Ripley

 Evidently, the life of a charming and murderous sociopath is arduous.  Tom Ripley, the protagonist of the Netflix limited series that bears his surname, spends much of his time traveling by train and ferry across Italy, hiking up and down mountainous stairs at Atrani, Naples, San Remo, and Palermo, and laboriously disposing of corpses on the rock-girt Amalfi coast and, later, the Via Appia in Rome.  Often, we see him mopping up blood, a task that invariably leaves telltale stains; he has to master forgery, write various letters that he ascribes to others, learn painting, book-editing, and idiomatic Italian.  (Patricia Highsmith's source novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, describes the situation exactly in its title -- Tom Ripley is, indeed, talented, a polymath who is a lightning swift study, and a master of fraud and deception.)  The material is a little thin and previous move versions of Highsmith's book (Rene Clements' 1960 Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella"s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley) clock in at about two hours.  But the longer limited series format of Netflix's Ripley allows the director Steve Zaillan to emphasize the hard, repetitive work of being an amoral and murderous criminal -- hence, all of the symmetrical shots of trains and ferries, the coming and going, the protracted encounters with suspicious police officers and private eyes, all of the laborious machinery of hoax and fraud.  The two previous film versions of the story are shot in gorgeous technicolor to exploit the spectacular Italian locations in which the action takes place.  Zaillan' adaptation is filmed in equally spectacular black-and-white and the film is glorious to behold,  Zaillan's photography is exquisitely conceived, frequently dividing the image into two lateral frames -- a fountain or structure occupies half the foreground composition with a remote figure moving or standing alone on the opposite side of the image.  The photography derives from Hitchcock (and Fellini) and features austere vertical shots, majestic dollying movements across piazzos and through stairwells, and dozens (probably hundreds) of "empty frames" -- that is, still compositions generally focusing on baroque objets d' art, flamboyantly expressive terra-cotta statuary, and all sorts of curious knickknacks.  In one scene, Zaillan orchestrates an encounter between a desk clerk and Ripley (and, then, a detective) around a little figurine of a saint lugging a cross (undoubtedly St.Peter of the crossed-keys, the patron of innkeepers); the encounters revolve inserted close-ups of people moving the little statuette from one place to another on a cluttered desk.  The positioning of the figure on the chessboard of the counter seems as important to the narration as the dialogue and plot-points motivating the scene.  Various gargoyles, putti, stone saints and angels and martyrs, all afford a running, if obtuse, commentary on the action, Tom's various crimes that are about as secular as possible -- Italy, it seems, affords a continuous contrast between Ripley's sordid adventures and the landscape of sacred beings and enormous empty palazzos with cloistral arcades and ecclesiastical arches, the places in which these events occur.  The show lags a little in its mid-section and doesn't really have a satisfactory conclusion -- in fact, the ending of the show is, more or less, a launching pad for the next installment of the tale; Highsmith wrote a number of Ripley novels and Zaillan's version introduces John Malkovich into the final episode as a corrupt art dealer, presumably as a teaser for the next series.  Nonetheless, the program is delightful and shows that the fearsome objectivity of the Hitchcock thriller is alive and well.  Highsmith worked with Hitchcock -- the director adapted one of her novels into the 1951 Strangers on a Train  -- and Zaillan stages many of Ripley's bravura sequences after the manner of Hitchcock, deploying exotic settings as the sinister, strangely indifferent backdrops for homicidal action; Zaillan's use of point-of-view shots, eccentric minor characters, and close-ups inserted into scenes to disrupt the flow of events and serve as a sort of cubist commentary on events depicted also closely tracks Hitchcock's stylistic practices.  Ripley is suspenseful in a nihilistic way -- the audience is invested in Tom Ripley's perspective on things and we find ourselves rooting for the peculiarly opaque and affect-less hero.  Ripley just doesn't care about anything but his own survival -- his bland, cheerful demeanor is the opposite of any sort of charisma; nothing is really premeditated; he's a master of homicidal improvisation. (Andrew Scott is excellent in title role.)

