Netflix's Ripley, with Andrew Scott, is a shadow of the beloved movie

Just because a movie is iconic and beloved doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be remade, particularly if it was itself based on another work in the first place. That’s as true of the 1999 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley as it would be of anything else. Anthony Minghella took sweeping liberties in his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 crime novel — itself a genre-defining classic — about a young conman who first infiltrates and then cannibalizes the life of a rich American playboy whiling away a carefree existence on the Italian coast. There’s room for another take to access different parts of Highsmith’s book than Minghella did, especially in the more expansive medium of an eight-part miniseries.

But something has gone wrong with Ripley, an austere, black-and-white retelling of the story starring Andrew Scott and written and directed by the celebrated screenwriter Steven Zaillian, which is now streaming on Netflix. Zaillian (who wrote Schindler’s List, among many other great movies, and wrote and directed the gripping HBO miniseries The Night Of) is clearly trying to be more faithful to Highsmith’s sour, misanthropic, internalized tone than Minghella’s more busy and melodramatic movie. But strange casting decisions, overly fastidious direction, and inert performances sink any chance it might have of muscling its way past the movie in anyone’s imagination. It’s a beautiful dud.

In the story, Tom Ripley is a clever grifter living a grimy existence in New York when he’s recruited by wealthy shipmaker Herbert Greenleaf to travel to Italy. Greenleaf wants Ripley to persuade his son, Dickie, to stop wasting money and time “studying painting” and return home to the family business. Dickie is only a vague acquaintance of Ripley’s, but Ripley hungrily grasps the opportunity to live another life. Once in Italy, he becomes obsessed with Dickie, a dissolute golden boy, and sticks to him and his privileged existence like a limpet. When Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, becomes suspicious and Ripley senses his new life being threatened, things take a dark turn.

Casting Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley is a brilliant idea on paper. Ripley is one of literature’s great sociopaths: an outwardly charming, morally empty shape-shifter with a talent for mimicry and an insatiable hunger for other people’s experiences. In roles like Fleabag’s hot priest, Sherlock’s Moriarty, and the lonely writer of All of Us Strangers, Scott has a way of being warm and distant at the same time, his impish charisma and sensuality visible, but held at bay by some inner safety lock. That works for Ripley, whose opportunism and manipulation is all aimed at faking an inner life he knows he doesn’t really have.

Highsmith wrote five Ripley novels spanning over 30 years of her famous antihero’s life. Scott, who’s 47, might have been perfect in an adaptation of Ripley’s Game or Ripley Under Ground, when the character is in his late 30s and his conniving, murderous ways have hardened. But Zaillian’s casting of him in a version of the first book is totally baffling. In The Talented Mr. Ripley the character is around 25, and the aimless formlessness of that age is central to his motivation, to the crucial missteps he makes, and to the naive acceptance of him by Dickie and Marge. Scott is far too weathered and sophisticated to be credible as a young striver, and Ripley’s emptiness comes off as too transparently creepy.

It’s unthinkable that anyone would be taken in by him — least of all the wary, studiedly bored version of Dickie played by Johnny Flynn, or Dakota Fanning’s coolly intellectual Marge. These versions of these three characters have no natural rapport at all, which isn’t helped by the flat affect employed by the actors or Zaillian’s painfully slow, methodical direction. This airless, alienating three-hander plays out across the early episodes of the series. Ripley was filmed on location in Italy by the great cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), but absent any visual storytelling imagination on Zaillian’s part, Elswit’s exquisitely framed, picture-postcard monochrome images feel cold and calculated. The scenes are largely empty of people, too, giving the whole thing a chilly, ghostlike, offseason feel.

It’s a very far cry from the urgent sense of life in Minghella’s movie. As well as its colorful, bustling Mediterranean scenes, that film was powered by the megawatt charisma of Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow as Dickie and Marge, and by the way the part of Ripley pulled Matt Damon into a thrilling exploration of his full range as an actor (arguably fuller than most of his parts since). Damon’s Ripley is at once empathetic, bumbling, edgy, and chillingly remote, and he plays the pasty outsider for laughs just as effectively as he shows the aching void at the heart of the character. The world of the movie is glamorous, alluring, and lively, lit in rich afternoon hues and scored by cool jazz; something for Ripley to be drawn to, rather than an emptiness that reflects him.

Minghella stirs all this into a rich psychodrama, adding his own plotlines and characters (like Cate Blanchett’s Meredith) to give Ripley more to bounce off, and leaning hard on a homoerotic interpretation of the Ripley/Dickie dynamic. That’s controversial with some Highsmith fans who don’t find it in the book, though it’s fair to say that a subconscious, dark sexuality is never far from the surface of her work. For his part, Zaillian downplays this queer subtext but doesn’t ignore it completely.

While Minghella’s movie loses some steam once Dickie is out of the picture and Ripley moves to Rome and assumes his identity, Ripley actually improves a bit at this point. Zaillian’s stylistic approach works better for the detailed, grimly comic procedural that follows as Ripley tries to cover his tracks, plays games with the police, and confronts Dickie’s friend Freddie. A couple of episodes are almost entirely given over to near-silent murder set-pieces that show a suspenseful black humor that is strangely absent when the characters are talking. That said, Freddie, odiously portrayed by an unforgettable Philip Seymour Hoffman in the movie, was always going to be a tough role to fill; the kindest thing you can say about the casting of Eliot Sumner (a musician and actor, and child of Sting) in the part is that it’s a wild swing and a miss by all concerned.

Ripley ultimately can’t escape a feeling of deadened, drawn-out emptiness. Maybe that’s supposed to be reflective of Tom Ripley himself, but purity of intention doesn’t make an eight-hour character study of a man with no character a good idea or a fun watch. And while Highsmith purists might feel Ripley corrects what they see as the movie’s oversteps, there’s no doubting that Damon dug far deeper into the subtleties and contradictions of her creation than a misused Scott manages to here. There have been many other Ripleys — including Alain Delon, Barry Pepper, Dennis Hopper, and John Malkovich, who has a brief cameo here — and there will probably be many more. For a riveting couple of hours, Minghella and Damon managed to pin this elusive character down. But he gets the better of Zaillian and Scott, and escapes into the shadows once more.

Ripley is now streaming on Netflix.