates, and both he and the other Ripleys are as transfixed on this ideal of jet-setting bliss as they are on its human representative. Actually, the first of many interesting differences might be identified here. To Book Tom, Dickie is a symbol of luxury and and the good life, a million miles from the destitution and grime of his own life in New York and is ultimately, especially after he feels let down by him, when he fails to embody his fantasy, starts to hate and envy him. By contrast, Film Tom genuinely loves Dickie, adoring the luxury and glamour of his life as an extension of his charismatic, blond, sunshine self. Once again like Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian, of Film Dickie one could say “wherever he goes he is loved”. As Gwyneth Paltrow’s Marge (Dickie’s friend/lover), puts it: “The thing with Dickie... it’s like the sun shines on you, and it’s glorious. And then he forgets you and it’s very, very cold.”
After the honeymoon phase elapses in the film, when the incident, absent from the book, of Dickie’s Italian mistress drowning herself during a local festival drives Dickie from his home in Mongibello, he takes Tom North to San Remo for a final bash before kindly exiting Dickie’s life, as he is bored with him. It is this pain and rejection that leads the shattered-hearted Tom to whack Jude Law right in the smug face with an oar. For book (and show) Ripley, this was entirely premeditated. Before even embarking, Book Ripley knows he will kill Dickie. One of the most arresting moments in the first book is when one stumbles on the line “He wanted to kill Dickie” and before you know it, you’re right in the middle of the first of Highsmith’s punctilious descriptions of the cold and methodical extinguishing of a human life and the disposal of what’s left behind, a detail that the series has the runtime and the tone to dedicate whole half-episodes to. Perhaps more importantly, the decision to adopt Dickie’s identity and to impersonate him altogether, assuming his lifestyle and habits for his own, comes to Tom all at the same time as the desire to kill him. While the murder is motivated by a feeling of intense rejection and envy (and hilariously at Dickie’s “rudeness” to him)3, in the film, Ripley’s impersonation of Dickie comes about almost by accident when he comes ashore after the murder and is called “Signor Greenleaf” - a scared and for the most part likeable young man, scraping a living in New York, finds himself thrown by chance into contact with high society and when cast aside by a man he loved, takes rash action that throws him on a path he never planned. He covers his tracks as best he can and is forever tormented by what he has done. The impersonation is just a way to evade consequences, when for Book Ripley, it is a way of life.
We see this life in book and series, with a long preamble to Tom’s time in Italy featuring in both, showing him scrape a living as a petty con-artist, defrauding old dears with tax scams. This sordid introduction lets us know from the get-go whom we are dealing with. A conman, a slippery creature with a pit of envy where a personality might be found. This is portrayed expertly by a pinchingly slimy performance by Andrew Scott (remembered by Brits like myself as the Moriarty of their youth). In the film, Tom is wafted through the story by happenstance. He borrows a Princeton jacket and for that alone is noticed by Dickie’s father. The film is a tragedy and the book and series are something between a dark comedy and a dark picaresque.
SALTBURN - A Sordid Picaresque
My review of SALTBURN, a film deeply indebted to Highsmith’s novel.
What’s scariest about book Ripley is that, as we see with his antics in the later books, he doesn’t just lust after wealth and luxury - if anything, he acts in the way he does because he can. Almost like No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, Ripley is beholden to something close to a set of standards, obscene, illusory and self-justificatory as they may be. Were I to pinpoint the axis of his psychotic value sytem, I would say it would have to be taste. This trait of his, in ingeniously placing a very domestic and socially conscious concern into a character completely beyond the pale is what makes him so compelling. A friend of mine and I recently supposed - and I’m sure many of us have felt this way - that it might do a great deal of good to redistribute wealth according to taste. Enough experience of oil-rich Arabs or the streetwear-bedecked brats of the modern moneyed classes will awake an attitude like this, however momentarily, in the staunchest of anti-Marxists. Likewise, Tom Ripley endures the talentlessness of Dickie and Marge, put to screen in the form of abysmal paintings by the former and peurile writing on the part of the latter. Marge in book and series is a dull and almost frumpy character, a far cry from Paltrow’s elegant incarnation of the character, who also takes a shine to Tom, our gateway to the world of Mongibello, further endearing her to us in the film’s early stages. We sit with him in our dislike of Marge and of crassness, something Ripley looks down on even as he commits heinous acts. Somehow, even if we loathe Ripley, Highsmith’s genius is in making us root for him despite it all. This is something that both the series and the film acheive also, but in very different ways.
We feel sorry for Damon’s Ripley, we relate to Scott’s.
