By the fifth and final novel in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripliad, Ripley Under Water (1991), serial-killing conman Tom Ripley is seeing out the 1980s practising his harpsichord and tending the garden of his French country pile. Plagued by the memories of his many misdeeds, he finds his anxiety triggered by his annoying new neighbours’ intrusion into his private affairs, three decades of murder and fraud too much even for this most amoral of minds. With the paranoia that dogged him at the conclusion of his first bloody adventure, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) – in which he bludgeoned trust-funded heir Dickie Greenleaf with an oar – now his reality, Tom does whatever it takes to survive.
Ripley – a new Netflix drama written and directed by Steven Zaillian, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Schindler’s List (1993), Gangs of New York (2002) and The Irishman (2019), and starring Andrew Scott of Fleabag (2016-19), Sherlock (2010-17) and, most recently, All of Us Strangers fame – dedicates its entire eight-episode first series to an embellished version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s an interesting take on the first novel, not least for Zaillian’s decision to shoot the whole thing in pin-sharp black and white, forgoing the dreamy azzurro of the Italian coast that did so much to set the mood of Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation. Highsmith’s initial incarnation of Tom is an 18-year-old, with both Alain Delon in René Clément’s version (Purple Noon, 1960) and Matt Damon in Minghella’s then in their midtwenties and passing for younger. Andrew Scott is a handsome man in his late forties who looks like a handsome man in his early forties, which suggests that he’s been cast with an eye on the entire Ripliad, hopeful that over subsequent series Tom’s many midlife crises can be believably portrayed by Scott.
Whether the temptation to fill the six-year gap between the beginning of Tom’s new life in Venice, where we leave him at the end of Talented, and the newer life we find him living with his French wife, Heloise, at the beginning of the second novel, Ripley Under Ground (1970), is too much to resist remains to be seen.
As a standalone piece of TV, Ripley is entertaining, though don’t be surprised if some fans of Highsmith and other screen adaptations of her work compare it unfavourably. John Malkovich, who played Ripley in Liliana Cavani’s 2002 working of the third novel, Ripley’s Game (1974), makes an enjoyable cameo worth hanging in for, but with seven and a quarter hours of running time to fill, we’re given too much padding and overexposure, telling us more about Tom’s backstory than necessary for a gripping screen thriller. For the opposite approach,
see my favourite Ripley adaptation, Wim Wenders’ starkly brilliant The American Friend, a 1977 adaptation of Ripley’s Game starring Dennis Hopper as Tom. Wenders dispenses with any real background on Ripley, landing him in Hamburg as a flared denim and cowboy hat-wearing alien, his pettiness, greed, boredom and misanthropy enough to set in motion the events of the film.
Wenders is so committed to his minimalist interpretation of the Ripley legend that he removes him almost entirely from the main plot until the final, bloody act, relying on Hopper to do his best Hopper in his intermittent moments on screen.
Hopper embodies the character with a tortured malevolence undercut with charming vulnerability while the story follows Zimmermann (Trevanny in Highsmith’s original) in his descent from humble picture-framer to cold-blooded contract killer against a neo-noir backdrop of 70s paranoia. Highsmith initially disliked the film – and Hopper in particular – but as Wenders recalled, after she had seen it a second time she “had much
better feelings about it. And she was full of praise for Dennis Hopper, too.” Wenders and Hopper had, she thought, “captured the essence of that Ripley character better than any other films”.
I think she was right. While readers of the Ripliad and admirers of Delon’s and Damon’s incarnations may forever imagine Tom as a boyish, insouciant
sociopath whose actions revolt us but who we can’t help but empathise with, little trace of that young man remains in the middle-aged Ripley, hardened as he is by his crimes and tortured by the demons
they unleashed. Who better to embody this highfunctioning breakdown than Hopper?
Whether Scott gets the opportunity to kill his way around Europe then semi-retire to tend his dahlias with this version of Ripley will depend on the reaction to the series and presumably its success in
reaching out to viewers unfamiliar with the source material or previous adaptations. Which perhaps makes sense of my least favourite promo tweet of 2024 so far (trigger warning): “Andrew Scott gets his Saltburn on in new Ripley trailer.” Perhaps rather than being snooty about badly articulated contemporary references I should see this linking of a huge mainstream hit to a new adaptation of an obvious inspiration as a good thing if it leads more people to discover Highsmith and Ripley, and perhaps even act as a gateway drug into the wider world of Highsmith adaptations that includes Wenders, Minghella and Clément’s takes on Tom as well as Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1950), Michel Deville’s Eaux profondes (1981) and Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015), to name a few. As Tom Ripley puts it himself, “I’m going to enjoy what I’ve got as long as it lasts.

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