Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Never
Say Not Again
(Casino Royale, 11/27/06)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Like
Democratic election victories and US Olympic gold in basketball, good
James Bond movies come along so seldom it's easy to forget they're possible.
When it comes to Ian Fleming's iconic spy/assassin, the failure is especially
puzzling, since everything necessary for success is already in the source
material. It takes the resourceful kind of incompetence—or cowardice—to
make enough bad Bond movies to nearly kill the franchise. Yet there
we stood after the release of the last ho hum Bond opus, Die Another
Day (2002).
In the latest installment, Casino
Royale, director Martin Campbell and screenwriters Neal Purvis,
Robert Wade and Paul (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) Haggis have
wisely returned to basics. Fleming's Bond, after all, was never supposed
to have the kind of face you'd see pinned to schoolgirls' closet doors.
He's a bruiser, or as M (Judi Dench) remarks here, a "blunt instrument."
The young Sean Connery came closest to realizing the written Bond, at
least in part because there's something of the Midlothian tough behind
that Scottish burr. In casting Daniel Craig (Munich, Infamous),
the makers of Royale have returned to the character's broken-nosed roots.
Of course, there's no point in minding
the plot, which has no more internal logic than a travel brochure. The
opening chase scene, for instance, takes place in Madagascar, but features
nothing more of that remarkable island than construction sites for the
characters to scale and leap around. For purposes of meeting Bond girls,
Nassau, Venice, and Lake Como are more promising. This chapter's heavy,
renegade banker Le Chiffre (played by Denmark's pride, Mats Mikkelsen)
also haunts picturesque places while he isn't financing terrorists and
(in a truly red herring) weeping blood through his freakishly villainous
tear ducts. Le Chiffre ("the cipher") also appears to have
a very unbanker-like affinity for high-stakes poker, which somehow gets
us to Montenegro's Casino Royale for a winner-take-all match with 007.
Royale is based on the very
first Fleming novel, which previously reached the screen only as a Peter
Sellers/David Niven spoof in 1967. Since the success of Spiderman
and Batman Begins, Hollywood has had a taste for so-called "origin
stories." Here, we see Bond earn his double-oh assassin's license
with his first two kills, as well as that formative period before he
got fussy over how his martinis are made.
But the pleasure of Casino Royale
doesn't lie in exposition. Instead, it's in watching Craig stalk those
precious spaces, chaos shining through those baby blues like the whipping
tail of a bull in a crystal shop. In a time when the paragon of male
success is—a la Entourage—a lout with a billion in
the bank and a reversed baseball cap, there's a definite retro thrill
in rediscovering how to converse with a lady, or to tip the valet on
one's way to the concierge. One also appreciates those other little
tips on survival, such as how to call the barman from the poker table,
or how to make yourself an emetic cocktail after you've been poisoned.
It's a good bet that stunning Eva
Green (The Dreamers, Kingdom of Heaven) was not even alive for
Sean Connery's last Bond outing, much less for Ursula Andress
and Pussy Galore. As tart-tongued "Vesper Lynd," however,
she pulls off the tricky task of seeming inaccessible without being
chilly. The somewhat less memorable Giancarlo Giannini is also along
for the ride, though not so much for his talent as for representing
the generically shifty European male. And, of course, Dame Judi is back
as M, for no obvious good reason at all.
But Casino Royale comes up
looking and feeling better than the sum of its parts. In a world that
really contains such cartoony villains as Kim Jung Il, or such improbable
"non-state actors" as Osama bin Laden, Bond suddenly seems
relevant again. Now if we could only slip him into Pyongyang…
©2006 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog