The
opening of any film is rife with visual and thematic information and clues that
anticipate and inform the rest of the movie. With Thelma & Louise (1991), director Ridley Scott puts a new and
gendered spin on both the expansive road movie and the intimate buddy film.
Teeming with thrilling, life-affirming energy, exuberant comedy, warmth, and
wit, the movie focuses on the two title characters, utterly ordinary,
working-class women fleeing the monotony of their lives and discovering
unexpected, untapped wells of feeling and strength. Not unlike the Western hero
of Hollywood classics, these ordinary women encounter situations and conditions
that make them extraordinary. The Western is also invoked through Hans Zimmer’s
mournful, tough, galvanizing country tinged score. Even before the first scene,
over the opening credits, the music creates a poignant mood that is at once
earthly and ethereal, like Thelma &
Louise itself—or should it be “themselves”?
Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut takes its title from the English derivation of Janus,
the two-faced Roman god who stands at the cusp of the new year, simultaneously
musing backward at recent lessons and experiences, and peering forward to the
murky and elusive future ahead, a guardian at the crossroads of the past and
present. The reference implies the twin forces of duplicity and shifting
circumstances that swirl in the fragrant atmosphere of The Two Faces of January, an old-school, sly, seductive Southern
Europe-set tale of moral compromise and misdirection. Based on the Patricia Highsmith
novel of the same name, Amini’s film has its own two faces; it’s at once an
involving character drama and a gripping suspense movie, a pleasurable period piece
of precision and class and a tight and tidy thriller as shrewd, sleek, and
scintillating as its characters.
