The Big Picture

‘The Big Picture” plugs into the old fantasy of shucking a cramped, unhappy existence and reinventing yourself under another man’s name. Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, and the movies made from them, plow this field, as does Antonioni’s ghostly “The Passenger,” made with Jack Nicholson in 1975. The new film nods to them while going its own way. Based on a 1997 novel of the same title by Douglas Kennedy, it relocates the action from America to Paris and Eastern Europe, where identities can seem as hazy as international borders. The film’s French title, translated as “The Man Who Wanted to Live His Life,” is closer to the point as well.