Patricia Highsmith has always been difficult for cinema to decipher. As the first great post-noir author, she never takes the easy way out with her heroes and villains — to her, such constructs don’t exist. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), her best-known work, features a master improviser who also happens to be a liar, a cheat and a murderer, yet his motivations remain cloudy to the end. No time to spare for conscience in Ripley’s world — there is only the next morally squishy activity, the eventual saunter into the sunset. Still, the notion forever nags at him (and us): How long will I get away with it? Ramping up tension without offering release, luxuriating in the perverse without falling back on pat psychology, Ripley and Highsmith’s other classics are bracing, nasty tales in which the game’s the thing, and part of the game is trying (in vain) to figure out what exactly makes these sociopaths tick.
The best Ripley (and Highsmith) adaptations to date, Purple Noon (1960) and The American Friend (1977), have been produced in Europe, which isn’t surprising given their urbane settings and the Continent’s long and proud tradition of existential unease. Hollywood, on the other hand, doesn’t do existential, or at least it can’t do it without a big fistfight at the end, as in Hitchcock’s version of Strangers on a Train (1952). Many single out Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) as the truest Highsmith film thus far, but as with his take on the The English Patient (1996), Minghella privileges lush scenery and period details over substance, and fundamentally misreads the author’s intent — in this case, he re-imagines Ripley is a tragic figure comfortable in everyone’s skin except his own. The truth is, Highsmith’s characters are too caught up in the adrenaline rush of deception and imminent capture to mope about for long. Even Liliana Cavani’s underrated Ripley’s Game (2002), with John Malkovich tacking closer to Highsmith’s conception of the character, can’t resist wrapping up with a cathartic shootout.
Which brings us to The Two Faces of January, the latest attempt to translate Highsmith to the big screen. As with the Ripley novels, we’re treated to sun-dappled locations (Greece this time), ambiguous desires, and crimes that must be covered up, fled from and denied. Rydal (Oscar Isaac, last seen grumping his way through Inside Llewyn Davis) is your typical callow expat Yank in Athens, treating college co-eds to local tours while scamming extra cash and a few one-night stands when he can. Soon he falls into the orbit of the MacFarlands, Chester (Viggo Mortenson) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst), who by all appearances are your standard well-heeled American tourists. Is Rydal attracted to Chester’s fat wad of cash? Colette, the former party girl who registers just the slightest bit of discontent with her life? Or Chester himself, who reminds him of his estranged, recently deceased father? Highsmith doesn’t settle for a definitive answer; in the fluid give-and-take among the three characters, one motivation might take precedence over the others in a given moment, before making way for another equally muddled one. Soon it becomes clear that Chester isn’t the upstanding businessman he claims to be, and when a run-in with a private eye leads to a very dead body in the MacFarlands’ hotel bathroom, Chester is on the lam to the Greek isles with Colette and Rydal in tow, the latter greasing the skids with fake passports and uncertain desires. Like we said: Is it Chester? Colette? The money? All of the above?
The Two Faces of January is the directorial debut of writer Hossein Amini, whose filmography suggests a bent for overheated narratives: Drive, The Wings of the Dove, Shanghai (we won’t get into Snow White and the Huntsman). Fortunately that melodramatic edge is tamped down for the most part here. Greece is as postcard-lovely as one would expect, but Amini isn’t interested in creating a lush travelogue; instead he lingers on faces, averted and furtive glances, the calibrations of each character’s thoughts. In this hothouse atmosphere, the simple lighting of a cigarette suggests complicity and obligation, as fear and distrust coil around the trio gently, like the kindest boa constrictor in the world. Faces might lack the clammy thrills of classic noir, but it knows how to take its time and draw us in; as the lead trio retreats further and further from civilization, we’re happily drawn into their rhythms, their unspoken attraction and repulsion.
While none of the actors embarrass themselves, Amini stacks the deck against Isaac and Dunst. As a pawn in the two men’s game, Dunst has little to work with, but she plays off her established persona of bubbly young thing (think Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow, another psychological study hiding underneath a period mystery) and bravely lets herself look bedraggled in a way she hasn’t been on screen before. While Isaac makes a nice visual counterpoint to Mortenson, Amini hasn’t given the character much of an inner life, and Isaac doesn’t have the resources to hint at one — a major shortcoming, given Highsmith’s characterization of Rydal in the book as a more resourceful, devious sort, and more of a match for Chester. Mortenson, on the other hand, can veer between menace, innuendo and regret in nothing flat. Dressed in creamy white, his coiffured hair coming undone over the course of the film, seduced by his own perception of himself as a decent man, his Chester suggests mountains of backstory with a single measured look or pause in speech.
Like a seasoned boxer, Amini is skilled with the spars and jabs, as long as his three actors circle around each other. Unfortunately, it all falls apart in the third act. A key moment from the book is rewritten in the movie, reducing Chester from tragic monster to tragic hero. Amini also can’t resist the lure of a big-bang finale, and concludes his version with a frenzied foot chase through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, both Rydal and Chester pursuer and pursued. It’s a notion that plays well in theory but sits uncomfortably alongside the more diaphanous pleasures of the rest of the film. While the denouement mirrors that of the book, Highsmith had the courage to present a more vicious, bitter conclusion, as Chester is betrayed by his delusions to the end. Amini can’t quite replicate that existential angst, and so we’re asked to linger on Isaac’s tanned, square-jawed face for a final image, witnessing what is supposedly a moment of release… yet instead of the two faces of Rydal and Chester, we find ourselves reflecting on the unknowable face of Highsmith herself, too quicksilver and elusive to be pinned down by a conventional cinematic retelling.
