Quantum of Solace
It is a good James Bond movie when the bad Bond girl is an interesting role and the actress playing her can act. It is a great one when the same is true of the good Bond girl. In this movie the bad one turns out not really bad but never loses her element of danger. The actress, Olga Kurylenko, also does no mean Bolivian accent for a girl from the Ukraine. The good one is played meatily enough by Gemma Arterton to make her pat role of sleeping with Bond and getting drowned in oil by the villain feel natural. Her body is left on the hotel room bed covered in oil in a reference to Goldfinger, but the oil scene has enough of its own reality that the reference does not come off cute. Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis have written a screenplay confident that it can stand on its own.
Cuteness is part of the Bond tradition that is being phased out. The character Q was quaint, like those "There will always be an England" notes that used to end New Yorker articles. There may still always be an England, but the quaintness is a dead joke. All other Bond movies had an obligatory early scene where Q explained to Bond what his new gadgets could do. In this movie the gadgetry is limited to a fancy cell phone, and any super powers of technology that appear in the movie are revealed incidentally while the plot moves on. The one old-Bond technological joke toward the end of the movie is set up in the traditional way ("This hotel runs on fuel cells? But isn't that dangerous?") but the punchline falls flat and the joke feels expendable.
Also gone is the villain's super-scary bodyguard and the long setup for an ultimate fight between him (or her in the case of Grace Jones) and Bond. Cleverly, two Bond traditions are killed with one stone when the nice Bond girl trips the only candidate for super-scary bodyguard and sends him tumbling down the stairs. He has to wear a neck brace for the rest of the movie. But again the movie flinches near the end, and Bond, who can make unconscious four secret service agents in three seconds in an elevator, can't beat up the villain, a skinny corporate CEO, in one minute of hand-to-hand combat. This is the suddenly-everybody-can-fight fallacy of action movies that I thought was put to rest by Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity who, when he asked, "How do I know that guy at the bar can handle himself?", once and for all divided the world of men into the ones who can handle themselves and the ones who can't and banished the conceit that a man can cross over mid-movie.
There is a more systemic failure in this movie. Judi Dench is as solid as ever as M, with those straight-shooting blue eyes, but the story of her slowly losing trust in Bond, and suddenly regaining it, or maybe never having lost trust in him but only giving in to political pressure to arrest him, is muddy and contradictory and doesn't work as effectively as it could as a foil to Bond's go-it-alone logic.
There is also a lot of talk in the movie about Vesper, the woman who betrayed James Bond in the last movie. Honestly, I don't remember the last movie and I don't remember Vesper or what exactly she did to betray Bond. I think that I don't want to know those things. I want to see how this movie holds up on its own and don't want to read it like a kid reading a comic book with the asterisk that refers to something crucial that happened in another issue. By my standard the movie holds up pretty well in the tradition of movies whose hard boiled heroes are haunted by the past, except that the final scene is a little murky for someone like me who has forgotten who Vesper was or what she did.
Comic books answer a yearning, and if the yearning individual is brainy he will go looking for intellectual satisfaction in the place that answers his yearning. Big, endless yearning is something that has been palpable for some time in the music and movies of Canada. It sneaked across the border into American pop music in the last decade, and now it's in our movies. Every new Spiderman or Batman movie has to be long and Wagnerian. My best guess at the appeal of these movies, which are stultifying to me, is that they immerse their fans in an ocean of yearning.
The new Bond movie gives little solace to yearners. (A quantum, maybe?) If the first movie was too long and emotionally unclear and promised a more bloated sequel this movie is a disappointment. It moves at the speed of mind. Daniel Craig's James Bond is the avatar of cool logic channeled into quick unreflective action. Whatever is worth pursuing and knowing can be found and proven in steady steps that proceed from what is near at hand. There is even a case to be made that Bond is the personification of analytic philosophy. If Bond feels certain that the beautiful girl is the key to reaching the shadowy evil global organization, but the Bolivian general is taking her to his yacht in a motorboat, then running along the pier and hopping from boat to boat must lead Bond to an unattended old wooden fishing boat, unlikely to help him steal the girl but all there is, and if it's all there is it must be what's needed. If after he has stolen the girl three sleek rubber speedboats chase him full of guys with machine guns, still he is Bond and the ways to make one speedboat crash, slice the next one in two, and hoist the third one upside down with a grappling hook will make themselves known to him at just in time.
There is a feeling of inevitability to what happens. If Bond happens to have killed the assassin at the Hotel in Haiti when M had wanted the man brought in for questioning, we feel regret, but we also feel (1) the death was unavoidable and (2) there must remain another way for Bond to discover and foil the villain. The logic of Bond is final. He had to attack the assassin, and if in the flurry of the fight he sliced the assassin's carotid artery instead of just knocking him cold, then no other outcome could have been possible.
If people say that Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever it is because he best conveys this confidence, not only that he is after the right thing, but that if only he acts now the materials to deliver him to the right thing will present themselves and he will know how to use them without thinking twice. Daniel Craig has inspired the writers and director Marc Forster to strip away a lot of the Bond tradition that has become schtick and focus on what Craig can do with the character. The result feels more like an action movie and less like a Bond movie. In a happy way watching this movie I didn't know what to expect next. I hope the same team makes the next Bond movie.
There is a real emotional story and it is told with economy. In one scene Bond's friend, played by Giancarlo Giannini, is dying and wants Bond to hold him. The girl, who until now has tried to get away from Bond, just watches and waits, and we know her sympathy has shifted. Her kiss with Bond near the end of the movie is one of the most natural kisses ever in a thriller.
