Word of warning: when this
sentence closes I'll be ladeling out
spoilers galore, so if that
doesn't suit you leave now and come back after you've seen the movie
and drawn your own conclusions.
M: You know the rules of the game. You've played it long enough. We both have.
BOND: Maybe too long.
M: Speak for yourself!
Played the game too long? It seems strange to have this assertion
foisted atop the plough-horse shoulders of
Daniel Craig's
Bond, considering
Skyfall is only his third cinematic
outing.
Sean Connery and
Roger Moore both cantered with
deceptive ease through no less than seven James Bond adventures
apiece before contentedly trotting out to pasture and leaving
younger, less capable mavericks to spraddle-leg the goads of legacy.
Time and circumstance were perhaps unkind to Lazenby, Dalton and
Brosnan, but with
Casino Royale there was never any question
as to whether Craig had it in him to sustain the franchise. Even
Quantum of Solace, which everyone now seems to regard as a
colossal turd,* pulled in a king's ransom only a few million shy of
the biggest Bond payout. So long as Craig kept away from the pasta
table and didn't bitch too poisonously about the job, the role was
clearly his for the taking.
But even if it is slow to cross the
minds of moviegoers, the question, “Has Bond outlived his
usefulness?” is certainly one the filmmakers must ask themselves.
Pushing the question to the front and centre of Skyfall's
story, however, made for an unsettling experience. Worse yet, events
forced me to concede the unhappy affirmative. For the first time in
my life, I left the theatre not wanting to be James Bond.
An overfamiliarity with Bond is
certainly one formidable challenge to the enjoyment he offers.
Critics speak appreciatively, for instance, of
Skyfall's
motorcycle chase across the rooftops of a Cairo market. But most
reviewers aren't aware that Brosnan's Bond has already been there and
done that. Are you scratching your head, trying to recall the scene?
Then you haven't
played 007: Everything Or Nothing.
Take it from someone who has, it's even more exciting to successfully
manipulate then it is to watch.
Seemingly aware of this divide, the
filmmakers conclude their version of the chase by taking slow,
deliberate aim at Bond, then firing a sniper's bullet through his
chest and dropping him into the drink. Game over. Start again.
So far, so brilliant. The filmmakers
had me in the palm of their hand and kept me there, as they hoisted
the story high among the glass towers and neon signs of Shanghai,
then down into the gambling dens where Bond meets the mysterious
Sévérine (the most compelling scene in the movie, to my mind**),
and finally onto the deserted industrial island where Anton Chigurgh
— wup: Silva — awaits.
And then things fall apart. The scene
sets up the rest of the movie, and, depending on where the viewer
places value, either succeeds or fails robustly from this point on.
 |
| "What do you think, James: too late to turn around?" |
Sévérine and Bond are in shackles,
awaiting who knows what. Sévérine is clearly fearful of her fate,
while Bond remains impassive in the face of the unknown. She is taken
away, and he is seated in the lair, where he endures yet another, “We
have much in common, you and I,” speech, this time from a villain
who gives Fleming's implicitly gay subtext a hard nudge closer to the
explicit. Bond quips his way out of his shackles, and the two repair
to the courtyard, where Sévérine, still tied-up, awaits.
Now Silva forces Bond into a game of
William Burroughs-Tell, placing a shot-glass of The MacCallan 50 on
Sévérine's head and allowing Bond the first shot. Bond shoots too
high (purposely? More later); Silva deliberately kills her. “Waste
of good scotch,” says Bond. He then single-handedly defeats Silva's
goons and holds him at gunpoint while British helicopters descend to
the rescue — too late for Sévérine, alas.
At this point my emotional ties to the
story disappeared. All I could see were B-movie tropes older than
the pulp mill, and reheated leftovers from other recent blockbusters.
Dodging machine-gun crossfire by sprinting in a straight line with
head lowered? Check. Running away from, then jumping to the left of,
a fiery explosion? Check. Helicopter swooping in on the attack while
broadcasting ironically jaunty music? Check.
And how about the script?
“He's been
one move ahead of us every step of the way. It's time to change the
game.” The “game-changer”: head to
a familiar, abandoned shack
to set up a defence and await the villain's final assault. Say, why
not make the shack the hero's childhood home? While you're at it, why
not make it a mansion? With a secret tunnel? And a gruff but affable
groundskeeper? As M and Bond and Alfred — wup:
Kincade —
scoured the building for potential weaponry, I half expected them to
stumble across a baffled Christian Bale, caught taking a mid-day
mope.
But Skyfall is where we get the
motherlode, quite literally. M dies within a stone's throw of where
Bond's mum and pop have been laid to rest — yet another très
tragique loss our increasingly Sisyphean hero must stoically
endure. Was he crying as she breathed her last? It could be argued
yes, it could be argued no.
As could so much of the movie. Getting
back to poor Sévérine, why did he make the quip about the scotch?
Was it, to spin it generously, an effort to non-plus the villain into
distracted meditation, the better to catch him and his goons
off-guard? Then why did he hand Silva over to M, when he'd promised
Sévérine he'd avenge her death? Was Bond absolutely certain he
could pull off a private vendetta in London? Or maybe he didn't mean
what he promised. Maybe (yikes!) he really did feel badly
about the scotch.
Or maybe he's grown too weary of women
getting killed on him to give a toss one way or the other. Lord knows
I have. Watching Sévérine get shot and forgotten I realized what
had indeed outlived its usefulness: that dreariest and most
predictable of adolescent fantasies, the perfunctory death of a lover
who complicates things. Conversely, it also revealed what I had come
to value most in Craig's iteration of the character: the patient
revelation of unguessed-at depths, brought out solely by the women in
whom Bond invests interest — Vesper Lynd, Camille, and once upon a
time, M herself.
Sévérine was only given half a
chance. Now, with M erased from the scene and Moneypenny corralled
into office domesticity, Bond returns to the fustiest old boy's club
imaginable. For “the Bond of the new Milennium” to regress any
further he'd have to join
Promise Keepers.
Feh. Game over. Start again.
*I saw the movie again the other
week, and while the story is not as taut as Casino Royale, I'd
still rate it as the second-best of the post-Connery Bonds. Even with
Jack White's homework-at-the-last-minute theme-song, Quantum is
leaps ahead of this movie.
**
Nor am I alone: “The short
conversation between Craig and Marlohe is perhaps the most realized
sequence of the movie: The actress conveys both terror and
vulnerability, and Craig comes across as concerned, competent, and
empathetic.” Noah Berlatsky for The Atlantic.
