The New Bond
Jan. 12th, 2008 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficI watched Casino Royale recently. It’s one of those films you can’t just leave on as background noise; by the third act I have to drop my notepad and just watch the acting. Smart writing, good performers playing off each other, some spectacular and innovative action sequences, it’s great.
But it’s the first act, really the first half of the movie, that makes its mark. Casino Royale isn’t just a reboot of the James Bond series… it’s a goodbye to the old one (and a considerably better send-off than Die Another Day, at that). The entire ellipsis plot is basically the Bond formula in a microcosm (consider it as a riff on Thunderball, if that helps). Bond gets the girl, foils the villainous mastermind, and stops the evil scheme. He’s as cocksure and experienced as ever, if a little stingy with the one-liners. It’s not until Solange dies that the cracks start to show in the armor, the armor that’s been up since Sean Connery played the character. The real deconstruction starts, not the cheap and easy kind of deconstruction that has been destroying American comics of late, but the kind that asks necessary questions and reinvents characters before (or well after, in Bond's case) they get stale.
The entire scene with M at Dimitrios' house... that isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Bond’s supposed to have a love scene with Solange in PG-13 kinda way, make a cheeky double entrende at Q or M, then fade out… James Bond will return in…
Instead, death is dwelled upon. Whether it’s the “made you feel it, did he?” of the first kill, the brief flash of the second kill’s family photo, or the smirk Bond displays when the bomber reaps what he sowed, none of the henchmen are disposed of as cavalierly as in the past movies… not until the climax, when Bond is well on his way to blending the old playboy super-spy with the new, anguished, Jack Bauer protagonist of the 21st century. That climaxes in the biggest death of all, and the one that’s dwelled on the most… Vesper’s.
There's a note of subversion in the way Bond's theme isn't played at his most triumphant moment... it's debatable whether the end of Casino Royale can be considered a triumph at all, especially as regards Bond himself... but after a grieving, traumatized Bond has just maimed a man he intends to torture or at least interrogate. It's an ironic commentary picking up where Martin Campbell's last Bond film, Goldeneye, left off. That started taking risks with the material, started picking at the fantasy of the James Bond image. There, Bond was condemned to some degree as a relic of sixties playboyism and even chauvinism. Here, he’s reinvented as both crueler and more sensitive, more vulnerable and yet still fantastical. The Brosnan films were largely content to leave Bond as a vehicle for escapism, with even the daring TWINE shoving in the much-maligned Christmas Jones as “consolation prize” for the loss of Elektra. Under the franchise’s new helm, it looks as if Bond is finally going to be fleshed out as a character, finally fulfill the promise to the audience made by films like License To Kill and Die Another Day (which always tried to explore Bond’s life outside of the tuxedo-armored Don Juan, but always hit the reset button at the end. No growth, no change).
Casino Royale isn’t about how an agent becomes the Bond of Connery, Dalton, and Brosnan. It’s about forging a new kind of Bond out of the ashes of the old. And that, to me, is a lot more interesting.
But it’s the first act, really the first half of the movie, that makes its mark. Casino Royale isn’t just a reboot of the James Bond series… it’s a goodbye to the old one (and a considerably better send-off than Die Another Day, at that). The entire ellipsis plot is basically the Bond formula in a microcosm (consider it as a riff on Thunderball, if that helps). Bond gets the girl, foils the villainous mastermind, and stops the evil scheme. He’s as cocksure and experienced as ever, if a little stingy with the one-liners. It’s not until Solange dies that the cracks start to show in the armor, the armor that’s been up since Sean Connery played the character. The real deconstruction starts, not the cheap and easy kind of deconstruction that has been destroying American comics of late, but the kind that asks necessary questions and reinvents characters before (or well after, in Bond's case) they get stale.
The entire scene with M at Dimitrios' house... that isn’t how it’s supposed to work. Bond’s supposed to have a love scene with Solange in PG-13 kinda way, make a cheeky double entrende at Q or M, then fade out… James Bond will return in…
Instead, death is dwelled upon. Whether it’s the “made you feel it, did he?” of the first kill, the brief flash of the second kill’s family photo, or the smirk Bond displays when the bomber reaps what he sowed, none of the henchmen are disposed of as cavalierly as in the past movies… not until the climax, when Bond is well on his way to blending the old playboy super-spy with the new, anguished, Jack Bauer protagonist of the 21st century. That climaxes in the biggest death of all, and the one that’s dwelled on the most… Vesper’s.
There's a note of subversion in the way Bond's theme isn't played at his most triumphant moment... it's debatable whether the end of Casino Royale can be considered a triumph at all, especially as regards Bond himself... but after a grieving, traumatized Bond has just maimed a man he intends to torture or at least interrogate. It's an ironic commentary picking up where Martin Campbell's last Bond film, Goldeneye, left off. That started taking risks with the material, started picking at the fantasy of the James Bond image. There, Bond was condemned to some degree as a relic of sixties playboyism and even chauvinism. Here, he’s reinvented as both crueler and more sensitive, more vulnerable and yet still fantastical. The Brosnan films were largely content to leave Bond as a vehicle for escapism, with even the daring TWINE shoving in the much-maligned Christmas Jones as “consolation prize” for the loss of Elektra. Under the franchise’s new helm, it looks as if Bond is finally going to be fleshed out as a character, finally fulfill the promise to the audience made by films like License To Kill and Die Another Day (which always tried to explore Bond’s life outside of the tuxedo-armored Don Juan, but always hit the reset button at the end. No growth, no change).
Casino Royale isn’t about how an agent becomes the Bond of Connery, Dalton, and Brosnan. It’s about forging a new kind of Bond out of the ashes of the old. And that, to me, is a lot more interesting.
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Date: 2008-01-14 11:19 pm (UTC)It sort of happened in the novels - occasionally the girl from the end of one book would appear at the beginning of the next.
And the memory of Vesper recurs, so that will fit perfectly into Bond 22. Hopefully they play it with a light touch, though.