The Two Faces of January

As envisioned by screen writer Hossein Amini in his big-screen adaptation, Patricia Highsmith's 1964 novel "The Two Faces of January" is a morality play about daddy issues -- as seen, fittingly to the title, from both sides. The film also marks Amini's directorial debut, but it's not an impressive achievement.

The film is fairly faithful to the Highsmith book, but the result falls some distance from either of the cinematic incarnations of Highsmith's more famous thriller, 1955's "The Talented Mr. Ripley." (Alain Delong starred in the 1960 Ren� Cl�ment-directed "Purple Noon"; Anthony Minghella remade the film in 1999 with Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.)

The two Highsmith stories, "Ripley" and "January," seem linked by a number of similarities: Americans abroad, embroiled in shady dealings that cascade into killings and paranoia. Another interpretation, of course, is that Highsmith was simply writing a watered-down imitation of her earlier success when she penned "January." Both works riff on class, greed, and psychological deficits, but where one wound tightly in a narrative labyrinth the other wanders through a less rewarding, less sinister, and more well-trod moral maze.

In the case of the story at hand, there are two scammers at work, and they're both old hands at their respective types of trickery by the time we meet them. One is a young fellow named Rydal (Oscar Isaac), who scrapes by making a living out of his services as a tour guide in Greece. He romances young women and finds occasions to fleece them by paying their tabs and having them pay him back at exorbitant exchange rates.

When Rydal first sees American tourist Chester MacFarland (Viggo Mortensen), he's struck by a resemblance between Chester and his late (and very much not lamented) father, a Harvard academic with a specialty in archaeology. (Hence Rydal's expertise in matters of the ancient world and his fluency in a number of languages.)

What Rydal notices even more, though, is Chester's beautiful young wife, Colette (Kirsten Dunst), who takes an immediate liking to him. At Colette's urging, she and Chester employ Rydal as a guide, and later on meet up with him and his date for dinner; Chester, like Colette, likes the young man, but tells his wife, "I wouldn't trust him to mow my lawn."

Maybe not. But it takes one to know one; Chester is the other scammer, and he's sold some phony stock to the wrong people. When a private detective dispatched by unhappy mobsters back in the States tracks Chester down, things rapidly spin out of control -- and Chester becomes reliant on Rydal's linguistic abilities, familiarity with local customs and methods of transportation, and his underworld connections to spirit he and Colette out of harm's (and justice's) way. By the time the two men's destinies become so joined, the movie's course feels carved out; as such, it offers little surprise, and we're left hopping at least for some stylish execution of the coming diagrammatic, step-by-step plotting.

No such luck: The narrative tropes here, be they literary or cinematic, are long worn thin, and a sense of weariness clings to this picture like the miasma of guilt and fear through which the characters move.

Michael Carlin's production design is handsome, as is the cinematography by Marcel Zyskind, but the script, direction, and acting never rise above the source material, which is strained at best and feels contrived throughout. There are some nice moments for Mortensen, as he wrestles with jealous insecurity and crushing paranoia, but Dunst's character crumbles in stereotypical fashion and Isaac's Rydal, though possessing greater psychological complexity than Colette, seems both inexplicably fixated and incredibly erratic.

There's a deeper mystery going on here, having to do with the dynamics between men of a certain age and their younger counterparts, and the tensions of sexual competition that can complicate even normal male relationships, but you're not going to define or resolve it in this midst of this particular morass.