e’s back. But he never went away. Patricia Highsmith’s diabolically inspired postwar creation Tom Ripley has returned, to luxuriate in our 21st-century age of Instagram lifestyle envy, tacit class paranoia and online identity fraud. He has triumphantly resurfaced in Steven Zaillian’s sumptuous and instantly addictive new eight-episode adaptation of Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley for Netflix, starring the incomparable Andrew Scott as the charmer, aesthete and serial killer.
It’s set in the early 60s, but has a queasy resonance for 2024. At an unhurried tempo, Scott’s Ripley is shown surmounting his early unease and likable callow vulnerability, attaining a hypnotic and insidious poise, his irises seeming to merge blackly with his pupils. He even to me seems to sway slightly, like a cobra in the presence of a hamster.
This kid starts out as Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder but he winds up as Highsmith’s Ripley. This was the allusionso many of the film’s detractors: the neglected and overlooked class element of Ripley-ism. Ripley speaks to the ruling class distaste for counter-jumpers and presumptuous parvenus. But his existence infuriates those who resent the ironic implication that pleading on behalf of the poor is just the politics of envy.