This is not necessarily a bad thing, and Amini’s directorial style is perfectly matched to his literary sensibilities. Neither overtly flashy nor lit-professor dry, it is above all else classical, even elegant at times. The Two Faces of January’s slow-burn pacing, mysterious characters, murky morality, and posh foreign setting align it with a certain strand of classical mystery probably best exemplified by Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and most recently by the complex Cold War espionage drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), a film with which this one shares three producers. One might be tempted to compare it to Hitchcock, but Amini lacks (or rejects) Hitch’s dark sense of humor and cynicism.

The story takes place in the mid-1960s and begins in Greece, where we immediately meet the film’s triad of characters: Rydal (Oscar Isaac), a well-educated young man who has left the U.S. to work as a tour guide, where he flirts with college girls and fleeces his customers with purposefully misleading exchange rates; Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen), an apparently wealthy American investor on vacation; and Colette (Kirsten Dunst), his significantly younger wife. Chester first catches Rydal’s eye because he reminds Rydal of his father, a hard-driving professor who alienated his son to the point that Rydal has recently declined to return to the States to attend his funeral. Chester ends up hiring Rydal to guide him and Colette in their sightseeing, and they develop a wary camaraderie. There is a hint of flirtation between Rydal and Colette, but the real sense of guarded connection is between Chester and Rydal, the potential bad father figure and still rebellious prodigal son.

The threesome is permanently thrown together when a private detective shows up at Chester’s hotel room demanding money for a group of investors who feel cheated by Chester’s investment schemes (the exact dynamics at play here are left purposefully vague; the investors are clearly a criminal group, at one point referred to as a gambling syndicate, but the extent of Chester’s own culpability is a bit murky). Chester ends up knocking the detective out and possibly killing him, and Rydal becomes involved when he goes to the hotel to return Colette’s bracelet and stumbles across Chester dragging the unconscious man’s body back to his room. Chester comes clean about the predicament he’s in and hires Rydal to help him and Colette secure fake passports so they can escape the country. From there, the film follows the group as they warily work together, each reliant on the others but no one entirely trusting anyone else.

Amini’s script sticks fairly close to Highsmith’s novel in the opening acts, but diverges quite substantially in the film’s second half. Highsmith’s depiction of Chester is quite sociopathic (similar to her most famous literary creation, the con artist Tom Ripley), but Amini’s version makes him more of a man in conflict who has gotten in over his head and is desperate to do anything to save himself. Chester makes some deplorable decisions and is responsible for more than one death by the time the film is over, but at no point is he a straight-out monster. He’s a cheat and a liar and a man ruthless enough to pin his crimes on someone else if it means his survival, but Mortensen’s performance always suggests that Chester is simply desperate, even a bit pathetic, constantly clutching at his suitcase, which may very well contain all of his worldly possessions. Thus, the seemingly sophisticated, wealthy American tourist we meet in the film’s opening frames is eventually revealed to be something akin to a rat caught in a maze of his own creation.

The Two Faces of January works as a character piece, and Amini generates several good scenes of tension and suspense. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind (The Killer Inside Me) captures the sun-bleached openness of Greece with postcard beauty that stands in stark contrast to the eventual desperation of the characters to escape it. However, there is a sense of reserve throughout the film that keeps it a bit too tamped down for its own good, as if Amini was desperate to avoid anything smacking of sensationalism. There are elements of The Two Faces of January that are reminiscent of Anthony Minghella’s superior The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), but that film was more daring and charged; Minghella wasn’t afraid to mix horror and tragedy and social comedy (interestingly, one of the January’s executive producers is Mingella’s son Max, who has until now worked as an actor). Amini is perhaps too intent on producing a film whose elegance outweighs its horrors, and as a result The Two Faces of January never fully delves into the hearts of darkness clearly beating beneath its mannered surface.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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