John Schlesinger

  • Eye for an Eye (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) Isn’t it fascinating how failed manipulation ends up creating hatred for the manipulator? I’m not giving psychological advice here—I’m talking about Eye for an Eye, a thoroughly detestable thriller from the depths of the mid-1990s. To its rare credit, it does announce its reprehensive colour early, as the opening moments race to its first manipulative set-piece—the murder of a young girl by a psychopath, heard by her mom on the phone as she’s stuck in a traffic jam. The histrionics coming out of Sally Field during that sequence, added to the naked manipulation required to get there in less than five minutes, are all the warnings you need to figure out that the entire film is going to be like that. Built on paranoid reactionary propaganda in order to create debilitating fear and retributive anger among the lowest common denominator, Eye for an Eye goes through the clichés at a blistering pace: The cute kid is killed, the hilariously over-the-top killer is caught, legal technicalities ensure that the killer is set free to kill again, and the mom decides to take justice into her own hands. And go it goes until the wearily predictable finale. There are no surprises here (although a subplot featuring Charlayne Woodard almost gets the film questioning its own assumptions, but not really), only disappointments and hollow attempts to make viewers blind with rage. No matter if the film piles on the absurdities: this is a film made for Fox News viewers, and the dumber Fox News viewer at that. Why did Field, Ed Harris and Kiefer Sutherland end up in this? Well, I suspect that Sutherland at least had some fun playing the single worst imaginable antagonist with a great deal of over-the-top gusto. Director John Schlesinger directs this vigilante fantasy with the slickness of 1990s thrillers, but none of the qualities—Eye for an Eye remains a deeply unpleasant film: cheap, trite, ugly… and manipulative.

  • The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

    The Falcon and the Snowman (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) You can always watch The Falcon and the Snowman for being one of Sean Penn’s early performances, but I found something more interesting in director John Schlesinger’s depiction of a specific time and place—the mid-1970s Southern California defence tech industry, and how the political disillusionment of the time could drive otherwise normal young Americans to propose information to the Soviets thanks to some ill-defined ideal of détente. Or at least that’s what one of the two characters believes, because the dramatic linchpin of the movie is the duelling relationship between the two leads—an idealist competent (played by Timothy Hutton), and a far less reliable friend (Penn) who acts as the go-between with the Soviets. Taking up in spycraft and the complex relationship between source and case officer, except with the inverted perspective from what we usually see, The Falcon and the Snowman remains a mildly effective thriller in which we do root for the spies to be caught red-handed (and one of them more than the other). Perhaps delighting in inversion from spy movie clichés, it’s specifically about spies who end up vastly outclassed by the demands of the lifestyle, and soon seek to get out of it once it doesn’t live up to their romantic notions of it. It does all amount to an effective period piece, down-to-earth and somewhat merciless in puncturing the clichés of the genre while still being effective in its procedural details. No wonder it’s based on a true story.