Review: The Two Faces of January

The most appropriate description of The Two Faces of January is 'stylish': that is its main selling point. Set in 1960s Greece, affluent Americans stroll around as if in a Mad Men holiday. The suspiciously well-dressed local peasantry smoke by Ancient ruins and crumbling tavernas, Hollywood's beautiful exports languidly milling about in bespoke linen. Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind deserves praise for his handling of these scenes, which capture the sun soaked environment with overexposed precision. Istanbul is used, as always, for its winding Ottoman alleyways that allow our Western heroes to be chased by moustachiod baddies.

Oscar Isaac, enjoying a career boost since Inside Llewin Davis, is Jersey-born Rydal, a tour guide who performs petty swindles and scams in central Athens. He ends up performing both these services for a wealthy American couple, comprising the mean, mysterious money-shifting Chester McFarland (Viggo Mortensen) and his young, pleasant wife Colette (Kirsten Dunst). However, a private detective shows up and informs Chester, and us, that some people who Chester defrauded back in the States are not happy. Chester accidentally kills him, Rydal helps out, and the trio are forced on the run in Hitchcockian fashion. Chester must also stop his marriage failing with the entrance of the young upstart.

The posters all declare that The Two Faces of January is brought to you by the producers of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, so you would expect that the plot would twist and turn, beguiling the viewer and forcing deep thought. But it doesn't. The events described above pretty much cover it - the chase goes on, the odd thing happens, it ends. The intelligence of TTSS, turned in on itself in knots, is entirely absent. The characters are established as shady, but are never explored, meaning that the figures on-screen are simply two dimensional stock types: swindling businessman, roguish young con artist, pretty woman. The police that follow them are just uniforms, the private investigator a flat imitation of Marlowe or Spade. The posters also declare that it's from the same novelist as The Talented Mr. Ripley and adapted by the same screenwriter as Drive. Again, bold comparisons that show just how shallow The Two Faces of January is. They are all stylish, sure, but TTFOJ is not nearly as pensive, profound or dangerous. It seems almost as if it was cobbled together as a re-hash of past glories for the pay cheque. The Mediterranean setting and sinister, plotting characters from The Talented Mr. Ripley are there, but the bubbling menace is absent.

Similarly, some themes are touched on, then left entirely. Deception, for example. Rydal mentions that he was a Yale man, which Chester doubts, but we never find out who is right. The trio circle each other in the paranoid, hot atmosphere, yet never seem to uncover personal secrets. Rydal's father is constantly mentioned, having just died, their dysfunctional relationship brought up in conversations that threaten to go somewhere. But again, nothing is made of it - it turns out Rydal just didn't really like his dad, and that's that. The actors all perform well, but without much depth to their roles they cannot take it anywhere . It leaves you wondering what the point of the whole thing is.

The chase has been a cinematic trope almost since the invention of the motion picture. Hitchcock got a lot out of them. This is what The Two Faces of January is built upon. Combine this with the visuals and it's perfectly enjoyable. A crime caper with pantomime villains, textbook tension scenes and an HD colour palate, The Two Faces of January is a worthy triumph of style over substance.

Review: Locke

The charismatically-named Ivan Locke (perhaps more suited to a medieval warlord) gets into his BMW and starts driving. He doesn’t leave the car for the rest of the film, nor do any other characters appear physically. Instead, all the action of Locke unfolds over the phone. Welsh builder Ivan is in the middle of a personal crisis, which also affects his professional life, and throws out instructions telephonically during a nocturnal commute to London. The tale doesn’t tell whether he has a forgiving mobile package. As scant as that information is, any more would tamper with the experience. The teasing out of information, and Locke’s attempts to fix everything, are the central premise of Steven Knight's latest production.

Wearing a country gent’s shirt more suited to Nigel Farage than a builder, Tom Hardy is predictably the central attraction of the show. Without an actor able to blend realism and force of personality, Locke would have flopped. Many of Hardy’s characters have thus far been extroverted, boldly charismatic and brashly noticeable. This was the opposite, almost as if Hardy wanted to prove that he could act in the Bogart school of understated expressions. The stress and mental strains start to seep through the concrete expression of calm collection as the evening wears on. What seems random is Ivan’s thick Welsh accent. Why? What was the point? Maybe Hardy was so used to silly accents from Batman that he couldn’t act without one. Not being a Welshman myself I am unable to say how good it was, but I did think that at moments it bordered on Indian. Either way, it was an inexplicable linguistic insertion. Nonetheless, Hardy proved yet again why he is a constant critical success, driving the plot as easily as the BMW.

