‘Ripley’ is Pretentious TV for “Smart” People

‘Ripley’ is an eight-hour black-and-white TV adaptation of a popular thriller novel that received a popular and glamorous award-winning Hollywood film nearly 30 years ago, featuring perhaps the greatest cast of Gen-X actors ever assembled. Writer and director Steven Zaillian, for some reason, thought he could outdo ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ which he cannot, and does not. Instead, he’s made one of the most self-consciously literary TV shows of all time. It’s TV for people who don’t like TV, TV for people who still subscribe to The New York Review of Books. This is not a popular TV show. The only people I’ve seen discussing it are people on my social-media feed who like books. Every post should begin with an italicized indeed. Ripley is smart TV for smart people. But it’s not much fun to watch.

That isn’t to dismiss its beautiful elegance. Every shot and black and white shadow is perfectly composed, considered, and absolutely gorgeous. Andrew Scott, who plays the amoral conman at the story’s center, fits well into a long line of cinematic Ripleys that includes Matt Damon, Dennis Hopper, and John Malkovich. I would argue for Hopper’s Ripley in Wim Wenders’s ‘The American Friend’ as the best Ripley, just because Hopper is so weird and unpredictable. But Scott gets right to the blank soul of the main character and never lets us forget that he’s watching everything go by dispassionately. He is the blankest of psychopaths.

So that’s all for the good, a beautiful black-and-white photographic composition with a strong performance at the center. But what made Anthony Minghella’s 1999 Ripley adaptation so great was the glamour of it all. Jude Law, as the louché gadabout Dickie Greenleaf, has never been sleeker or more gorgeous. He is the tannest anyone has ever been in a movie. The movie also features peak Gwyneth Paltrow as his partner Marge, Gwyneth at the absolute height of her Oscar-winning movie star powers. By contrast, ‘Ripley’ features Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning, two perfectly acceptable screen presences, but they are bland canvases, ciphers. We take no joy in their comeuppance or feel any sorry at their misfortunes.

The Talented Mr. Ripley also has in its back pocket, in supporting roles, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Cate Blanchett, the absolute two best actors of their generation, absolutely eating the screen and giving the second half of that movie a tremendous boost and magnetism. It’s the height of arrogance for Zallian and Scott to think they can come even close to topping what Hollywood put out.

Essentially, this is the same story. Patricia Highsmith wrote several Ripley novels, but this is ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ in eight-hour format. My favorite part of the show is actually the first half-hour, where Ripley bumbles around Manhattan, working a shoddy debt-collection scheme to pay the bills at his sleazy residential hotel. It’s character context, similar to what Wenders does at the beginning of The American Friend. Ripley is like an evil secret agent, just waiting for some circumstance to activate him. Once he does activate, though, we feel like we’ve seen it all before, in color. And the pacing is all off. It’s an eight-hour PBS mystery with a five-hour chiaroscuro denouement.

That said, once Ripley’s crimes begin to take shape in Europe, we meet the police inspector assigned to his case, played by the brilliant Italian actor Maurizio Lombardi. This character is intelligent, skeptical, wry, and simply great TV. I would watch The Inspector Ravini Mysteries all day, every day. Lombardi seems to understand that watching TV can be intellectually stimulating, but mostly, it should be entertaining. It’s a lesson that the rest of ‘Ripley’ often seems to not understand.