Other Reviews in this Series.
Director: Sam Mendes
Writers: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan
Cast: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Berenice Marlohe, Ben Whishaw, Albert Finney
Runtime: 143 mins.
2012
When I claimed a few days ago that Casino Royale is and will probably remain the best Bond movie, I received in response an outpouring of love for Skyfall (for me an outpour is two people). I'm going to quote pieces of their responses without permission.
"Maybe in terms of scale, Casino Royale wins just because of the sheer amount of character creation. But there's a lot of humanity injected into the Bond character during Skyfall as well. In terms of his struggle with his past, family issues, and aging... Not believing he can be the same caliber of agent he once was. No other Bond movie approaches that level of analysis of his internal psychoses. You know, since when does James Bond have anxiety?"
"The real payoff of [Casino Royale] is in Skyfall, not in Royale itself. Skyfall is, at its core, about the trauma of loss & memory: the trauma of the Reformation (and you could argue this is really when the Empire started) and then the loss of Empire. What happens when England finally loses enough that they have to deal with the trauma they've been ignoring for centuries? . . . This is a new type of Bond. Still the markers of the one we knew before, but it doesn't shy away from the pain and violence that is inherently a part of being Bond. . . . Mostly I think the Craig Bond films can't be separated quite as easily, as they completely depend on one another."
These are two very similar and eloquent responses in defense of Skyfall's merits. Clearly there's a lot of Skyfall love out there, a love which I share. Skyfall was the movie that hooked me into the Bond franchise (when I first saw Casino Royale I was too young to care about much beyond the action). Moreover, they're absolutely right in pointing out that Casino and Skyfall are of a piece. One is an origin story about the man who became the agent, the other is a retirement story about the agent in danger of becoming the man. One recreates Bond for modern audiences, one investigates Bond's relevance for that audience. One reboots the series, one reestablishes the series regulars.
Skyfall follows James Bond, an agent beyond his prime and injured in the field of duty. Throughout the movie he attempts to maintain some semblance of potency and heroism in the face of obsolescence and cyberterrorism. Skyfall gives almost equal attention to M (Judi Dench), the head of MI6 and the one who put Bond in danger in the line of duty. She is forced to deal with threats of forced retirement and boogeymen from her past.
I spent my Casino Royale review singing its praises and calling it the tippety-top Bond movie, but if I'm being honest I might like Skyfall just as much. Certain aspects of it are flat out improvements over what Casino offered.
One of these is how it looks. Skyfall is a gorgeous film. That's what happens when you get Roger Deakins on the job, cinematographer of some of the most visually impressive films of the last few decades, including almost all of the Coen Bros. filmography. He and director Sam Mendes craft stunning scene after stunning scene. Gone is the fumbly jumbly camera jerking of Quantum of Solace; every moment of every action scene is elaborately and clearly mapped out in space. My favorite moment of the whole film has to be the glass and neon skyscraper fight in Shanghai. There's a continuous shot of Bond fighting an assassin in silhouette, with bright shifting colors and Chinese characters floating in and around them, that has to be one of the most beautiful combat compositions I've ever seen. Then there's the long shot that introduces the villain, Silva, a great way to dynamically plant our attention on this strange new man.
Silva is the other improvement over the previous Craig Bond films. Neither of them had a particularly iconic villain, and Silva provides that, in large part due to the casting of Javier Bardem. His role here is significantly different than his careermaking villain in No Country for Old Men, but this guy can play sinister like nobody's business.
All that being said... Skyfall is problematic for an unfortunate array of reasons. For every two steps in the right direction, there seems to be one stumble. Thus the movie leaves a bad taste of empty promise, one not egregious enough to distract in the moment, but one that lingers and nags the longer you dwell on it.
Let's jump back to Silva. Bardem's performance is perfect Bond villain schlock. Silva is smart, sinister, all that good stuff. But if you put any modicum of thought towards his character, his goals, his methods, it all begins to unravel. He's a genius who can blow up a building using computers from a mobile position, yet he chooses not to kill his target M at the beginning of the movie because he "wants to send a message." Okay, fine. But then at what point does he actually start to try killing M? Why does he operate in secrecy and shadows half the time, and grab a gun to lead a strike force the other half? Why does he let himself get captured? The whole turns out he wanted to be caught the whole time!!! is a cliche popularized by The Dark Knight in 2008, one that was already played out by the time Skyfall hit in 2012. It makes more sense in the former film anyway; the Joker was an agent of chaos whose plans needn't have a rhyme or reason. But Silva is supposed to be a cold calculating precision operative, this will-he won't-he runaround begins to feel a bit like narrative cheating just to yank the audience's chain.
