Netflix’s Ripley begins in 1960s New York, a city emptied of cars, crowds, and color. Sulky nighthawks dribble out of crumbling tenements and asocial whiskey bars, and a hundred failed scams trail behind Tom (Andrew Scott), as he drags himself down Mechanic’s Alley. Before long, however, the setting shifts to the village of Atrani, a faded beauty along the touristic Amalfi Coast with a vertiginous bearing. Su, su, su a postal attendant tells Tom after he inquires about the location of Palazzo Greenleaf, home of his unwitting mark Dickie (Johnny Flynn). We watch Tom clamber up staircase after staircase—in Atrani, in Naples, in Rome—and tire of all the Dutch angles that strive to convey the exceedingly simple message that this swindler is not on the level.
Apart from the gift of knowing how to spend someone else’s money (though how many immoderately priced glass ashtrays does one really need?), Scott’s depleted confidence man isn’t especially talented. He’s a crook who barely feigns being straight. The impossibility of straightness, of perfectly and universally adhering to its codes, is better thematized in previous filmic adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s noirish novel. Steven Zaillian’s version, of course, isn’t a film, merely a streamer with the budget of one. And Robert Elswit’s black-and-white cinematography, while praised by many critics for its lushness, tips, counterintuitively, into the lurid. Pat ideas pop on the small screen with undue vibrancy. Tom’s ambivalence is oceanic, so Elswit’s camera takes periodic dips into the Tyrrhenian Sea. The implacably straight lines of Rome’s EUR complex, whose mausoleumlike spaces stand in for the ticketing areas of train stations and the distended waiting rooms of banks, reflect, to Ripley himself, the rightness and coolness of his schemes. Up, up, up Tom goes into the upper crust of expat society. Upmarket is the extent of his desire—and the imaginative limitations of the series in general.