We meet Tom Ripley as a penny-ante crook running cons out of a squalid apartment in New York City.  Ripley's sexuality is ambiguous throughout the show.  He seems to be gay, but in a muted asexual way.  A private eye accosts him in a bar and introduces him to a plutocrat, a businessman who runs a ship-building enterprise.  The plutocrat's son, Dicky Greenleaf, is abroad, living in Italy where he aspires to be an artist (although he has no discernible talent).  The shipbuilder believes that his son knows Dicky (and, perhaps, suspects a sexual relationship between the two young men.)  In fact, its unclear that Ripley has had anything to do with Dicky in Manhattan.  In any event, Greenleaf pere dispatches Tom to the Amalfi Coast on a mission to retrieve the errant scion and return him to New York.  Ripley finds Dickie ensconced in palatial digs at Atrani, a lavishly beautiful Italian hill town on the cliffs overlooking the Adriatic Sea.  Dickie has a girl friend, Marge, played by Dakota Fanning, that he mostly ignores -- she's writing a travel book about Atrani.  Ripley admires Dickie's trust fund life-style and, ultimately, murders the young man, bludgeoning him to death with the oar of a rented row-boat and, then, sinking the corpse in the sea tethered to the boat's anchor.  (This murder sequence is extravagantly staged:  Ripley has to hammer Dickie's skull into a bloody mess with repeated blows and, then, gets tangled up in the anchor that he uses to sink the cadaver; he falls out of the boat which spins in circles with its outboard motor rotating around the place where the corpse is sinking to the bottom -- the anchor towed by the out-of-control boat brains Ripley, (temporarily) sending him to the bottom, and he comes within an inch or so of being disemboweled by the spinning rotor of the outboard motor.)  Ripley, then, assumes Dicky's identity, drains his accounts of funds, and decamps to Rome.  In the Eternal City, a louche buddy of Dicky's, the decadent Freddie Miles (he's a playwright) discovers that Ripley is playing the part of his friend.  Ripley has to kill this guy too and most of an hour episode documents his efforts to conceal the gory dead body and, then, desert the corpse in Freddie's Fiat on the Appian Way.  This murder inspires the interest of the police and an investigator (Inspector Rivini) doggedly hounds Ripley, suspecting that he has something to do with the English playwright's death.  More complications ensue and the actions shifts between Palermo, San Remo, and, at last, Venice.  

Zaillan, who senses that there's not enough of a story here for eight hours, introduces a peculiar subplot into the narrative.  Dicky was an admirer of Caravaggio and took Ripley to see one of his paintings.  (A priest appears when Ripley is standing before a Caravaggio canvas on an altar and says gnomically "It's the light" -- this is a mantra that reoccurs in the movie, a gesture toward the extravagantly beautiful chiaroscuro that Zaillan employs in the show's camerawork.)   There is some suggestion that Tom Ripley is a reincarnation of Caravaggio -- the artist was gay, murdered a man, and spent the last years of his life on the run from those seeking to avenge the crime.  Zaillan is not content to merely imply connections between Caravaggio and Ripley, but, in fact, dramatizes this metaphor in a series of tableau-like scenes depicting events from the life of Caravaggio -- I'm ambivalent as to whether this foray into what seems to me to be supernatural terrain is warranted or effective; but it is certainly interesting.  Zaillan seems to suggested that the "talented" Mr. Ripley is, indeed, an artist of some kind (we see him effortlessly mastering all sorts of skills) and that he is akin to Caravaggio in some occult way.  A theme of the show is that Ripley is better at various endeavors than those who claim those activities as their vocations -- he's a better, more charismatic playboy than Dickie and a better artist as well; he turns out to be a better author than Marge; and he outwits the Italian authorities with stylish aplomb.  (A running joke is the Italian inspector who insists on speaking English which he thinks that he is mastered --but his discourse is well-nigh impenetrable with strange locutions and, even, stranger pronunciation of English words; by contrast, most of the film is shot in Italian since Ripley seems to have mastered conversation in that tongue.)

The show features many spectacular locations, possesses a wry black humor, and has a rich rogue's gallery of supporting characters.  (Eliot Sumner is indelibly weird and sinister as a depraved hermaphroditic British playwright -- the actor who uses the pronoun "they" is the musician Sting's...what? son  or daughter?  I can't tell.)  Ripley is slow but full of interesting details.  It documents an era when artists about to become famous and well-known lounged around Italy -- one imagines Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg wandering around Italy and North Africa in the early fifties and there's a La Dolce Vita vibe to the imagery -- Fellini's lustrous black and white cinematography is particularly evident in many of the shots that Zaillan stages.  I enjoyed this series and recommend it.