Film review: The Two Faces of January

The lush scenery of Greece and Turkey is the real star of this adaptation.

From left, Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac and Kristen Dunst in The Two Faces of January. Courtesy Magnolia

The Two Faces of January

Director: Hossein Amini

Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Kirsten Dunst, Oscar Isaac

Three stars

Who can say no to a good Patricia Highsmith adaptation?

Mind you, The Two Faces of January, her 1964 suspense thriller, is not the easiest story to bring to the screen. Still, the production, shot in Greece and Turkey, is truly lush and the stars – Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac and Kirsten Dunst – are almost too subtle and nuanced for the roles they play. The result is easy viewing.

Built around a trio of greedy, lying, vapid losers, the film opens in Athens at one of the world’s most clichéd tourist sites, the Parthenon. But it’s 1962 and things looked newer then.

Rydal (Isaac), a good-looking young American expat living in Greece, is playing tour guide to a group of breathless college girls while portentously talking about “the cruel tricks gods play on men”, when a swanky American couple frolicking around the ruins catches his eye.

Chester McFarland (Mortensen) is not easy to warm up. Much older than his wife Colette (Dunst), there’s a shrewdness about him that allows him to size up Rydal on the spot, watching as the boy brazenly shortchanges one of the girls on his tour.

Rydal tells the couple he’s a Yale graduate who is in Europe while he tries to figure out what he wants to do in life. Chester explains that he is an investment broker and hires the boy to show them around. Neither of them seems particularly trustworthy.

Over dinner, Rydal can’t take his eyes off light-hearted Colette, though his own date (Daisy Bevan) seems equally worthy of attention, not to mention rich and available. Since the Colette-Rydal attraction is so crucial to the plot, it would have behoved everyone to work on a little more ­chemistry.

In addition to jealousy, Chester has fresh problems to deal with when a private eye sent by the mob (played tough by a hard-nosed David Warshofsky) tracks him down to his luxury hotel. Awkwardly, the men decide to talk in the bathroom and next thing you know, Chester is dragging his unconscious nemesis down the thickly carpeted hall back to his own room.

Rydal appears at the wrong moment and is forced to help, not realising the trouble he’s letting himself in for.

The most puzzling piece of the plotting is why the McFarlands check out of the hotel in the dead of night, leaving their passports behind. The moment they leave the hotel they are on the lam, in a foreign country, without any way to get home.

Sensing easy money is to be made, Rydal follows them like a guardian angel and whisks them off into hiding on the island of Crete. Suffice to say, things go from bad to much, much worse.

The film’s biggest asset is its exotic atmosphere. It’s a time when you could still meet men like Chester who had been on the European front during the Second World War and returned as tourists, and when smart Ivy League graduates could drift around the continent instead of paying off student loans.

The film marks the directorial debut of British-Iranian screenwriter Hossein Amini, who shows his skill at working with actors and sensing the way they can fill out literary characters.

His screenplay generally feels more naturalistic than Highsmith, the dialogue less spare. Dunst has the least exciting role of the lot, something of a bone over which the men compete, while glowering at each other.

Mortensen’s elegant-until-cornered Chester is a layered character with quite a moral range, from nefarious swindler to a man able to make a grand redemptive gesture. He cuts an ugly but human figure vis-à-vis Rydal’s petty con man.

But as Chester points out, it’s only a matter of time before the younger man turns into him.