I approached writer-director Steven Zaillian’s miniseries “Ripley” with trepidation. Why this again? For a cultish series, Patricia Highsmith’s five Tom Ripley novels, released between 1955 and 1991, have a large hold on filmmakers. Particularly influential is “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which has spawned at least two adaptations and many rip-offs, most recently “Saltburn.” There’s a sense of déjà vu, then, even if the most prominent Ripley for Americans—Anthony Minghella’s “Talented Mr. Ripley” with Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman—is 25 years old.
And yet here comes “Ripley” on Netflix, with “Talented Mr. Ripley” once again serving as the dominant source text, and the result is one of the streaming events of the year.
Zaillian returns Tom Ripley to a state of pre-psychology. It has become fashionable to explain Ripley’s actions with the fact that he appears to be closeted, as Highsmith was, which would mean something very different in the 1950s than it does today. Minghella went to town on that subtext, nearly rendering Ripley sympathetic as a mixed-up boy who just wants to be hot and rich too, like the trust-fund babies he winds up fleecing and/or murdering on an idyll in Italy.
Highsmith was not known for cuddly pop psych. Her Ripley is a reptile. For her, at least initially, and for Zaillian, Ripley seems so obsessed with attaining status as to be post-sexual. Ripley is cold-blooded, intelligent, and capable of adapting to new habitats. He can assume your skin and be a better “you” within weeks. Playing Ripley for Zaillian, Andrew Scott doesn’t once try to endear the character to the audience. This is a remarkable performance. There’s little emotional inflection in Scott’s line readings, and this tactic draws us closer to Ripley. He’s so unlikable that he’s likable, or at least fascinating. The only emotion that bleeds through, at inopportune times, is bitterness. But this is Ripley getting his sea legs. He will gain more control across other stories.
We enter into a guilty kinship with Ripley for the same reason that we do to various degrees in all the riffs on Highsmith’s books: He’s more relatable than his prey. Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and Marge (Dakota Fanning), and especially Dickie’s friend, Freddie (Eliot Sumner), are rich and well-tailored with boats and villas and the whole nine. They are the kind of people who can afford to drift around Europe for months, luxuriating in their uselessness, while Ripley is first seen in a tight New York City apartment running petty scams. He lucks into the con of a lifetime and makes the most of it.
Mistaken for a friend of Dickie’s, Ripley gloms onto Dickie and his coterie. When the ride threatens to end, he takes drastic actions and embarks on an elaborate series of frauds that involve boat keepers, Italian law enforcement, art dealers, and gangsters. Ripley works for his money, unlike his victims, and this irony bonds him with us. Knowing that Highsmith’s narrative already works in such a way, Zaillian and Scott double down on Ripley’s inhumanity. He’s a cipher so ruthlessly competent that he becomes funny: a demonic Sherlock Holmes, both everyman and super-being.
Aesthetically, Zaillian has two big ideas with “Ripley:” the uninflected line deliveries, a rule which extends to varying degrees to most of the characters, and rich black-and-white cinematography that has already been justifiably applauded. Cinematographer Robert Elswit, who has shot “Mission: Impossible” and Paul Thomas Anderson films, fashions images here of a luscious hyper-clarity. He doesn’t make the mistake of many modern black-and-white productions: “Ripley” isn’t pastiche; it isn’t trying to look like an old movie. It is simply in modern black and white, with un-emphatic angles—there’s little movement, and deliberately repetitive shots that suggest the characters’ patterns of thought—that complement the neutral line readings.
The image clarity, like the uninflected line deliveries, gets our guard up. We’re looking for how something in the background may undo one of Ripley’s scams, or wonder if there’s something even eviler than Ripley in the terrifyingly vast ocean. A shot of moss floating in a Venice canal brings to mind that extravagantly elegant and eerie shot of a dead’s woman hair underwater in Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.”
