What 'Ripley' Understands About Infiltrating The Rich

In todays climate, where billionaires are swallowing media companies whole, it seems like every fictional TV or movie plot even marginally concerning wealthy characters must confront a number of familiar questions. Do the have-nots eat the rich? Does the story effectively make the audience want to condemn the wealthy or affluence in general?

And more broadly: What does it say about capitalism?

To be fair, filmmakers have baited responses like these lately with half-baked ideas about them in films like Glass Onion and the even more lacking Saltburn . 

Netflix s new series, Ripley, however, refuses to engage with any of this to its benefit. Based on Patricia Highsmiths popular novels following the escapades of grifter Tom Ripley, a character made cinematically famous in director Anthony Minghellas terrific 1999 film, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley finds its protagonist just as calculating, unassuming and murderous as ever.

When we meet him at the start of his eight-episode journey, its the 1960s and Tom (absorbingly portrayed by Andrew Scott) is living in New York and getting by well enough on anonymous petty crimes. Its clear hes a loner maybe by choice, due to his lifestyle, or maybe because he just likes it better that way. The audience never really knows for sure, and it doesnt matter. 

Each episode is sumptuous, shot with Robert Elswits crisp, black-and-white cinematography. Writer-director Steven Zaillian banks on the audiences willingness to accompany Tom on the basis of his undeniable intrigue and his slick narrative. 

He has the right assumption. Its virtually impossible to not be fascinated by Toms every move, even for those of us who have already seen his trajectory play out before and still love Matt Damons performance in the 1999 film. Ripley doesnt much expand on a story thats already familiar to some. Rather, it takes its time mounting the characters infiltration into the world of privilege. 

A wealthy mans offer too great to turn down comes along Toms path, sending the grifter out of The Big Apple to Italy to find the mans son (Johnny Flynn) who has retreated there for, perhaps, fun or good vibes or, really, just because he can. Thats part of the allure of being rich: traversing life on a whim. Its already beguiling to watch as a viewer, but downright irresistible for a man like Tom.

Because as a con man, Tom can be anywhere, or anyone, at his own will, and no one can really do a thing about that. Few who arent rich could say the same.  

Like Jacob Elordis Felix in Saltburn, Dickie is likable; he loves his girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), feels inspired by his paintings and is thrilled by his adoptive Italian life filled with great food, wine, beaches and friends like Freddie Miles (a phenomenal Eliot Sumner). 

One thing Ripley smartly seems to recognize about our endless fixation with wealth, on- and offscreen, is that its not affluent people or affluence per se that are inherently bad. The show doesnt actively try to vilify either of them. Instead, it gets to whats both rotten and enticing about having money: getting to act with impunity.

Rich people can and often do get away with everything, and thats just the identity Tom needs. Dickie welcomes Tom into his lavish world, in which Tom is quick to partake decadent dinners, gorgeous landscapes and a frothy lifestyle to boot. But the grifter is more invested in all this because here he can be anonymous and unaffected.  

We never witness Toms enthusiasm for these endless soirees or spending obscene amounts of money on things that dont matter. What we see is a man who will do anything to be everywhere and nowhere at once, even if he has to discard or even become other people along the way. Its sociopathic, cunning as all get out and entirely effective.  

It makes every encounter Tom shares with any character whether the jittery landlady, overly familiar hotel clerks, Marge, a dogged inspector or the snobby Freddie feel almost instantly perilous. Because potential intimate exchanges are the enemy of the exempt. They make the guilty more vulnerable. But they make for excellent suspense throughout the series. 

All of this makes it hard not to think about the role race plays in this story. Ripley never contends with it. That could be partly due to the fact that it has an almost completely white cast or because the story, or Zailian, has no interest in it. 

But its hard not to see this story through the context of a white American man with modest means who is jettisoned across the world because his race, in part, grants him an unbridled trustworthiness to find a man he doesnt know, who may or may not already be in trouble. (Dickies father seems unsure about that last point.)

The one non-white character who might be able to pierce through that layer of racial privilege is played by Bokeem Woodbine , a Black man who bookends the series and is just as mysterious as Tom. Their dynamic together provokes a number of interesting thoughts: like, what does being mysterious, or Woodbines characters relationships with the wealthy, or even wealth itself, grant him?

That would likely be something different than the impunity it ultimately gives Tom. Its an oversight that becomes a nagging flaw of Ripley. Or perhaps its folded into one of the great intrigues of a show that effortlessly rails against eating the rich and binary morality. The series actively sits in its own shaded reality, much like the wealthy themselves. 

Ripley drops on Netflix Thursday.