Hossein Amini has had a variable but mostly strong career as an accomplished, professional film writer, penning excellent scripts for Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1995) and Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove(1997) back when, and recently scoring big hits working on Drive (2011) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), as well as the not-so-big 47 Ronin (2013). Undoubtedly the hits helped him make his feature directing debut, an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. The Two Faces of January delves into territory inevitably reminiscent of her Tom Ripley novels, although the theme of two men locked in a criminal folie-a-deuxis more reminiscent of her Strangers on a Train. The setting is Athens, 1962: Oscar Isaac is Rydal, an American in self-imposed exile in Greece subsisting as a tour guide, petty scam artist and lover boy for good-looking Yankee girls. Rydal strikes up a relationship with the rich and pretty Lauren (Daisy Bevan), but has his eye drawn by a couple, Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst), at first because Chester reminds him of his father. Rydal resisted returning home after his father’s recent death because he was still sitting on lodes of intense resentment for his demanding intellectual regimens and emotional detachment.
Drawn into casual friendship with the couple, Rydal soon finds himself sucked into Chester’s multi-continental criminal escapades: having fled the US with the profits of a stock scam, Chester is confronted by a private detective, Paul Vittorio (David Warshofsky), who’s been sent by extremely unhappy investors to collect the proceeds at gunpoint. Chester manages to attack Vittorio, who dies in the melee, but he manage to fool Rydal, who catches sight of him dragging the body down a hotel corridor, into thinking that he’s dragging a drunk back to his room. Chester however soon makes most of his situation plain to Rydal and appeals for his help so he and Colette can flee Greece. Rydal arranges for false passports for them, skimming some of the profit for himself, and then volunteers to escort the couple to Crete for the several days it will take for the passports to be ready. Rydal’s motivation in this is clearly beyond money, and his designs on winning Colette away from Chester seem pretty blatant, even as the two men maintain another, loaded, uneasily Oedipal relationship, false father and untrue son tussling for control of woman and fortune.
Amini’s direction displays gifts for economy in the first twenty minutes that call to mind a good classic Hollywood director tackling the same sort of material: mid-career Anatole Litvak, say, or Fred Zinneman before he got prestigious, quickly sketching character outlines, situational underpinnings, basic relationships and the stakes of the oncoming drama, before getting busy with a sudden swerve into plot. Amini pieces together some decent suspense sequences, avoiding the kind of prestigious bloat that afflicts a lot of this brand of “old-fashioned” thriller film. Whereas Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mister Ripley (1999) lumbered on for two and a half hours, Amini offers a reasonably brief and concise running time whilst remaining open to the landscape the setting provides, capturing a sense of bleary dislocation and washed-out romanticism when his bedevilled trio awaken by the sea after a night of anxious drinking, and using a stony plain they walk along to communicate the jagged desolation that fills their psychic horizons. An eerie sequence that pays off in violence and tragedy is staged in an ancient Minoan ruin, with frescoes depicting ancient, dangerous bull dancing rituals reflecting the gnawing psychological battle entangling the protagonists. A fine chase through an Istanbul bazaar late in the film sees Mortensen dashing through gullet of shadowed mazes, where metalworkers pounding away in infernal abodes.
The crisp, muted yet definite colours of Marcel Zyskind’s photography suspend the characters in a world existing in some Venn diagram mid-point between period tourist postcard and that small genre of midday noir, of which Rene Clement’s take on Highsmith, Plein Soleil (1960) was a major example. That film was surely a strong influence here, whilst the suspense sequences, from Chester trying to hide the dead private eye’s body to the final chase, clearly have more Hitchcockian pretences, although here perhaps the aesthetic seems more in line with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) than Strangers on a Train (1951). And yet there’s something oddly laborious about Amini’s direction and the film as a whole, and the qualities which I praised above ultimately conspire to dampen the film. Amini’s approach to building scenes is a literal as his screenwriting, spelling out whilst never developing a convincing mood of neuroticism or contorted reality. The material does feel partly at fault too, which treads territory too well-worn in Highsmith’s oeuvre, whilst her redeeming on-page psychological subtlety and control of viewpoint slips out of Amini’s fingers. There’s a difference between generating a sense of tragic inevitability and just plain predictability, and Two Faces doesn’t quite know it. The intrinsic theme of the two men competing over the woman is as old as the hills and even the skill of the three actors can’t make it feel anything more than obvious.
Moreover, although generational conflict is wound into the story, the film is set in the past without feeling convincingly of its past nor of its generations as players in their time. Amini offers a brief exchange between Chester and Vittorio, where the private eye ruefully notes that he’s been sent back to Europe after never giving a damn about it when he was here as a young soldier: this moment is loaded with a sense of middle-aged regret, the shared understanding between the two men of what time has done to their expectations in life and sense of the world, and is more convincing and telling in the thirty seconds or so it takes to play out than anything we get between Chester and Rydal. Rydal stands in for the disaffected sons of the WW2 generation, a beatnik escapee feeding off the loose change of the post-war plutocracy – except that Amini doesn’t engage with these men on any such level, preferring to invoke different class backgrounds to supply the asymmetry to their yearnings and resentments. Where the immediacy of sexual and fiscal jealousy can believably propel a story like this, the underlying sense of both rivalry and connection between Chester and Rydal required to make both the more complex psychodrama work, not to mention the finale, is communicated too bluntly and scantly to convince. Two deaths occur in the course of the story, both essentially accidents that nonetheless clearly stem form a landslide of bad decisions, and a sense of quiescent dread of when eventually the situation will combust is built, only to defuse awkwardly, with one character’s final redemptive act seeming more than a little wimpy in narrative terms. The Two Faces of January might have become a mercilessly Sartrean thriller about hell being the people we’re stuck with, even an Antonioni-esque story where thriller stakes mask contemplations of the godforsaken things people do to one-another, but it finally remains too much in thrall to its own classiness and literate poise. Still, the film’s pleasures are worth noticing, most particularly Mortensen’s reliably good performance as a professional charmer with a desperate streak who finishes up destroying almost everything he loves.
