Mike Figgis

  • Mr. Jones (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) If you often find professional movie reviewers obsessing over a specific film’s reason to exist, there’s a good reason for that. Knowing about Hollywood’s greenlighting process means that there are dozens more film proposals than finished films, and something always tilts the balance toward what shows up on screen. Usually money, but more often money with added purpose. By the time Mr. Jones was filming in 1991, Richard Gere (who co-produced the film) was arriving at the top of his superstardom following well-regarded performances in Pretty Woman and Internal Affairs—it’s natural for actors with that level of clout to start looking for acting showcases. He certainly gets one here, as a protagonist with bipolar disorder that gives him the chance to go from one emotional extreme to another in the same scene. In director Mike Figgis’ hands, the film turns into a slickly overproduced romantic drama that keeps the focus on Gere at all times, whether he’s going through several emotional states, cajoling a foreman, rushing an orchestra, romancing his psychiatrist or threatening to jump off a building. It’s a showy performance that overshadows a script built on contrivances and nice Hollywood sentiments—the romance between patient and doctor means that Mr. Jones could be subtitled “Medical Malpractice: The Movie,” and the pat overemotional ending rings hollow during the entire end credits. Still, credit should go to Gere: it’s a terrific performance and it does much to make us forget about the rest of the film. It exists to showcase Gere, and it does just that.

  • Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

    Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2016) While Nicolas Cage’s stature as a dramatic actor has fallen tremendously in the past few years, it’s useful to go back to Leaving Las Vegas to remind ourselves of how good he could be when provided with a good script, an attentive director and enough opportunities to show what he could do. Here, he plays a washed-up screenwriter whose alcohol problems have led to divorce, ostracism and, in the film’s first few minutes, a self-imposed exile to Las Vegas where he intends to drink himself to death. This, as the film quickly points out, is not a matter of hours but weeks. There’s one complication in his plan: the appearance of Elizabeth Shue as an escort who finds common ground with him. Their relationship evolves into a spectacularly dysfunctional mess of co-dependency, twisted affection, impossible rules and headlong rush to self-destruction. The ending is not uplifting, but it’s entirely appropriate. Writer/director Mike Figgis (working from a novel) shoots the film using low-grain super-16 stock, lending a muddy quality to the images that works in the film’s unpolished favour. Leaving Las Vegas, given its downbeat nature and harsh scenes of humiliation and pain, is not an easy movie to love—but it’s easy to respect and it plays well even twenty years later, especially as a reminder of Nicolas Cage at the height of his dramatic capabilities. Given his propensity to take up roles in direct-to-video thrillers and the disappearance of adult thrillers from the Hollywood landscape, I don’t think we’ll ever see anything quite like this from him ever again.