Ivan is a builder, more specifically a concrete specialist. It is understood that he is the best in the business, always ahead of paperwork and running a tight ship. But the night before the biggest concrete pour in Europe (outside of military nuclear works, we are told), he absconds to deal with bigger issues. His bosses are furious, but Ivan tries to manage it all from his car. His adherence to building with concrete borders on the obsessional, so the professional side of the story is a way of showing how this controlling man tries to deal with messy life. Ivan acts in such a rigid fashion to avoid being like his father, yet has ended up in a very similar position. Is this because the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, or that life is not as controllable as concrete? There is no formula for love or happiness. Ivan is essentially a decent man, but a moment of weakness has left him unable to un-hurt those closest to him.

Locke has been described in some quarters as a thriller. But it doesn’t rely on twists, so cannot really be described as a thriller per se. Instead, it is a character study, seemingly more suited to the theatre than cinema. It has been written so tightly and acted so superbly that it is elevated from simply a commute down the M40 (without even stops at periodic Little Chefs) to a tense personal voyage. Whilst not nail biting, as some have suggested, Locke is delightfully claustrophobic. Whereas a film usually pulls away from a location after a while, viewers are forced to remain in the car with Ivan’s strifes mounting. The petty annoyances of having to contact a council official busy in a curry house and memorise mobile numbers niggle at the audience. On top of that is the major familial plot, which lifts the enterprise into film-worthy levels.

Perhaps Locke is a comment on the state of modern man. The existentialist crises that face our society's young chaps are reflected in Ivan: having to act like a man but feeling like they are being blamed for it; taking responsibility and doing the right thing even though that will be condemnation; the negatives of masculinity without the positives. Certainly Locke echoes the thoughts of If-, about (if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you), a twenty-first century act of stoicism because, as Ivan repeats, 'it is the right thing to do'. With this in mind I would imagine it to be a film more suited to men than women. But maybe I'm wrong.

While the shooting style is fairly minimal, there is room for quite a few expressionistic out-of-focus shots of streetlights and car bonnets. The angles shift from one side of the vehicle to another, and bursts of lyricless music stimulate a feeling of stifling doom. Although not always a comfortable watch, Locke is gripping, compelling, and all those other descriptions a psychological semi-thriller should be.

Hardy does 'stressed'

Review: Calvary

Calvary is an Irish black comedy from filmmaker John Michael McDonagh. It tells the story of Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson), a priest in rural Sligo who is dismissed or abused by most of the troubled locals despite being an exemplary moral force. His routine is brought to a violent standstill when an unseen villager announces, during confession, that he will kill Lavelle in a week. The anonymous man was abused as a child by a clergyman, and he has chosen an innocent replacement to pay because it will be all the more shocking. Over the next week, we watch Lavelle try to make sense of it all in his troubled parish.

The setting is importantly modern Ireland: society in the grips of a choking recession whilst simultaneously shedding its Catholic bearings. The characters all struggle with everyday spiritual questions without organised religion acting as the main moral force. People look to money, drugs, drink and other instant vices to provide comfort against a carefully-shot backdrop of green mountains and crumbling white cottages. Despite the rural locale, it is a place where there is open disrespect toward priests, immigration (albeit minimal) and juvenile serial killers. I suspect that this national introspection was a main concern of McDonagh's.

Various nefarious locals exude auras of ill-intent, a la most films set in the countryside, with a Celtic undertone that’s reminiscent of The Wicker Man. We have a pseudo-aristocratic former banker, a sadistic doctor, a brooding African mechanic, a masochistic adulterer, an angry ex-copper and more. Gleeson must be lavishly praised for his performance. The cast is superb (IT Crowd dork Christ O’Dowd in particular), but it is the burly lead who so subtly captures a man in turmoil. His cracked, sympathetic facial expressions single him out amongst the rest, who struggle unsuccessfully to combat their own problems. They are often framed awkwardly, either threateningly dominating the screen or perched lurking in the corners.

I suspect that the film is stuffed full of religious references and theological thoughts, and that the more you watch it the more you uncover. Certainly many of the seven deadly sins are displayed by the villagers, from gluttony (boozing and drug-taking) to lust (cardinal preoccupation) to wrath (murder). The title refers to Christ’s crucifixion location, but is Lavelle as ready to sacrifice himself in the midst of taunting sinners? To its great credit, Calvary doesn’t preach: it is spiritual investigation of a subject which is generally argued along entrenched, political lines. A bit like a gentle parish priest instead of the usual fire and brimstone pulpit zealotry. The whodunit element (for the potential assassin remains secret) is not of particular importance, nor is the violence, being more a way of tying the plot together with an urgency and sinister undercurrent.

Calvary is on an instant level about the Church, its abuses and organised religion generally. But beneath that superficial subject, the film is more of an examination of the human condition, and attempts to find solutions for all the inexplicable horror of life. This is much like religion. A superb and entertaining film more concerned with stimulating thought than cheap thrills.