Many people are milling around the Greek tourist sights at the beginning of The Two Faces of January, but our story will ignore almost all of them. It’s only the shady characters who interest us here. Con artists always have something at stake—exposure, the possibility of their past transgressions catching up with them, and suspense about their next game. Three of them meet in the shadow of the Parthenon: Rydal (Oscar Isaac), an American tour guide knocking around Athens in the early 1960s, and Chester and Colette MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst), a stockbroker and his younger wife on extended vacation.
Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, hatched this group of expat swindlers, so there’s likely to be at least as much psychological game-playing as conventional suspense. Yes, there’s a murder, but most of the movie is concerned with how Rydal projects guilty feelings about his own late father onto Chester; or how the discrepancy in age between the MacFarlands might create a seed of doubt between them; or whether Chester is more interested in Colette or Rydal. Director Hossein Amini adapted Highsmith’s novel, and while his movie does nicely with the concept of a sunlit noir, it doesn’t actually generate a lot of heat. Everything feels a little too well-made to create much friction. And it’s an unbalanced triangle: The energy between surrogate father and son leaves Colette as the least compelling character in the bunch.
For all that, I enjoyed the movie anyway. The languorous portrait of people at loose ends in Europe is nicely drawn; these three convey the gloriously decadent sense that they don’t much belong anywhere, so they might as well fetch up here in the meantime. And the actors are very watchable. All three roles could have been cast with more fitting performers, but it’s intriguing to see what this trio does with the material—even if Dunst gets the short end of the characterization stick. Isaac proves that his terrific turn in Inside Llewyn Davis was no fluke, catching the scrappy desperation of a hustler. And Mortensen—well, how many actors grow more mysterious and less easily pegged as they grow older? Chester always seems to be hiding something, and Mortensen’s sly gift is to suggest that he might have everything, or possibly nothing, to hide. Opens Fri., Oct. 10 at Varsity. Rated PG-13. 96 minutes.
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