In high school I struggled to cut my writing homework for English literature down and would routinely hand in essays that were hundreds of words over the limit.
I argued that my teacher should be happy I was giving them more than they asked for.
His response went a little like: "Not when everyone else has managed to get out what they wanted to say, using fewer words and taking less of my time."
This is Ripley's problem. Its director, writer and producer, Steve Zaillian, would have you watch 7.8 hours worth of television to tell a version of a story that Anthony Minghella (most notable of the six Ripley adaptations) managed to tell 25 years ago with a two-hour movie.
Andrew Scott (Fleabag, All of Us Strangers) leads this iteration as Tom Ripley, a duplicitous con man who we first meet masquerading as a debt collector and barely scraping by in 60s New York.
As in previous versions of the story, Tom needs little convincing when a wealthy man wants to pay him to travel to Italy and convince his rich and spoiled dilettante son Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn) to return to the US.
Tom is instantly enamoured by Dickie's life: He lazily adds haphazard brushstrokes to mediocre paintings and relaxes on his Amalfi coast-moored boat with his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), who is trying and failing to write an Eat, Pray, Love-style book. Which is to say, "they do nothing".
Tom's desperation to cling to the life his proximity to Dickie affords him results in murder, deceit and fraud. (Yes, the parallels to the recent Saltburn are striking.)
In the age of streaming, Ripley is by no means the first adaptation with a blown-out run time. But the decisions from other directors to tell familiar stories over the course of several episodes instead of in a single film (most recently Mr and Mrs Smith) have been justified by their additions to source material.
Ripley, however, subtracts key elements from the classic movie starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. And it confines itself to telling the story of only the first of the five Patricia Highsmith novels that comprise the Ripley series. (Perhaps because Zaillian doesn't plan for this limited series to remain limited? Not that we have any indication of this, beyond the fact the show was named after the series as opposed to its first book, The Talented Mr Ripley.)
The reason Ripley is so long despite its comparatively thin narrative is because it leans painstakingly into the conventions of the psychological thriller genre, drawing out the minutiae of Tom's every movement and experience — partly to create an intoxicating visual world, but mostly to foster a sense of unease.
In this way, something that would seem simple and mundane in another context, like the sound of an elevator ascending, becomes anxiety-inducing.
It's incredibly effective at building glorious tension. But, over so many episodes, it's also exhausting.
As is Zaillian's decision to tell this story in black and white. Don't bother waiting for a mid-way transition to colour à la Poor Things — it isn't coming.
"The edition of the Ripley book I had on my desk had an evocative black and white photograph on the cover," Zaillian said of his decision in Vanity Fair last year. "As I was writing, I held that image in my mind. Black and white fits this story — and it's gorgeous."
There are moments when Zaillian's decision feels so fitting. For one, it lends a beady quality to Scott's eyes, which helps emphasise that this version of Tom is less morally grey. He's older (Scott is 47), beaten down from a life of poverty, visibly slimy and set in his scheming ways. (Yet somehow still attractive, because Scott is out here giving Hot Priest in everything he does.)
And in Zaillian's monochrome world, the use of light can be equal-parts transfixing and anxiety-inducing — whether it's dancing on the fur of a watchful cat or flashing across the eyes of a suspicious taxi driver.
But, despite this aesthetic appeal, there are more moments when the decision to go full black-and-white is irritating.
And part of what makes both Highsmith's original story and the 1999 film so psychologically thrilling is that they play out in the decadently beautiful dreamscape that is the Amalfi coast in the 60s. In those tellings, the incongruence of the dark events that take place within the vibrant setting were key. But, in Ripley, things start off dark and stay dark.
Colour is lacking in more than just the literal sense, too. While Fanning is perfectly suspicious as Marge, and Flynn makes for a brilliant choice as the charismatic Dickie, there's something missing in the chemistry of their relationship. Tom and Dickie's friendship doesn't feel genuine, either — Flynn isn't carefree enough and Scott isn't youthfully exuberant enough for it to be entirely plausible after the orchestration of their meeting is revealed.
And, somehow, all three characters are less rounded than they have been in previous versions of this story — none more so than our protagonist. We don't get overt glimpses at Tom's self-awareness as we did in the 1999 film when Damon quietly posited:
"Whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes sense, doesn't it? In your head? You never meet anybody who thinks they're a bad person."
Maybe that's because Scott's version of Tom has even less to lose than the Tom Ripleys that came before him. Maybe it's because Ripley is trying to be cerebral and show, rather than tell, absolutely everything — from the chore that is mopping up blood to what happens when you accidentally leave key evidence at a crime scene and have to double back for it.
That could also go some way to explaining the repeated visual parallels drawn between the Italian painter/murderer Caravaggio and Tom throughout the series, which was Zaillian's addition to the story.
But for what Ripley leaves out from Tom, Marge and Dickie's narratives, it adds immeasurably to its background characters. Italian actor Maurizio Lombardi is a stand-out as weary police inspector Pietro Ravini, as are the string of observant hotel concierges whose delightful expressiveness screams the extent to which they see through Tom.
And then there's Freddie Miles — Dickie's impossibly exhausting trust-fund-baby friend — refreshingly portrayed here by real-life trust-fund baby Eliot Sumner (whose parents are Sting and Trudie Styler). Their decision not to emulate the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's iconic version of Freddie is commendable.
Surprisingly, there are several moments of hilarity in Ripley; there are even darkly humorous moments in the wake of cold-blooded murders.
But each of these gags pale in comparison to the highly satisfying ending — which happens to be less wrenching than that of the 1999 film, and more exciting than the book.
(Ironically, I have gone over the word limit for this review.)
Ripley is streaming on Netflix.