THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY. Imperfect Film [REVIEW]

I remember liking the poster for this film. Elegant, well composed, seemingly understated yet eye-catching. Hossein Amini’s debut turned out to be similar in spirit—though, unlike the poster, it was not without flaws. The screenwriter of Drive chose for his first feature an adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith, an author whose work had already been brought to the screen many times—and often successfully, as the enduring popularity of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley clearly showed. In fact, The Two Faces of January had more in common with the latter than just Highsmith’s name.

Both stories unfolded in sunny Europe in roughly the same era, and both centered on liars and con artists whose circumstances turned them into killers. What Amini’s film ultimately lacked, however, was psychological depth and the suffocating atmosphere that had elevated Minghella’s adaptation. In The Talented Mr. Ripley no one had been innocent, yet no one—not even Ripley—had been entirely evil. Amini’s characters were equally hard to root for, but the debuting director seemed almost too sympathetic toward them.

Set in 1962, the film followed wealthy American couple Chester and Colette MacFarland vacationing in Athens. They befriended Rydal, a young American working as a tour guide. The three began spending time together, though Chester quickly sensed that Rydal was a small-time hustler—and one clearly intrigued by Colette. As it turned out, Chester himself had fled the United States after swindling investors with nonexistent oil fields. When a private detective tracked him down and died during a scuffle, the MacFarlands turned to Rydal for help. He agreed to secure forged documents and assist their escape, but tensions between the two men gradually intensified.

From the outset, the age gap between Chester—around fifty—and the much younger Colette stood out. Rydal, in his twenties, was drawn to the married woman, and she seemed charmed by his eloquence. Yet the expected erotic tension never fully materialized. Colette admitted to her husband that she merely liked the young man, and that effectively closed the matter. Played by Kirsten Dunst, she deliberately refrained from radiating overt sensuality. Rightly so—her character ultimately served a different narrative purpose, and any trace of romance quickly dissolved into distrust and hysteria.

Rydal, meanwhile, appeared almost as fascinated by Chester as by Colette. Amini avoided the homoerotic undertones present in earlier Highsmith adaptations. Instead, Rydal saw in Chester a resemblance to his recently deceased father. Disappointed though he was by each new revelation about Chester’s criminal past, he continued alongside him—as if trying to prove something, perhaps even to repair something. Chester, for his part, saw in Rydal a younger version of himself, a novice con man who might still have time to start over. Despite this, jealousy and suspicion defined Chester’s behavior, while Rydal grew increasingly repelled by the older man’s treatment of his wife and his drunken excesses.

The film gained considerably from this character dynamic, yet Amini the director was ultimately let down by Amini the screenwriter. In the finale, the bond between the two men was underlined too insistently, with conclusions delivered in a blunt, almost heavy-handed manner. It had once been said that Nicolas Winding Refn had sharply trimmed Amini’s script for Drive, especially the dialogue. One couldn’t help but feel that a similar guiding hand might have benefited this project as well.

What worked best was the slightly languid atmosphere laced with constant unease—closer, perhaps, to crime stories featuring Peter Ustinov than to the dense psychological thrillers about Tom Ripley. The Greek sun illuminated everything impartially: city streets, mountain landscapes, tourists’ pale faces, even corpses. Viggo Mortensen, as Chester, seemed to grow visibly redder over the course of the film—whether from the sun, the alcohol, or the pressure of his predicament was left ambiguous.

The transformation in Rydal, played by Oscar Isaac, was subtler, but by a certain point he, too, bore the marks of an adventure that had given him nothing good. One could almost understand the characters simply by watching their faces. It might have worked even as a silent film; their emotions were that clear.

Amini directed his debut in a classical, almost old-fashioned manner—hardly a flaw in itself. He made confident use of picturesque locations and paid attention to telling details: Chester always carrying a suitcase, Rydal moving with ease wherever he went. The cinematography and score were excellent, and the actors fully inhabited their roles. Yet the film was overly explicit, as if unwilling to trust that images could speak for themselves. Dialogue too often served merely to convey information, and certain narrative cards were revealed too soon, as though the director feared losing the audience’s attention.

In the end, The Two Faces of January proved to be an imperfect film—one that nonetheless offered a fair amount of pleasure to admirers of this kind of sun-drenched criminal tale. And perhaps only to them.