You'll have to excuse me. One of the constants in recent reviews of Netflix series is that, even when they are theoretically ambitious and have a large budget, they refuse to leave their mark. It's a combination of a lack of artistic ambition and often mediocre direction.
You just have to look at the bombshell Avatar: The Last Airbender, with great visual effects but a frustrating inability to generate epic or memorable shots; or The problem of the 3 bodies, at times ridiculous in the technical section, which turns an extraterrestrial threat and a plot driven by science into a series of conventional cadence, forgotten when turning off the television.
Where is the interest of those responsible (the scriptwriters, the directors, those responsible for photography) to construct scenes with weight in themselves, to marry substance and form, to understand audiovisual art as an art that requires reflection on each plane more beyond allowing the plot to advance on a functional level?
In this context, in which even a director in decline like Tim Burton conceived a Wednesday that seemed like a bad copy of his own cinema, something like Ripley arrives in the platform's catalog and one feels that one is faced with a rarity, before a a work to take a look at and that, beyond the final result, provides stimuli to the viewer.
Steven Zaillian, who won the Oscar for the screenplay of Schindler's List, who has written the texts for films such as Gangs of New York and The Irishman and who created and directed the series The Night of, is responsible for this new adaptation of the novel The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith that Anthony Minghella already made into a film with Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. With this precedent, the decision to bring Tom Ripley's story to television was bold.
But, with the choice to tell it in black and white and a more psychopathic vision of the main character, he soon emancipates himself from (almost all) possible comparisons. It shows how, in the 60s, Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott), a small-time scammer with a lonely life, agrees to travel to Italy to convince a rich guy (Johnny Flynn), who has a relaxed and wasteful Mediterranean life with a writer ( Dakota Fanning), so that he can settle down and return to his family in New York.
After watching only two episodes (yes, still few) it is difficult to form a global opinion of the series. Zaillian draws attention by containing the implicit histrionics of Andrew Scott's interpretations to disturb with his x-ray of a sociopath who, no matter how much he tries to hide, always conveys to others that there is something wrong with him. In social interactions it is interesting to see him react a second later than a normal person.
However, the roles of Dickie and Marge, expats of the period, are approached from an interpretative languor that, added to the slowness and beauty of the proposal, runs the risk of entering into the artificial, almost of being faced with a performance with two mannequins. directed to the millimeter by an obsessive director with an almost editorial outlook.
But Zaillian's pursuit of constant beauty is appreciated, even entering into the pretentious. The search and exploitation of corners, sometimes with dramatic intentions, other times comical, sometimes simply for their aesthetic appeal. The presentation of the extras. Ripley's placement to convey the turbidity it emanates. The frames that turn the elegant symmetry into symbolically calculated. And, well, a monument should be dedicated to Ripley because of the texture of the black and white.
Should all television fiction be Ripley? Of course not. But it is appreciated to enter Netflix and see a production that emanates reflection, exploration and beauty of the image, beyond the mantra of bulimic entertainment. Although this could have an explanation. It was a project for the American channel Showtime, the one that produces Dexter or Yellowjackets, and due to restructuring in the company they sold the miniseries to Netflix when it was already in post-production.
