Two Faces of January, The (2014)
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Review #1,076 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Hossein Amini
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac
Plot: A thriller centered on a con artist, his wife, and a stranger who flee Athens after one of them is caught up in the death of a private detective.
Genre: Thriller / Drama
Awards: -
Runtime: 96min
Rating: PG13 for some violence, language and smoking.
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
“I'm sorry I disappointed you.”
Writer
Hossein Amini's directorial debut is an interesting one, at once in tune with
the genre it tries to serve, yet also succumbing to style and form without
quite finding the heft befitting the characters it attempts to study. This is no intense character study, in the
vein of Drive (2011), also written by
Amini, but a more laid-back suspense-drama about assuming fake identities.
It
stars Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst as Chester and Colette, a
husband-and-wife pair sightseeing in the exotic locale of Greece. They inadvertently meet an American tour
guide called Rydal, who is attracted to the couple, and helps them around. Rydal is our eyes, the person who we will
follow and possibly sympathize with. As
played by Oscar Issac (Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013), he adopts an intriguing position in the film –
he is a supporting character playing a lead role.
As
Chester’s
past catches up with him in a form of a private detective, who appears out of
the blue to harass him for money he owes (or stole from) some clients, things
take a turn for the worse. Amini’s
film then becomes a journey that will bring the trio to places they haven’t
been before, both literally and psychologically.
Functioning
as a Hitchcockian thriller in both moulds, The
Two Faces of January is a cross between North By Northwest (1959) and The 39 Steps (1935),
filled with picturesque views of Crete, Greece, and in its climax, a foot chase
across Istanbul, Turkey. Panic and fear
become part of what they must overcome to escape the authorities, particularly
affecting Dunst’s
struggling character. The performances
are just nice and not overly dramatic.
The Two Faces of January
is slow-moving; while it doesn’t lose you in ways that a
poorly-directed piece would, it never quite grips you enough to insist that you
should be involved in the emotions of the characters. The plot also doesn’t
quite hold up well when the film makes it over the finish line, but for what it
is worth, it goes through the generic paces rather okay.
Gorgeous
to look at and directed with elegance, Amini’s
work here would have been better appreciated if it was an older film from
another time. The strange irony is that
this is a period film set in the early 1960s, so perhaps its deliberate classical
style, if you may, doesn’t quite have the final word in
the face of Amini’s
modern screenwriting sensibilities.
Verdict: A slow-moving, low-key thriller that goes
through the paces rather okay, but never quite finds the heft befitting the
characters it tries to study.
GRADE: B- (7/10 or 3 stars)
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