Ripley vs. The Talented Mr. Ripley

Which is better: Ripley or The Talented Mr. Ripley? 

Ripley (Netflix, 2024) is a one-season Television series that dropped in April of this year and is based on the 1955 thriller novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith. The series stars Andrew Scott (Moriarty in the 2010 BBC series Sherlock), as Tom Ripley, Dakota Fanning as Marge Sherwood, and Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf. 

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, Paramount/Mirimax) is a feature film featuring Matt Damon in the title role, Jude Law as Dickie, Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddy Miles, and which is also based on the Patricia Highsmith novel. 

As much as you can compare a movie to a television series, there is no question in my mind which one is better: The Talented Mr. Ripley from 1999 is better than Ripley, the Netflix series, from 2024. The casting is better. The acting is better. The cinematography is better. The script is better. To me, the film beats the television series in just about every way. 

I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley in theaters back in 1999 and have re-watched it a few times over the years, as well as read the novel. The 1999 film adheres pretty closely to the book and is, in my opinion, one of the best novel-to-movie  adaptations in film history. It completely stands on its own. With a lot of film adaptations there's this sense of "Yeah, but you really need to go back and read the book." While the Patricia Highsmith novel is a great crime thriller, I think you can get everything you need to get from this story by watching the 1999 film. 

In the 1999 film you've got a pretty unbeatable cast, with four -- FOUR -- of the best actors of their generation in their primes: Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Each of these actors is perfectly cast and turns in an impeccable performance. I could probably go on, but I don't need to. If you don't believe me, go ahead and watch the film.

The 2024 television version, on the other hand is woefully miscast and underacted, starting with John Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf. Even without having to fill Jude Law's shoes in this role, Flynn's Greenleaf is so subdued and muted as to appear as though he's sedated most of the time. As opposed to Law's vivacious, charismatic, Golden Boy portrayal of Greenleaf, Flynn at times looks as though he is in a coma. Andrew Scott is tolerable as Ripley; however, in his late forties, I daresay the actor is a bit old for this role and -- like Flynn -- he just doesn't bring enough energy into the role. Furthermore, unlike between Jude Law and Matt Damon, there is almost no screen chemistry between Flynn and Scott, in a role that requires there to be a lot of chemistry. Tom Ripley is supposed to be in love with Dickie Greenleaf. In the 1999 film, you see and feel this infatuation; in the 2024 television series, it's like you would only know this if you knew the plot already. Otherwise, it's just not believable. 

The character of Marge Sherwood, played in the 2024 series by Dakota Fanning, is cast well enough and grew on me as the series wore on. The only other performance I know by Fanning (as an adult) is from Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019), in which she appears for a few minutes of screentime and does a lot with an otherwise dismissible role. Her turn here in Ripley chews up far more screentime and she's moved up a few notches in my estimation.

The other strange casting decision was that of the Freddy Miles character. In the 1999 film this part is played -- again to a pitch-perfect performance -- by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays the role in a boisterous, swaggering, kind of way. In the 2024 series this part is played by Eliot Summer who has that "maybe I've seen him somewhere before" kind of look but who plays the role in a sort of understated, cat-like way that -- when held up against Hoffman's portrayal of Miles -- just turns the entire role into something else. I'm willing to grant that the showrunners intended for it to be that way; after all, why do exactly what was done before. However, Summer's version of Miles sticks out like a sore thumb even in this altogether miscast series, which is saying something. 

It's extremely difficult to take Ripley on it's own terms because The Talented Mr. Ripley was so good. But even taken on its own, Ripley takes far, far too long to heat up. It's an eight episode series that's basically a snooze fest until the fifth episode. That's not good. In fact, I finished the show simply so that I could write this blog post. Otherwise, I probably would have stopped after episode two and not picked it back up. 

If I have anything good to say about the show it is that, once it does start to get interesting, it gets really suspenseful, even ending on a cliffhanger so good I found myself saying: "No, please no...there has to be another episode..." only to find that I had, in fact, finished the series. Maybe it takes a while to come around, but it gets there. 

Still...in just about every category imaginable, the Damon-Law-Paltrow-Hoffman version of The Talented Mr. Ripley wins by a mile.