2024-04-08 15:35:30
A picture hangs in the pleasantly weathered villa of the would-be American shipyard heir Richard Greenleaf, which overlooks the pleasantly rainy Italian Amalfi Coast. It’s something of a common thread of Steven Zaillian’s Netflix series “Ripley.” If you shook it a little you could probably get it to actually show a human face.
It comes from Picasso – cubist phase. Richard Greenleaf, whom everyone calls Dickie, a dilettante of life and art, probably doesn’t know this at all, nor does he know what it feels like to live a life that is constantly reassembled from blocks scattered around as if by fate. Until what you think you could be and what you are are somewhat consistent.
Something like the shaking of Picasso is how you have to imagine the prehistory of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Patricia Highsmith’s most successful novel. For months, Highsmith had shifted the blocks of her plot, changed perspectives, replaced main characters, and spun new and new motifs. Until the words hit paper like nails. And a novel was created that turned all the laws of crime novels and morality, guilt and punishment on their head.
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And that one was about Dickie Greenleaf. And from Tom Ripley, an identity eater who appears out of nowhere and from social exclusion on the Amalfi Coast, is supposed to bring Dickie home on his father’s behalf into the bourgeois working society and gradually builds his and Dickie’s existence into his almost cubist existence, which is the same as that one pretty much the same as what it was probably intended for – elegant, amoral.
An artist’s existence like something out of a picture book. A Caravaggio of the crime novel. That Caravaggio – homosexual, ruthless, ahead of his time like Tom Ripley, a murderer who gets away – plays such a role in the developmental novel that is, above all, Highsmith’s 1955 thriller is no more a coincidence than anything else.
The meaning of the clothes, the mirror images, the homosexual foundation, the anti-bourgeois lack of consequences of Tom’s murderous actions, the allusions to Henry James, the disturbing pact that one makes with what is actually absolute evil when reading, by blaming Tom Ripley for his further criminal life even when he slams a heavy ashtray onto someone’s skull several times.
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René Clement made a film of the talented Mr. Ripley, that was in 1960, and Alain Delon was an angelic Tom who gets arrested at the end. Patricia Highsmith didn’t like it. And Anthony Minghella, that was in 1999 and Matt Damon was a strangely inconspicuous Ripley, haunted by fears, that was in 1999, and Patricia Highsmith, who was already dead in 1999, wouldn’t have thought it was great because Minghella, the Catholic, was also facing the final consequences – Tom gets away, not only so that he could do mischief in four more novels – he recoiled just as much as Clement did.
Everything in color. The Amalfi Coast Tourist Office still relies on it today. Mongibello – a town that Highsmith invented as a habitat for yearning Americans – looked like something out of a shoe commercial. And like on the covers of Diogenes, Patricia Highsmith’s home publisher.
And one is thankful that when the now 71-year-old designed his Ripley, he was writing Scorsese’s “The Irishman” and “Mission: Impossible” on the desk of Steven Zaillian, a screenwriting god who won an Oscar for “Schindler’s List.” “, a completely different edition was written. One with a black and white image on the cover. Zaillian couldn’t get that out of her head. This is what his “Ripley” had to look like. Not like a Ferragamo campaign.
What: NETFLIX
Like an anti-“Barbie” manifesto. Like an echo of Neorealismo and like the brother of Joel Coen’s “Macbeth” in his black and white prison of fear and guilt and atonement. How Zaillian, with the divinely gifted cameraman Robert Elswitt at his side (Oscar winner for “There Will Be Blood”), managed to convince Netflix that – despite Caravaggio and Picasso – there is no other way than black and white with this one “Ripley,” you might not want to know exactly (perhaps there is a producer lying around somewhere, as if accidentally killed).
Zaillian creates an optical web of metaphors that is as dense as Patricia Highsmith’s literary one. Tom, the climber, is constantly being sent up stairs. Southern Italy has never looked so morbid. Only the rain is a witness to what is happening. Zaillian quotes himself (a cat runs through the blood of a Ripley victim, leaving red marks like the girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List), quotes Hitchcock and the noir tradition of the fifties.
“Ripley” is razor-sharp and looks like a living graphic novel. You can’t get enough of the pictures, the stairs in this up-and-coming story, the sculptures that constantly point to nowhere, the fountains, the sea, the veils over the horizon. And the pace. And from the music. And the whole museum of things that Zaillian immerses you in.
However, everything would only be worth half as much without Andrew Scott. He was Moriarty, the amoral arch-villain in “Sherlock”, a nightmare for Benedict Cumberbatch because Scott played him into the shadows with the jack-in-the-box tricks he can do with his face. For Ripley, who is in his late twenties, his late forties are actually too old. But nothing short of a casting coup.
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Because Scott can allow evil to break through in an extremely calculated way and fear. And yet he has the incredible coolness and superiority that it takes to assert himself against the Camorra and the police. And because he is able to gradually put together his Ripley, who begins as a poor poet in New York, like Picasso on Dickie Greenleaf’s wall.
However, you feel a bit dizzy at the end. Zaillian is now 71. Four Ripleys still lie ahead of him. We wish him and his health all the best for the future of his life. Just don’t let anyone at Netflix think of unpacking the paint box again.
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