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The Observer
5/11/06
By
Tim Adams
Give or take the
odd Octopussy, I suppose, like all of us, I've pretty much
seen them all. My first, memorably - you never forget your first -
was a rerun of Thunderball at a Gaumont in Birmingham, which
in my memory was in the process of being demolished. I'd have been
eight, and the most dramatic big screen extravanganza I'd seen
previously was Swiss Family Robinson, so Bond came with something of
the force of revelation; I went home to re-enact Sean Connery's
underwater fight with Largo's men with a single rubber-suited Action
Man in the bath.
My first on its
proper release, not long after, was The Man with The Golden Gun,
complete with Lulu's soundtrack. I had nightmares for a while about
Christopher Lee's Scaramanga, and recall trying to join in with
playground discussions about the voluptuous merits of Britt
Elkland's Mary Goodnight in relation to Pussy Galore, a name whose
reference was possibly still beyond me. I was, in any case, hooked,
for a long time secretly thinking Roger Moore was the best Bond, a
fact which would have dismayed my Dad who properly held out for the
more spartan virtues of Sean Connery, and my Mum, who would
sometimes make an impassioned, slightly flushed argument for the
missed opportunity that was George Lazenby.
Anyhow, with some
of this in mind, I went along to the ODEON Leicester Square on
Friday night for the first screening of the new Bond, the Daniel
Craig Bond. Most of the other balding, paunchy one-time-schoolboys
in the queue seemed to have a similar not quite cynical sense of
expectation. There'd be chases, and gadgets and gags - the last Bond
line I'd heard in the cinema, was also one of the best: Pierce
Brosnan, on the Bosphorus with Dr Christmas Jones at the end of The
World is not Enough: 'I've always wanted to have Christmas in
Turkey.'
Hopes were high. If nothing else, there would be John Barry's theme,
which, as I joined the line to have my mobile phone confiscated - an
emasculation I could never imagine 007 submitting to - was already
dun-de-dunning in my head. The word before this screening was that
Daniel Craig's Bond would be a purist's Bond, dirtier and grittier
than recent smoothies. CASINO ROYALE was the first of Fleming's
books, and the only one, for contractual reasons, never previously
filmed except in the Peter Sellers spoof. It would return James to
his roots, the cold-blooded killer, the ex-wartime Commander, before
fast women and invisible cars turned his head. It begins, after a
title sequence involving the designs on the back of playing cards,
and diamonds coming out of guns and writhing croupiers in silhouette
- you know - in exactly that retro spirit, apparently in black and
white, in Prague: Bond is in the shadows surprising a double agent
rifling through a filing cabinet. Craig had effectively auditioned
for Bond in Layer Cake, in which he played a cocaine dealer
out of his depth, and we cut to what looks like a scene from that
film - the very un-Bond-like graphic violence of Craig murdering an
informer in a white-tiled public lavatory, holding the man's head
underwater in a cheap sink. This, we are led to understand, was
Bond's first kill, the most traumatic, his 007 status still pending,
before the quips set in. His second, of the double agent by the
filing cabinet, with a silencer, is more straightforward, and
prompts a wry smile.
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That grainy
preamble over, Craig is in colour and up and running - straight
through a staged cobra and mongoose fight in a market in Madagascar,
over the odd trashed car, past plenty of startled villagers carrying
unlikely dry goods, up some serious scaffolding scattering hard-hatted
building workers, and on to a crane tower over the impossibly blue
ocean in pursuit of a scar-faced villain with a bag of explosives.
Who wants backstreet grittiness when you can have fights with guns
that run out of bullets at opportune moments at high altitude?
Craig is the first Bond since Connery who looks more than capable of
doing his own stunts, he runs like a streetfighter, falls credibly
from great heights and has been practising his free running. This is
pre-Q Bond; the closest he gets to a gadget is a decent mobile
phone; he spends a good deal of his time chasing fast cars on foot
in a manner Roger Moore would have deemed far too keen; to start
with he doesn't even seem to have his own motor. Worse still, he
hasn't yet earned Barry's theme, except in odd mangled chords.
The best preface to Casino Royale is Simon Winder's wonderful
book THE MAN WHO SAVED BRITAIN out in paperback to coincide with the
release of the film. It's the comic history of an obsession with
Bond, both his own and our own - an unravelling of all the curious
hang-ups about posh drinks and hat-throwing and casual misogyny that
takes in the demise of imperial ambition, post-war austerity and
Fleming's taste for torture. It's a brilliant deconstruction of
those staples of British life that Paul Johnson, writing long ago of
Bond in the New Statesmen, denounced as 'sex, snobbery and
sadism', (this before Johnson moved to the Spectator and
discovered the pleasures of the same).
You rather wish Cubby Broccoli and the rest had studied Winder's
memoir before embarking on CASINO ROYALE. One of the things his book
argues well is that the explosion of a gas tanker is no real
substitute for vaguely plausible plotting or some notion of
contemporary relevance - a key element in Fleming's thrillers was
his sharp move from villainous former Nazis, to Cold War paranoia.
In attempting to flesh out the idea of Daniel Craig's Bond as
backstory to subsequent Bonds - trying on his first dinner jacket
for size, tripping over his chat-up lines to Eva Green's gorgeous
Vesper Lynd, replying when asked if he wants his martini shaken or
stirred, 'Do I look like I give a damn?' - almost everything else
seems to have gone out of the window (along with various not
particularly sinister villains).
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I'm quite happy for
Bond to live in a continuous present, but the time frame of the film
is perplexing. After the grainy Fifties Prague opening, there is the
predictable Seventies, Whicker's World rush of destinations, taking
in Uganda, Madagascar, the Bahamas and Venice, while Bond, who we
are presumably supposed to believe we have never come across before,
suggests from time to time that he is in 2006. Judi Dench as M,
seems more than usually unsure about the wisdom of her role or which
era she's in. She speaks at one point of her nostalgia for the Cold
War, before outlining the plot, such as it is, which involves an
attempt to manipulate the stock market using terrorism, bringing in
the first and only reference to 9/11. You don't expect Casino
Royale to be 24, quite, or Bond to be Jack Bauer, but it seems
bizarre to be employing a mix of Albanian and Swiss and African and
Italian financial terrorists when you might think there are more
real current fears to explore.
Director Martin Campbell is also
unsure about how much of the glamour of violence he wants to strip
back. There are unusual 007 moments in which Bond lets us know he's
human, sitting soaking in the shower in his blood-drenched dinner
suit comforting Vesper after she has helped him kill a man; or,
oddly, screaming in pain. Raymond Chandler praised the original book
of Casino Royale for its brutal description of torture,
exposing genre-fiction to a new realism. The scene that Chandler
singled out is reproduced here, with Bond tied naked on the frame of
a chair while his exposed scrotum is whipped with a knotted rope.
Craig is, not surprisingly, in more obvious pain than any previous
Bond , but having put him there, the only way to remove him is
through a comically unexplained ambush; by the next scene, like the
Bonds of old, he is recuperating by the Italian lakes, his
tenderized tackle magically restored.
The problem with making Bond more real, is that everything around
him then seems even more fake than usual. Craig, always a
charismatic presence, often looks unsettled by that dislocation; his
sex scenes are more energetic than those of his predecessors but
even less convincing; he is hardly allowed any comedy. As a result,
by the end of a curiously back-to-front film, when he finally gets
his theme tune and introduces himself - 'Bond. James Bond' - he,
like the creaky franchise itself, seems profoundly unsure whether he
is coming or going. |
