Let’s consider, for a moment, the question of our sympathy for Tom Ripley, a character who starts amusingly off-kilter and turns into a full-blown psychopath by the end of the third episode of this eight-episode series (which is to say, early on). Can we make any excuses for his criminal actions? He is an orphan who has never known any stability or real love and affection, it’s true. Also, Dickie sucks. But how can we separate idiosyncrasy from danger? Where is the line between Tom Ripley, the funny, lovable scammer, and Tom Ripley, the cold-blooded murderer?
“Whatever happens, I’m not worried about it,†Tom says to Fausto, his Italian conversational teacher, about his plans for the future. “Something always turns up. That’s my philosophy of life.†This very philosophy is the root of the demented, Ripley-ean confidence that lets him manipulate any situation, however unfavorable-seeming, to his advantage. Tom is just recovering from having his confidence injured in the last episode when he gets dealt another blow: in a letter, Mr. Greenleaf essentially fires him. With polite detachment, he writes that it has become clear that the mission was “a failure.†Zaillian shoots the epistolary exchange as if Tom and Mr. Greenleaf were talking to each other across the Atlantic: a personal address and, therefore, a personal let-down. Mr. Greenleaf is not mad; he’s just disappointed. But because we, the viewers, are the intermediaries in this transatlantic exchange, the effect is that it feels as though Tom is talking to us. It sends a shiver down my spine when he raises his eyes from the letter to indignantly question the use of the word failure. Though he has no way of knowing for sure — Matteo at the post office wouldn’t confirm or deny — Tom has an instinct that Mr. Greenleaf sent a letter to Dickie, too. He sets out to cross-reference them, hoping to glean a better understanding of what failure, exactly, Mr. Greenleaf is talking about.
Dickie is at work on yet another painting that should land him in painting jail when Tom finds him and tries to lift the letter from his jacket pocket. But before he can do it successfully, Dickie leaves to see Marge, shrugging off Tom’s invitation for a drink. Just behind the confused melancholy of Andrew Scott’s puppy eyes, you can see a wrathful resentment start to brew. Mr. Greenleaf was right after all: For the first time since they met back at the shipyard, things are not going as expected. If, for a moment, it seemed that he’d been able to win Dickie over, now it’s clear that Dickie is imposing a distance between them. On the way to Marge’s, Dickie reads the letter from Mr. Greenleaf with a frown. Tom is imperceptibly trailing behind him; he watches through the window as Dickie discusses it with Marge. Tom puts on his best Dickie voice. “How do you suppose I get rid of him, Marge?†he speculates. “Throw him off the balcony, drown him? He’s afraid of the water, you know. He told me.†Almost as if to prove to himself that water doesn’t have as much power over him as he may have made it sound like, Tom stands creepily in the rain until Dickie comes and gets him for dinner.
Apart from having to go up and down the stairs all the time, the only other incontestable truth of Tom’s life in Italy is that he will have the world’s most awkward dinner with Dickie and Marge every night. The stilted dynamic is nothing new; what feels unprecedented is the beat that Tom takes before answering Dickie’s invitation to go to San Remo for the weekend. Up to this point, he has been consistently eager to agree to Dickie’s suggestions and to throw out some of his own. But now he is in possession of knowledge that is obscure to Marge and Dickie. He knows exactly what they are getting at, with their invitations to go away and their conspiratorial little looks: They’re trying to get rid of him. When, rather than immediately answering with enthusiasm, Tom’s eyes cloud over and become inscrutable, you can tell that he is thinking impure thoughts. He feels provoked. His “I think that sounds great!†reply is cut with a high dose of oh shit undertones. Dickie and Tom board a train to San Remo, first class.
