Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Action
Salad
(Quantum of Solace, 11/24/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
It
can sometimes be a philosophical exercise to write about movies these
days. Consider the following paradox: you have a barrel of wine, and
add one drop of water at a time. At what exact point—at what number
of drops—do the contents of the barrel become water, and not wine?
Now this: a critic watches a Tom Cruise film entitled Mission: Impossible.
The film shares virtually nothing with the original TV series except
the title and a theme song. So is he supposed to treat this as Mission:
Impossible, or some cynical Hollywood concoction meant only to exploit,
not remake, an old favorite?
The statement "Quantum of
Solace is the new James Bond film" would seem to be beyond
philosophical dispute—until we watch it. Like 2006's terrific Casino
Royale, it stars Daniel Craig as perhaps the coldest, least unctuous,
most magnetically physical 007 in the long history of Bondage. It features
fast cars, exotic locations, and spectacular women (if not necessarily
in that order). The plot—something about an evil environmentalist
(Mathieu Amalric) trying to steal Bolivia's water supply—makes
about as much sense as most other scenarios in the series. Bond girls
Olga Kurylenko and Gemma Arterton provide somewhat more than a quantum
of solace for sore eyes.
But Quantum very intentionally
lacks other elements we expect to see in Bond movies: no Q, no spy gadgets,
no flirtation with Moneypenny, no shaken martinis, no "Bond, James
Bond" and—if memory serves—not a note of Monty Norman's
famous 007 Theme until the very last minute of the film.
Perhaps most radical of all, it
lacks what all Bond movies (including Casino Royale) have featured—
namely, the golden glow of worldliness. These were never great works
of cinema, but at least they conveyed the joy of knowing how to wear
a tuxedo, of having the taste to choose the proper wine to go with carre
d'agneau, of knowing what to say to a woman before and after you
bed her. In short, the pleasure being a gin-swilling, guncarrying, globetrotting
master of the universe. Quantum's Bond is master of nothing,
least of all his impatience to get on with the next licensed killing.
Drip, drip, drip: is it wine or is it water? Or
more directly, at what point does all this cease to be Bond, and become
something else, such as one of those Jason Bourne movies?
The rationale for this sourpuss
007, of course, is that he's still in mourning for the death of his
beloved Vesper (Eva Green) in the last film. This would be fair enough
if the character showed any sort of developmental arc, some crack of
vulnerability that, by way of contrast, would make his fury that much
more human. But the script by Paul Haggis, et al. never allows Bond
to develop, to grow or change. He not only lacks an arc—he's emotionally
flatlined. Memo to Paul Haggis: flat characters are dull.
Even this would be excusable if
Solace offered consistent thrills in the stunts department. Unfortunately,
the film is yet another in a growing series of Hollywood spectacles
that offer "action salad": fights and chases where jumpy,
jangly, super-heated editing takes the place of intelligible choreography.
The opening tableau, a car-chase over a narrow mountain road, is so
over-cut that it's impossible to see who is doing what to whom. If good
movie action sequence can be likened to a sentence, with a beginning,
middle and end, and a rationale for what connects them, then the action
in Solace is like a debate response by Sarah Palin—there's
an utterance being produced, and the thing comes to a close, but you're
not sure how the words are supposed to go together.
Bond films can be nonsensical, sure,
and predictable. But incoherence is never an attractive quality for
the world's suavest spy.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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