In ‘Ripley’ on Netflix, the Con Man Gets the Art House Treatment

Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” sets its dark action in a succession of colorful Italian locales: the Amalfi coast, San Remo, Rome, Palermo, Venice. Movies based on the book, like René Clément’s “Plein Soleil” (released in the United States as “Purple Noon”) and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” have taken the opportunity Highsmith gave them to capitalize on sun and scenery. The audience gets its brutal murders and brazen deceit wrapped in bright visual pleasure.

For “Ripley,” an eight-episode adaptation of the book that premieres on Netflix on Thursday, Steven Zaillian has decided to do without the color. Shot — beautifully — in sharply etched black and white by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”), “Ripley” offers a different sort of pleasure: the chilly embrace of the art house.

Reflecting what the more high-minded filmmakers of the show’s time period (it is set in 1961) were up to, Zaillian, who wrote and directed all the episodes, takes an approach that harmonizes with Elswit’s austerity. The entire season moves along sleekly — you could say somnolently — at the same measured pace, with the same arch tone and on the same note of muted, stylish apprehension. Highsmith’s pulpy concoction, with its hair-trigger killings and sudden reversals, is run through a strainer and comes out smooth. It feels like what you might get if the early-’60s Antonioni or Resnais had directed a season of “The White Lotus.”

And Zaillian appears to have asked his actors to practice a similar restraint. Their overall affect isn’t flat, exactly, but it’s within a narrow range, with physicality tightly reined in and the eyes asked to do a lot of work. When you have the eyes of Andrew Scott, the gifted Irish actor (“Sherlock,” “Fleabag”) who plays Tom Ripley, that’s not a big problem.

Zaillian has been faithful, in broad outline, to Highsmith’s story. Ripley, a slacker and a con man grinding out a living in postwar New York, is sent to Italy to try to persuade a trust-funded idler to come home and take over the family business. He has only a passing acquaintance with his target, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), but in the first of a long series of misunderstandings and lucky strokes that go Ripley’s way, Greenleaf’s father thinks they are good friends.

Highsmith’s novel is a training manual for the sociopath: Once Ripley sees the indolent lives led by Greenleaf and his sort-of girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), in a picturesque fishing village on the Amalfi coast, he ups his game from tedious grifting to full-contact identity theft. Wedging himself between Dickie and Marge, he becomes obsessed — an obsession in which the lines between befriending Dickie, sponging off Dickie and becoming Dickie are progressively erased.