• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, November 11, 2024

The choices filmmakers make are sometimes puzzling, although I admit up front that they know more about filmmaking than I do -- a lot more since I have never made a film.

Still, while watching the premiere episode on Friday of “The Day of the Jackal,” Peacock’s new 10-episode adaptation and reimagining of the original “Jackal” book and movie, I was stuck on a filmmaker’s choice that baffled me.

Over many of the scenes -- too many of them -- songs were played. They were not familiar to me, but they were all sung in the style that characterizes a segment of popular music today -- songs sung in slow, mournful, dreary tones.

The makers of “The Day of the Jackal” apparently believed that the dirge-like music was necessary to drive home and underscore the alienation, uncertainty and perhaps loneliness felt by the “Jackal” -- a code name for a lone, professional assassin (played by Eddie Redmayne, above) -- as he engaged in the meticulous preparation and carrying out of his profession.

But the music was wholly unnecessary. No pun intended, but it was overkill. All the scenes of the assassin walking through airports and the streets of European cities, assembling his rifle and setting up his scope and then making his exits after his killings would have expressed the same thing if all we heard was ambient sound.

If memory serves, this was the technique chosen for the 1973 movie of “The Day of the Jackal,” which was adapted, like the TV show, from the suspense novel by Frederick Forsyth.

The movie was a classic of what you might call “creeping suspense,” which was made all the more suspenseful by its naturalism. 

However, the choice that works most in favor of the “Day of the Jackal” TV series is Eddie Redmayne in the title role.

The actor perfects the blank stare of the dedicated professional whose success depends on self-discipline, caution and daring.

In the premiere episode alone, he wears masks, adopts identities, switches cars and erases evidence in ingenious ways.

Yes, he is a loner or, at the very least, he works alone. But other than the soundtrack of sad songs, there is no other evidence to suggest that he feels lonely in his life or work. In fact, for all we know, he might be quite satisfied with both of them.

While we are on the subject of music, the same sorts of song choices make themselves known in the life of the other major character in the show, an agent with MI6 who goes in search of the Jackal after a high-profile assassination.

She also gets the sad-song treatment. We also get to see her home life in which she neglects the emotional needs of her teen-aged daughter because the agent puts her work first ahead of everything. 

The story of her personal life is a waste of time and slows down the whole thing. In the end, it is Redmayne who rivets your attention, with or without the lifeless singing.

“The Day of the Jackal” starts streaming on Thursday, November 14, on Peacock.