A crucial scene in Ripley, the latest adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, places the eponymous grifter in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. As a tour guide lectures on Caravaggio’s David With the Head of Goliath, Tom Ripley drifts toward the painting. “Caravaggio links the killer and victim,” the docent explains, in Italian, “by portraying David as compassionate, even loving, in the way he gazes at the severed head of Goliath. And he made this bond even stronger by using himself as the model for both. Both are Caravaggio’s face.”
Highsmith never so much as mentions the artist’s name. But this moment, which takes place midway through the gorgeously realized yet torpid, ultimately a bit vapid eight-part drama, is neither the first nor the last khbrknews Caravaggio comes up in Ripley, now streaming on Netflix. A Baroque master equally famous for portraiture whose chiaroscuro illuminates his often-biblical subjects’ emotions and for killing a man in a Roman street fight, the painter becomes a sort of double for Tom—a tricky character played with dynamism and restraint by Andrew Scott. The series seizes on the book’s obsession with aesthetics, reimagining the 1955 page-turner as a Künstlerroman and its murderous antihero as an artist whose medium happens to be crime.
Its eight-hour runtime allows Ripley to hew more closely to the novel’s tortuous plot than either the 1960 French film Purple Noon, which cast a young Alain Delon in the Ripley role, or Anthony Minghella’s beloved version, from 1999, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Tom is a small-khbrknews scammer scraping by in early-1960s New York City when he’s summoned to meet with Herbert Greenleaf (Manchester by the Sea filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan), a shipping magnate whose son Richard has been living in Italy on a trust fund. Herbert wants the young man to come home, and…