At least since Dickie’s presumptuous disclosure of his sexuality in the last episode, a key has been slowly turning in Tom’s brain. To quickly recap Tom’s red flags so far: He scammed old ladies in New York; he stretched the truth about his acquaintance with Dickie Greenleaf before he arrived in Italy; when a random guy with a suspicious air offered him money to participate in a scheme, he immediately said yes; he is definitely a little clingy, if not codependent. He has not yet shown a proclivity for physical harm or injury. His crimes haven’t been exactly victimless, but save for the old ladies with the chiropractors — that was messed up — his victims aren’t really all that sympathetic, either. It’s hard to feel too bad for Dickie Greenleaf, whose life is a breeze, or even for Mr. Greenleaf himself, who is naïve enough to go around offering money to random kids without covering all his bases. Even though Tom Ripley has done absolutely nothing to prove his trustworthiness, throughout these first episodes, I find myself rooting for his scheme to work. So it’s a reality check, to say the least, when he bludgeons Dickie Greenleaf to death with the oar of a rental boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
The murder scene, which Zaillian choreographs and shoots with a psychopath’s methodical precision, is the apex of an afternoon that has been building toward danger, simmering in an atmospheric unease established from the moment they check into their hotel. Dickie wants to find a perfume for Marge, and while he goes around town looking, Tom waits for him by the beach. When Dickie finds him, perfume in hand, he is watching a group of acrobats performing a pyramid and other stunts on the beach. He looks at them with a child’s wholesome wonder, clapping and praising them. Dickie, who never misses an opportunity to be a wet blanket, undermines Tom’s enthusiasm by saying that the guys are “fairies.†“So what if they are?†Tom replies. “It’s really impressive.†Dickie expresses some half-hearted regret for spending the whole afternoon looking for Marge’s perfume and ignoring Tom, so they decide to take out a boat.
As the boat keeper shows Dickie how to run it, Tom stands by the tip of the boat with his back turned to the shore (and boat keeper). Out in the open water, Dickie finally says what’s been on his mind: He would prefer it if Tom didn’t come to Freddie Miles’s in Cortina over Christmas. He “owes it†to Marge to spend this time with her since he has been hanging around with Tom so much. It’s a testament to Dickie’s cluelessness that he thinks Tom is taking the news well. Their conversation skirts around the edges of the “real problem†until Tom puts it on the table: What did Mr. Greenleaf say about him in his letter? What is the real issue here, exactly? And what is Tom supposed to do over Christmas and New Year’s and after? Dickie tells Tom that it’s time he went to see some more of Italy and that Mr. Greenleaf is onto their little scheme. Tom had written that he was close to convincing Dickie to come home for the winter, while Dickie himself told him there was no thought further from his mind.
The complete dissonance between their interpretations of their situation is the last straw for Tom. As he crushes Dickie’s skull with the oar, he looks almost considerate, as if he were doing a puzzle or putting together Ikea furniture. Dickie’s cries for help don’t move him; this is our first look into Tom’s true psychopathy, the first time he has failed to be at least a little bit emotional — he uses Dickie’s own blood to slide the green signet ringer off his finger. His plan for throwing Dickie’s corpse overboard, weighed down by an anchor, backfires — the rope trips him and throws him right into the water, the boat spinning in circles around him — and feeling flushes back into Andrew Scott’s face, which twists into squirmish fear. Tom finally manages to pull the fuel line from the motor and make his way back into the boat. Because now the two worst things have happened — he has killed Dickie, and he has fallen into the water — there is no longer anything to be afraid of. Just as suddenly as it appeared, emotion drains from his eyes.
What follows is a long, excruciatingly silent scene of methodical work that is cleverly boring. Inconveniently, the murder has produced a corpse and a mound of evidence. Tom drags his feet through the clean-up. He takes the boat to a cove, fills it with rocks and manages to kind of sink it; the engine sticks out slightly, but at this point he’s so tired, he doesn’t have the energy to care. By the time he’s done with the whole thing, he’s miserable, like he’s having the worst day of his life, not because he has killed the man he supposedly loved, but because it was just so much work doing it. We’re reminded here of Tom’s baseline motivation for all of this: He wants his life to be easy and uninterruptedly pleasant. It’s inventive on Zaillian’s part to commit to the tediousness of the clean-up, but as the minutes pile on, the sequence — which runs at around 15 minutes — loses tension. It’s easy to forget that a murder just happened by the time Tom is done with the boat.
When Tom makes it back to the hotel, there are two policemen in front of it, which makes him paranoid. In the new light of his murderous status, everything — the beds, Dickie’s suitcase, the streets of San Remo — seems dangerously knowing. Even the hotel concierge is suspicious of Dickie’s whereabouts when Tom hastily checks out, which seems a bit gratuitous to me; it’s not that weird that in a party of two, one person would be in charge of checking out. As he walks to a cab, he sees the boat keeper telling the police that two Americans had disappeared with one of his boats. Tom walks at a fast clip right behind him — it’s classic Ripley luck that when they were renting the boat, he’d had his back to him anyway. On the train back to Atrani, Tom sits on the same seat Dickie had occupied on the way down. He slides Dickie’s signet ring onto his own finger.