The Two Faces of January **** (2014, Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac, Kirsten Dunst) – Movie Review

Viggo Mortensen and Oscar Isaac are riveting in writer-director Hossein Amini’s tense, twisty and sleek adaptation of the 1964 Patricia Highsmith novel, filmed in the polished vintage-style Hitchcock mode.

As usual, Viggo is particularly excellent as the charismatic middle-aged American conman Chester MacFarland, though Isaac makes an impressively dangerous charmer as Rydal, a young Greek-speaking American who is working as a tour guide in Athens, expertly moving from smiling winningly to reptilian as his character demands.

Kirsten Dunst does well enough, looking right and doing all that’s asked of her, as Chester’s alluring younger wife Colette. But, as ever, Highsmith’s female characters are loads less interesting than her males, and this story’s all about Chester and Rydal, alas for Dunst. There are two or three other significant speaking roles, but they’re so negligible that the movie is virtually a three-hander.

It’s 1962, and the handsome MacFarland couple arrive in Athens, where they go sightseeing at the Acropolis and encounter Rydal, who is scamming tourists on the side. Rydal accepts their invitation to dinner, but later at his hotel Chester gets him to help move the body of a seemingly unconscious man who he claims attacked him. It turns out to be the corpse of a cop Chester’s just killed and now Rydal impulsively, compulsively offers to help the couple get fake passports and tickets to flee to Crete, and goes with them.

So a fascinating, offbeat story, then, but the film changes so many things from the novel, wilfully, and fans of Highsmith and the novel probably won’t be at all happy. As screenwriter, Amini might as well have started with an original screenplay. OK, Hitchcock did the same thing with Highsmith’s first book, Strangers on a Train, and that’s one of cinema’s best-ever thrillers, but Highsmith wasn’t at all pleased with that. She wouldn’t like this movie either, because of all the changes to her work, but now she isn’t here to defend her book alas.

That aside, this is an absorbing, stylish psychological thinking-person’s suspense thriller. It looks great, there’s a lovely eerie atmosphere and shedloads of tautly woven tension throughout, taken at a good pace, building to a satisfying climax in Istanbul, and wrapped up in a compact running time (96 minutes). Plus there’s polished, confident direction from first time film-maker Amini, handsome cinematography by Marcel Zyskind on striking locations and a fine, lush, vintage-style score by Julio Iglesias.

It’s a whole lot cheaper and less troublesome than a trip to Athens and Crete, which you think Highsmith must have based her book on, and you won’t end up with a dodgy tummy after it.

Highsmith preferred the company of animals to people and said: ‘My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.’  She attended a London cocktail party with a gigantic handbag that contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails who she said were her companions for the evening.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Film Review

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/