Emmy spotlight: ‘Ripley’ looks to be a major limited series player this year thanks to its impeccable visual craft
“The light. Always, the light.” Tom Ripley is staring at a Caravaggio painting in a Roman church, his typical blank expression a touch more bewildered than usual, when a priest comes up behind him and tells him to pay attention to the light, how the artist uses the contrast of brightness and deep shadow to direct the eye. The moment is brief; Tom isn’t one for introspection, and like a shark, he never stays in place for long. But the line doubles as a clue to the audience as well, some of whom have been as bemused as Tom by “Ripley’s” quietly dazzling style.
In Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” for Netflix, shot entirely in precise, pitiless black-and-white, light is Zaillian’s most crucial storytelling tool in “Ripley.” The script is carefully paced, often wordless, but every shot shines a light on a new, revealing detail – a sharp glass ashtray, a misaligned letter on a typewritten page, a distant figure on the beach – and the accumulation of detail is ultimately what makes the story stick.
For Netflix, “Ripley” is already emerging as a serious awards player. In the Emmys’ Outstanding Limited Series category, long dominated by HBO and FX, Netflix has won two of the last three years with “The Queen’s Gambit” and “Beef.” “Ripley” currently ranks sixth in the Gold Derby combined Emmy odds for limited series, which promises to be a dogfight this year, at 16/1. It’s going to be tough to trump the likes of “Shogun” and “True Detective: Night Country” this year, not to mention “Fargo” and “Lessons in Chemistry,” But “Ripley’s impeccable craft makes it a dark, shadowy horse for the streamer.
“Ripley” is the rare modern series to fully commit to a monochrome palette. Shows like “WandaVision” and “Better Call Saul” have dipped into black-and-white to startling effect, but “Ripley” doesn’t let up. Compared to Anthony Minghella’s lauded 1999 adaptation of the same novel, which luxuriated in the golden Mediterranean glow of its Italian setting, Zaillian’s “Ripley” feels not only colorless but drained of warmth. It refuses to be comfort TV, and some Netflix subscribers have reacted harshly; an Independent piece highlighted reactions from viewers who found the choice “annoying” or said it made them “mad as hell.”
The stark cinematography is an apt choice for Zailliain’s melancholic take on the material, though. Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott, convincing as an unconvincing human) is a petty con artist from New York who stumbles into an opportunity for a big score when a wealthy businessman asks him to track down his wayward son idling away on the Amalfi Coast. In Italy, Ripley clumsily befriends the son, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), moving into their enormous villa. Dickie was played by Jude Law in the 1999 film in a star-making, Oscar-nominated turn; Flynn’s Dickie isn’t a font of charisma like Law, but he’s more human, his generosity and friendship more unaffected, which makes it that much more heartbreaking when the story takes an inevitable dark turn.
Black-and-white lensing is often used to evoke nostalgia, but there’s no faux film grain or retro winking in the look Zaillian (who directed every episode) and DP Robert Elswit (a 2008 Oscar winner for “There Will Be Blood”) have devised. Paradoxically, the combination of the old-world location and the crisply detailed, high-contrast digital camerawork makes this “Ripley” more modern, a story out of time that could take place in 1954 or 2024. Notably, in an era where prestige TV is often dinged for being too dark, Elswit’s images are always legible; the look may be shadowy, but what we’re looking at and the narrative purpose of each shot is crystal clear.
“Ripley’s” visual storytelling can be witty (a long ocean-set sequence that verges on macabre slapstick) or surreal (trees that glow eerily in the dark, sudden cutaways to scenes set years or centuries earlier), but it’s never less than gorgeous. Vertiginous stairwell shots are straight out of Hitchcock, and they’re not the only thing that evokes the master of suspense. Without the distraction of color, every carelessly placed envelope or forgotten bathroom stain draws focus as the detail that could undo our protagonist. In the most frightening moments, blood splatters across the frame like paint, or spewed black bile. Wine and blood both appear inky black, making a merlot-sipping Ripley look vampiric. By the final episode, Ripley himself has become obsessed with his own lighting, playing with the way a lamp changes his face to aid his subterfuge.
The tantalizingly slow burn of “Ripley” would likely be a turnoff to some viewers no matter how it was filmed, but the black-and-white cinematography emerges as the biggest selling point of the series, proof that this style can be thrillingly contempo in the right hands. Will Emmy voters take notice? It may well prove unavoidable. Zaillian’s series “The Night Of” took home the statue for Best Cinematography in a Limited Series in 2017, and the addition of the Oscar-winning Elswit could only help its chances for a repeat, though matching “The Night Of’s” 13 total Emmy nominations seems like a long shot.
With this series, Zaillian is looking to add to his four Emmy bids to date, and his second each for writing and directing. And to be sure, “Ripley” deserves close study. Like a Caravaggio, the meaning comes through in the full tapestry.
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