It’s a kind of envy unlike the raucous jealousy of the impoverished towards the wealthy - it’s not egalitarian in any way, not even covertly (which is almost always what lies under egalitarian politics anyhow). Ripley’s narcissism sees him as deserving what others have for the fact of his good manners and polite sense of propriety, as well as their fecklessness and disappointingly flawed humanity. When he chastises Marge at the party for speaking too liberally about Dickie with Venice’s gossiping socialites, we see the hilarious spectacle of a man’s murderer calling out discussion of the matter as being in bad taste. The ruling concern of the twisted mind of the picaresque upstart Tom Ripley is a sense of “proper and tasteful” conduct, lacked by the decadent and indulgent sorts that have what he wants and in his mind, deserves, echoing that old class conflict between the aristocracy and the middling sort who played for status through displays of virtue, instead of straighforward power.
Ironically, perhaps, it would be far more justifiable to view Jude Law’s colourful incarnation of Dickie Greenleaf as debauched and decadent to the point of forfeiting his right to what he has when compared to that of the book or the series. While Jude Law’s Dickie is twelve times the spoiled cad that Johnny Flynn’s Dickie is; a not overly interesting, good-natured and ultimately untalented son of a rich man, what’s striking is how much more likeable and compelling Jude Law’s Dickie is. At first I was tempted to see this as an error of the series, reinforced by its muted palette - Flynn’s Dickie is a bit flat and uninspiring, when Law’s Dickie captures us as completely as he does Damon’s Tom, completely taking over the film for the duration of his screentime. We are right there with them both, on the back of Dickie’s Vespa, as it were; living the limerent fantasy of that Summer on the boat in Mongibello and at the jazz bar in Naples, “drowning in honey, stingless.”4
The greyscale look of the series works at times better than others - it doesn’t allow for that overwhelmingly gushy period in the film and nor can Atrani, the renamed Mongibello conjure quite the same Belpaese allure as the film’s - seasons and their associated feelings, and temperature itself being so tied to colour. We instead get a Noir. A character study, rather than an emotional tryst. Series Dickie doesn’t have the backing of rose-tinted, celluloid cinematography, sat in the same chasm of Noir as the rest of it all. This is not to say that there is no Dolce Vita fantasy for Ripley to fixate on - conveyed in the pitch perfect leitmotif of Mina’s version of Il Cielo in una Stanza,5 and Dickie’s Montblanc pen, which Tom not only steals but uses to forge Dickie’s own name - only that Dickie is far more easily decoupled from this in the series than the film. Film Marge is also fond of Tom at first, which could not be further from the ire that she immediately shoots his way in the series and book. Both Marge and Dickie in the book are uninspiring characters that allow us to relate in a diabolical way to the perspectives of a psychopath.
If nothing else, I think these three incarnations of a story offer some interesting reflections on how the structural features of different media necessarily influence the content that is portrayed. I would argue that the departure from book to film almost necessitated the changes that were made, or better put, it was far easier to tell the story that Minghella told with film than it would have been to put across what RIPLEY did. It is a better fit.
As noted, in Minghella’s film, everyone is a bit more caricatured and one-note than in the book. The series is populated not by “black and white” characters, but by shades of inadequate, flawed and deeply human grey. The film is tinted with halcyon hues - its cast like a set of elegant one-note swatches, tailored into a well-told and evocative tragedy - every colour acts towards a feeling in a more contained and unified whole. Had Ripley been as cold and unfeeling in the film and had Marge and Dickie been as uninspiring, we would just be left with an emotionless dud. There isn’t the time in a film to sit with the conflicts and motives of the book, when there is in a series.
What the series cannot do, however, is tell us Ripley’s thoughts. The book takes place mostly in the tangled and twisted head of its murderous lead and an inner monologue would have cheapened the series, leaving it limp and unimaginative, rather than just faithful. So much of what I have discussed above is communicated directly in the book, and ingenious ways had to be devised to put it across in the series. At first I was put off by just how bad they made Dickie’s paintings, remembering them as mediocre in the book, or by just how hostile Marge is to Tom from the get-go. The series also gives us an insight into the travel book that Marge is writing and makes it fittingly dreadful. These seemed like a compromise of subtlety, but I realise that they were mandated by the change in medium. In order to win us round to Ripley’s view, the show’s creators had to vamp things up, in order to place us in his dark perspective, they had to cast the world itself in black-and-white.
The third novel in the Ripliad, Ripley’s Game was adapted into a film in 2002, starring John Malkovich as Tom Ripley, who was (excellently) cast as the criminal art dealer Reeves Minot in the last episode of the 2024 series.
A kind of love affair between two men that borders on but is also not straightforwardly romantic. Both adaptations and the novel play effectively with the grey areas in Ripley’s sexuality (or complete lack thereof).
Patricia Highsmith. The Talented Mr. Ripley, p87.
Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited. (Yes, I’ve quoted this before)
The series features some terrific Italian Classics, like Tony Remis’s Quando, Quando, Quando.