Netflix Made an Odd Choice With Its Fascinating New Thriller. It’s Actually Perfect.

This post contains spoilers for Ripley.

Part con man, part serial killer, Tom Ripley would be an American icon if he were anything at all. Patricia Highsmith’s social-climbing sociopath, introduced in her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, worms his way into the upper classes with a gift for impersonation, shedding his own identity so easily because he barely exists to begin with. As he adopts the lifestyle and takes on the mannerisms of the dissipated shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf, Tom begins to forget even the sound of his own voice, nearing what Highsmith calls “the real annihilation of his past and himself.”

But in Ripley, the new eight-part Netflix adaptation of Highsmith’s book, Tom (Andrew Scott) is not alone in his nothingness. The people whose company Tom wants so dearly to keep—Dickie (Johnny Flynn), his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), and the wealthy wastrel Freddie Miles (Eliot Sumner)—are hardly more concrete than he is. Their names, and the family money behind them, open doors, but they’re more like chalk outlines than actual human beings. When the murdering starts, it’s merely a formality.

The new adaptation—the third, after 1960’s Purple Noon and 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley—sticks the closest to Highsmith’s original text, but it makes one major change, aging up the central characters by some two decades. The book’s Dickie, in his mid-20s, is still sowing his wild oats, burning through the family fortune in Italy before—or so his father, who sends Tom to Italy to retrieve him, might hope—acquiring enough sense to go back to the U.S. and take over the family business. And Matt Damon’s Tom has a boyish charisma that makes him seem even younger. But Scott is 47, and Flynn, the series’ Dickie, is 41, and although the show makes only glancing references to their more advanced age, they’re clearly past the point of youthful dalliance, edging into the stage where who they will be is who they’ve been. Dickie seems sanguine about the prospect of being a trust-fund kid for life, surrounding himself with younger hangers-on so his failure to mature is less glaring. But Tom’s clock is ticking, loudly. Whatever dreams he might once have harbored (and the series never makes us privy to who he was before), they’ve long since expired. His only aspiration is survival.

In Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, which brings the novel’s gay subtext all the way to the surface, Tom is driven mainly by his attraction to Dickie, whom he beats to death with an oar after Dickie spurns his companionship. (For a playboy expatriate bent on adventure, there’s no more withering judgment than the one Dickie passes on Tom: He’s “boring.”) But where Damon’s Ripley kills for love, or the lack of it, Scott’s is just trying to scrape by. His sexuality hews closer to Highsmith’s original description, in which Ripley explains he “can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” He doesn’t even lust after Dickie’s material comforts, although he does get caught trying on some of his host’s clothes when he thinks Dickie is out for the day. He just wants to be released from the precarity that seems to be his permanent lot in life, to know what it’s like to exist in the world without the wolf always at his back.

Ripley’s Ripley is, in short, a grinder, not a striver. The series, written and directed by Steven Zaillian, is a version of the story for a time when even the objectively wealthy feel insecure because their fortunes pale beside the highly visible lifestyles of the ultrarich. (As Succession underlines, there’s a divide between those who merely fly first class and those who can afford their own jets.) Dickie’s villa on the Amalfi Coast may offer splendid views of the Mediterranean, but to contemporary eyes it’s positively rustic—he and Marge have an involved discussion over whether to finally get a refrigerator. As majestic as Robert Elswit’s cinematography is, the choice to film the entire series in black-and-white deliberately leaches away any hint of sensuality or visceral enjoyment. Minghella’s version, by contrast, practically overflows with pleasure, not least the joys of eyeing its superlatively attractive cast. (Even Philip Seymour Hoffman’s odious Freddie has a malignant charm—you can’t wait to see what repellent thing he’ll do next.) When Tom joins Dickie onstage at an Italian jazz club, the chemistry between them is infectious, flush with the giddiness of Tom discovering a whole new way of living. But the series’ Dickie is a painter, not an aspiring saxophonist, and it takes only a single shot of his canvases to establish that he’s positively dreadful at it. (I am not much of a guffawer, but: I guffawed.)

In fact, no one in Ripley is particularly good at anything. Dickie’s a terrible painter, Marge a would-be writer and photographer with no obvious talent for either, and although Freddie Miles calls himself a playwright, we’re not presented with evidence of him writing any actual plays, let alone having them staged. Tom’s not even much of a con man. His check fraud scheme falls apart the moment anyone takes a second look, and he gets away with murder, both figurative and literal, only because he’s killing people others are happy to be rid of. (In a sly running gag, the Italian police pronounce Freddie’s surname as if it’s malaise.) Even Tom’s talent for impersonation is downplayed. If it’s easy to pass as the late Dickie Greenleaf, it’s because so few people know or care who he is. He’s just another rich American wasting his way through Europe, hardly worth a second look as long as his traveler’s checks are good.

Stipulating that Dickie’s father, played in a delightful cameo by Kenneth Lonergan, probably knows how to run a successful shipbuilding business, the only person we see competently plying their trade is the Italian detective (Maurizio Lombardi) who sniffs out Ripley’s trail. Faced for once with a worthy adversary, Tom finally shows true flashes of cunning, but the sharp-witted inspector is betrayed by the indolence of his colleagues and the turgid pace of midcentury technology. It doesn’t take a malevolent supergenius to stay one step ahead of him, just a keen survival instinct and an understanding of the mechanisms of privilege that comes from a lifetime of being subjected to them.

From Harold Hill to Frank Abagnale Jr., the con artist is a key figure in American lore, the hyperbolic extension of the idea that you can be anything you set your mind to. We revel in the slickness of their patter and the ingenious complexity of their scams while feeling secure that we’d never be dumb enough to fall for one ourselves. But Tom isn’t the kind of swindler who makes us feel good about being taken for a ride. His actions are impulsive and crude as often as they are clever and calculated, imperfect crimes committed with the nearest blunt object and subject to laborious cleanup after the fact. (Tom spends most of Ripley’s fifth episode just trying to dispose of a body, and is nearly foiled by a temperamental Italian elevator.) It’s his single-minded determination that gives Tom the edge. He just wants it more.

Zaillian originally made Ripley for Showtime, and though it benefits from its premium-cable gloss, there’s something fitting about the series ending up on Netflix, slotted in the carousel next to Anna Delvey and the Fyre Festival. Once, grifters were isolated loners whose greatest weapon was their ability to remain unseen, but now they’re celebrities in their own right, admired for their ability to exploit a system we’ve accepted as irredeemably corrupt. Tom Ripley was just ahead of his time.