Dining + Murder in The Talented Mr. Ripley
Dining + Murder in The Talented Mr. Ripley
With Netflix streaming the somber "Ripley," we look back at the gustatory pleasures of the seminal 1999 film
Today, “Ripley” makes its small screen debut in the form of an eight-part miniseries on Netflix. Though I’ve yet to watch it, from what I can tell by the trailer, the early reviews, the black and white cinematography, and even its truncated title, there’s something austere about this adaptation, which follows five rather lush films. It would seem that seasoned writer/director/showrunner Steve Zaillian has leaned into the noire elements of the source material—namely “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the first and most enduring of the five novels comprising “the Ripliad”—rather than its sensual pleasures. That would be a disappointment to many fans, myself included.
Throughout the Ripley novels and films, the narratives delight in art, jazz, travel, and Italian tailoring. These details serve as delicious counterpoints to the rather grim plotlines, all of which concern the crimes of titular character Tom, a sociopathic social climber and con artist who hoodwinks and—spoiler alert—murders his way into the good life, that of moneyed, midcentury expats swanning around Italy during il boom. These touch points represent the world Tom covets, but for my money it’s the food that’s perhaps most telling.
For a woman who was rumored to have subsisted off a steady diet of fried eggs and bacon, Ripley author Patricia Highsmith certainly got dining right in her books, and this theme was only explored further in the films, particularly Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Google the film, and you’ll mostly find menswear articles dissecting Law’s rakish style as Dickie Greenleaf, the American playboy whose shipping magnet father has dispatched Tom to retrieve. Certainly, it’s Dickie’s clothes that Damon’s Tom, in his corduroy blazer, fixates upon. Tom ogles Dickie’s fits, borrows them, dances in them, all to the increasing disgust of Dickie, who begins to sniff out Tom for the fraud that he is.
But look further, beyond the clothes, and you’ll see that food and drink, however subtlety, also take center stage. There’s the half-eaten panini by Tom’s side as he first spots Dickie and Paltrow’s Marge Sherwood emerging from the Mediterranean, spying the pair through a set of binoculars as if he could eat them up. Or the orange drinks beside their beach chairs, which Brad Thomas Parsons speculates might be Campari and orange juice in his excellent deep dive of the cocktails in the film. Later, at the couple’s villa, Tom is tasked with making a martini. Here, Tom, not yet completely inhabiting the chameleon he’ll later become, stumbles, and it’s Marge who takes over, blithely boasting, “I make a fabulous martini.” That one line alludes to an entire world that’s heretofore been inaccessible to Tom, ever the outsider and the audience’s stand in, who, despite his terrible transgressions, we root for; it’s a world of privilege and all its attendant luxuries.
It’s these attitudes toward food and drink that perhaps prove the most interesting insofar as they embody this world that Tom will do anything to inhabit. No one exudes this more than spoiled, charisma-oozing Dickie. While Tom fixates on Dickie’s “superb” pinkie ring, Dickie is more taken with his own espresso maker, which gleams in the midsummer sun. With Tom’s money, a small fortune courtesy of Dickie’s dad, the duo buy an ice box so that Dickie can keep his beer cold. They go to Rome together, where Tom is keen to see the sights, but—at Dickie’s insistence—the first stop is a cafe by the Trevi Fountain. There they rendez vous with Seymour Hoffman’s Freddie Miles, who quickly pours himself a glass of wine and just as quickly chugs it before, plug that he is, he absconds with Dickie to an alfresco table awaiting at Fabrizio’s. Tom, dismissed as a rube, one who can’t appreciate good restaurants, is left alone, hitting tourist traps that Dickie and Freddie couldn’t care less about.
More gustatory pleasures follow. In San Remo. In Venice. In cafes and jazz clubs and at markets. Although Tom warms up to it all rather well. For those who haven’t seen the film, I won’t spoil it more than I already have (though hopefully I’ve piqued your interest — it is currently streaming on Netflix alongside “Ripley”). While Minghella’s midcentury-set thriller concerns a certain class of privileged Americans who treated Europe as a fantasyland rather than a real place, today “The Talented Mr. Ripley” is the fantasy, which is why it remains so popular. And we can thank, in part, the dining for that. In a time in which reservations seem as scarce as resources, in which tables are secured by jumping through hoops, there is something fun and refreshing in watching characters, however horrible, gallivant from restaurant to restaurant and cafe to cafe, as if the world is their oyster.
James Jung
VP, Content
Blackbird Labs, Inc.