Zaillian knows how to use televisual time as something other than a means of cramming in more narrative than he could in a movie. Set pieces in “Ripley” have an exhilarating dedication to detail. When Ripley murders someone late in the series, at least 30 minutes are devoted to the process of disposing of the body. There’s blood here, blood there, he stashes the body, ascends the stairway of his flat, remembers something, a cat looks on, descends, takes a cab, remembers something else, returns to the flat, a cat looks on again, ascends, descends, etc. The whole thing is an absurdist nightmare that Zaillian fashions into droll cinematic music. Zaillian’s montages have a pop that brings to mind Hitchcock, shaming the slack, inexpressive pacing of most modern thrillers.
The same principles come into play when Ripley is interrogated by various characters, most memorably Inspector Ravini (Maurizio Lombardi). There’s a sense of rhythm to dialogue that circles and chews itself; as intelligent characters engage in verbal warfare that lasts longer than typical televisual and cinematic pacing condition us to expect. You better be good if you’re going to play this game, and Zaillian, a veteran screenwriter with no films under his belt as director that anticipate this level of finesse, rises to the occasion. Zaillian weaponizes “slow cinema” principles to bring the modern thriller back to life. TV or not, this is one of the most cinematic works that I’ve seen so far this year.
In David and Nathan Zellner’s new film “Sasquatch Sunset,” Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Nathan Zellner plays sasquatches living in the wild of North America. They grunt, smell themselves, fornicate, defecate, and interact with other wildlife. The make-up and costuming are quite good, but a facsimile of realism isn’t a priority. These Big-feet are cartoony looking, suggesting that a few citizens of Gen X spent a lot of time wondering about Harry’s life before he took up with the Hendersons.
The Zellner brothers don’t cheat out on the premise by adding humans. We are on this grunting existential journey with these sasquatches—ride or die. Sentimental music alternates with intense scatological humor. Sometimes, the Zellner brothers seem to be aiming for “2001” or “A Quest for Fire.” Other times, we’re in the realm of “Dumber and Dumber” with animals. The tonal disparity invites you to wonder if you’re watching an empathetic poem to creatures that are endangered by our blithe indifference to our surroundings, or a hipster art-house put-on.
Two of the Big-feet screw doggy style, and there’s a cutaway to a couple of others watching them, dumbfounded, disturbed, left out. Other times, mood music plays while the creatures hike the majestic mountainside. The poignant scenes seem intended to make you feel guilty for laughing at the general absurdity of this project, and that guilt seems to be the movie’s reason for being. As if the Zellner brothers, punking us, are exclaiming: “See! Cinema can make you maudlin about anything!”
It’s been said that the Zellner brothers have been true to the idea of sasquatches as animals, and not, you know, just as us but hairier and hornier. That’s obviously not correct. They are highly human—would a wildlife creature be embarrassed by watching his peer get laid? Maybe? I guess I can’t claim to know—and much of the film’s effectiveness hinges on us seeing ourselves in the Big-feet’s travails, whether we’re sharing in the pleasure they derive from eating berries, or the pain they suffer when one of them dies. One death—the Zellner Bigfoot is eaten by a mountain lion—is played for absurdist humor and poignancy at once, which embodies the determination that “Sasquatch Sunset” has to eat its earnest cake and have its self-conscious weirdness too.
Mileage on this thing is going to vary greatly. If you’ve often felt that American cinema is sorely lacking in primates lactating and masturbating, well, then, have I got a movie for you this weekend, boy-0. If you, like me, somehow get the Joan Osborne song “One of Us” stuck in your head, and start trying to make the lyrics fit the movie — “What if sas-quatch was one of us? Just a bigfoot on a bus”— you will, of course, have no hope of taking “Sasquatch Sunset” seriously. Yes, I was that bored; I don’t think the flower-child sentimentality ultimately does this movie any favors. But I’m sympathetic to it. It’s true to itself, and people labored hard for it to exist. Why they did might be a question that you try, in your sympathy, to banish from your thoughts.
“Ripley” is now streaming on Netflix. “Sasquatch Sunset” is playing in theaters.