Then there are the thematic issues. I love the topics Skyfall tackles. I first became fixated with the movie because of its meta-reading of the Bond franchise, and the way it narrativizes the Bond filmmakers' struggle to remain relevant in the new millennium. There's even a visual reference to one of my favorite poems, "Ozymandias"! It's good stuff. But not unlike Sam Mendes's early career hit American Beauty, Skyfall is a beautiful film with fascinating subtext that occasionally undercuts itself.
Let's start with the most egregious example: Severine. It's never clear what exactly the purpose of this character is, beyond the pat "Bond needs to have sex with someone" role. From what I can put together, Severine's importance to Bond is... that he wants to save her? I can't even come up with something good, it's apparent that Bond is only in it to use her as leverage just like the poker chip he used to arrange their meeting. Then Severine is captured, abused, and made the center of a homosocial game between Silva and Bond: shoot the shotglass off of the damsel's head. This is surely meant to show Silva's sadistic cruelty, as well as Bond's lost nerve. He can't muster up the confidence to take a proper shot. Fine. But then, after Silva executes her, Bond makes a dumb quip and disarms and kills like three bodyguards with perfect shots. Then, as Silva stands by the dead body of Severine, the music swells triumphantly when the MI6 cavalry arrives. As if the movie has immediately forgotten that a tortured woman was just massacred for the sake of building the stakes a little bit. And Bond walks away from it chipper as a lark.
That scene is the kind of gross insidious gender issue that is easy to miss the first time around (unless you're a woman, I imagine), which makes it even more dangerous. Stuff like that creeps into the rest of the movie. The commentary about whether Bond is outdated is great, even if it's delivered primarily through lots of obvious, winking dialogue. "OLD dog, NEW tricks, get it??" The commentary is about the traditional British empire establishment trying to find its place in this post-internet postmodern world. But the way that commentary manifests is kind of troubling. The foregone conclusion is that Bond is still relevant, but it ultimately comes at the expense of the subjugated groups that the white male patriarchy has always oppressed. Severine is a key example. Silva is another. Think about what exactly makes him different than Bond. They were both agents, both close with M, both brilliant and skilled. Here are the differences the movie makes a point of letting us know about: Silva is foreign, whereas Bond is British (or perhaps Scottish??). Silva knows how to use computers, whereas Bond is a hands on guy. Silva is queer, whereas Bond is straight as a rail. Silva has a physical deformity, whereas Bond remains a perfect specimen. Bond is our unequivocal hero, and Silva is portrayed as perverse. I'm not saying he shouldn't be seen as a bad guy, but it is troubling when the signifiers for "bad guy" overlap with the signifiers for tech-savvy, non-British, queer, and differently abled. Your movie starts to feel troublingly conservative.
Speaking of troublingly conservative... for the sake of nostalgia the movie makes a point of shuffling up the cast of regulars such that it more closely resembles the Bond we're used to. So we begin the movie with Bond, M, and Tanner, two white guys working for a white woman. Then we end the movie with Bond, Turner, new M, Q, and Moneypenny. The number of white guys has doubled, one of whom replaces the formerly strong female character of M. Now, again, there isn't anything inherently wrong with casting Ralph Fiennes as your new head of MI6, but reducing minority representation in a historically problematic franchise like Bond is an issue. But Moneypenny is introduced, a strong black female character! She's smart, witty, and she kicks ass! And then she makes the mistake of shooting the franchise white man, and for this sleight is punished by being forced into wasting away her talents in a secretary position. Making the problematic character of Moneypenny a capable field agent doesn't work if you're going to make her push papers as Bond's subservient source for casual flirtation anyway.
This review got a little heated, but it's important to really tear into the implications of movies like these that are so slick and appealing on the surface. As I said before, Skyfall was my entry point into appreciating the franchise, and I still like it very much. But there are some crucial issues holding it back from competing with Casino Royale for the best of the best.
3.5 / 5 BLOBS
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