The movie has other original touches. The loud corrupt, CIA agent played with jolting authenticity by David Harbour, would by the logic of earlier Bond movies be, perhaps, stung to death by Bolivian scorpions, but the new Bond movie lives and lets live. The most exhilarating scene is the chase at the opera house, which is edited down to highlights, intercut with the ongoing death scene in Tosca and silent except for the sound of the orchestra and singers. We don't need to thrill you with that old Bond stuff, the movie says, and it's right.
Cuteness is part of the Bond tradition that is being phased out. The character Q was quaint, like those "There will always be an England" notes that used to end New Yorker articles. There may still always be an England, but the quaintness is a dead joke. All other Bond movies had an obligatory early scene where Q explained to Bond what his new gadgets could do. In this movie the gadgetry is limited to a fancy cell phone, and any super powers of technology that appear in the movie are revealed incidentally while the plot moves on. The one old-Bond technological joke toward the end of the movie is set up in the traditional way ("This hotel runs on fuel cells? But isn't that dangerous?") but the punchline falls flat and the joke feels expendable.
Also gone is the villain's super-scary bodyguard and the long setup for an ultimate fight between him (or her in the case of Grace Jones) and Bond. Cleverly, two Bond traditions are killed with one stone when the nice Bond girl trips the only candidate for super-scary bodyguard and sends him tumbling down the stairs. He has to wear a neck brace for the rest of the movie. But again the movie flinches near the end, and Bond, who can make unconscious four secret service agents in three seconds in an elevator, can't beat up the villain, a skinny corporate CEO, in one minute of hand-to-hand combat. This is the suddenly-everybody-can-fight fallacy of action movies that I thought was put to rest by Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity who, when he asked, "How do I know that guy at the bar can handle himself?", once and for all divided the world of men into the ones who can handle themselves and the ones who can't and banished the conceit that a man can cross over mid-movie.
There is a more systemic failure in this movie. Judi Dench is as solid as ever as M, with those straight-shooting blue eyes, but the story of her slowly losing trust in Bond, and suddenly regaining it, or maybe never having lost trust in him but only giving in to political pressure to arrest him, is muddy and contradictory and doesn't work as effectively as it could as a foil to Bond's go-it-alone logic.
There is also a lot of talk in the movie about Vesper, the woman who betrayed James Bond in the last movie. Honestly, I don't remember the last movie and I don't remember Vesper or what exactly she did to betray Bond. I think that I don't want to know those things. I want to see how this movie holds up on its own and don't want to read it like a kid reading a comic book with the asterisk that refers to something crucial that happened in another issue. By my standard the movie holds up pretty well in the tradition of movies whose hard boiled heroes are haunted by the past, except that the final scene is a little murky for someone like me who has forgotten who Vesper was or what she did.
Comic books answer a yearning, and if the yearning individual is brainy he will go looking for intellectual satisfaction in the place that answers his yearning. Big, endless yearning is something that has been palpable for some time in the music and movies of Canada. It sneaked across the border into American pop music in the last decade, and now it's in our movies. Every new Spiderman or Batman movie has to be long and Wagnerian. My best guess at the appeal of these movies, which are stultifying to me, is that they immerse their fans in an ocean of yearning.
The new Bond movie gives little solace to yearners. (A quantum, maybe?) If the first movie was too long and emotionally unclear and promised a more bloated sequel this movie is a disappointment. It moves at the speed of mind. Daniel Craig's James Bond is the avatar of cool logic channeled into quick unreflective action. Whatever is worth pursuing and knowing can be found and proven in steady steps that proceed from what is near at hand. There is even a case to be made that Bond is the personification of analytic philosophy. If Bond feels certain that the beautiful girl is the key to reaching the shadowy evil global organization, but the Bolivian general is taking her to his yacht in a motorboat, then running along the pier and hopping from boat to boat must lead Bond to an unattended old wooden fishing boat, unlikely to help him steal the girl but all there is, and if it's all there is it must be what's needed. If after he has stolen the girl three sleek rubber speedboats chase him full of guys with machine guns, still he is Bond and the ways to make one speedboat crash, slice the next one in two, and hoist the third one upside down with a grappling hook will make themselves known to him at just in time.
There is a feeling of inevitability to what happens. If Bond happens to have killed the assassin at the Hotel in Haiti when M had wanted the man brought in for questioning, we feel regret, but we also feel (1) the death was unavoidable and (2) there must remain another way for Bond to discover and foil the villain. The logic of Bond is final. He had to attack the assassin, and if in the flurry of the fight he sliced the assassin's carotid artery instead of just knocking him cold, then no other outcome could have been possible.
If people say that Daniel Craig is the best Bond ever it is because he best conveys this confidence, not only that he is after the right thing, but that if only he acts now the materials to deliver him to the right thing will present themselves and he will know how to use them without thinking twice. Daniel Craig has inspired the writers and director Marc Forster to strip away a lot of the Bond tradition that has become schtick and focus on what Craig can do with the character. The result feels more like an action movie and less like a Bond movie. In a happy way watching this movie I didn't know what to expect next. I hope the same team makes the next Bond movie.
There is a real emotional story and it is told with economy. In one scene Bond's friend, played by Giancarlo Giannini, is dying and wants Bond to hold him. The girl, who until now has tried to get away from Bond, just watches and waits, and we know her sympathy has shifted. Her kiss with Bond near the end of the movie is one of the most natural kisses ever in a thriller.
The movie has other original touches. The loud corrupt, CIA agent played with jolting authenticity by David Harbour, would by the logic of earlier Bond movies be, perhaps, stung to death by Bolivian scorpions, but the new Bond movie lives and lets live. The most exhilarating scene is the chase at the opera house, which is edited down to highlights, intercut with the ongoing death scene in Tosca and silent except for the sound of the orchestra and singers. We don't need to thrill you with that old Bond stuff, the movie says, and it's right.
posted by David Gillman at 9:01 AM
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