'Skyfall': God Save The Drama Queen

by Brett Parker

Skyfall, the latest installment in the seemingly-immortal James Bond series, once again pits the phenomenal Daniel Craig in a 007 adventure that looks to reflect on the damaged emotional depths of the famous character’s world.  While overwhelming praise for the film has reached the heights of “one of the Best Bond Movies Ever” talk, part of me can’t help but think that this whole trend of grittiness is starting to show a bit of strain.  Don’t get me wrong, Skyfall certainly makes good on everything we want from a Bond film: the action scenes are slam-bang, the women exude gorgeousness, the villain delivers sinister glee, and Bond pounds on baddies in the most debonair of suits.  While I wouldn’t at all say that the film’s loving reception is undeserved, you must forgive me for suspecting that the character is being taken a little too seriously these days.  The masterpiece Casino Royale proved that a bit of seriousness can mix wonderfully with the franchise’s more sparkling elements, but the somber angles we’re given this time don’t feel terribly urgent, perhaps because we’re starting to realize that Bond was never that decidedly urgent to begin with.  

The film hits the ground running as we open on Bond (Craig) and a fellow agent named Eve (Naomie Harris) chasing a bad guy through a Turkish city and atop a speeding train to recover a confidential computer disk.  Even though she doesn’t have a clean shot, Eve is instructed by MI6 headquarters in England to try and shoot the villain dead while he battles with Bond atop the train.  Eve misses and Bond is shot, falling from the train into the waters below and presumed dead by the agency.  Little do they know that Bond washes ashore alive and decides to go off the grid to enjoy a holiday with his newfound “deceased” status.  

Yet once news of a terrorist attack on MI6 makes headlines, Bond is ready to return for action.  He learns that a scorned former agent turned cyber-terrorist named Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) is holding a psychotic grudge against M and plots to wreak deadly havoc on her agency in the worst of ways.   Bond fights to combat Silva’s violent attacks, but it becomes apparent that this crazed opponent is a tech genius who can hack into the agency’s system and run afoul of their advanced innovations.  Making matters worse is the fact that Bond is not in the best of physical shape, for the rough and tumble nature of his job has worn him out quite a bit.  With Silva’s threats growing more violent and MI-6 running out of technological defenses, Bond and M team up together to find whatever resources they can to put a stop this rouge madman.  

The most inspired ideas in Skyfall show the Bond franchise’s most entertaining implausibilities coiling back on themselves in the face of logic.  If Bond in the past has been an action figure who can take endless beatings, dodge countless explosions, knock back massive amounts of booze, and keep on ticking, then this time he can feel the wear and tear of his dangerous job taking a crucial toll on him.  As Bond fumbles with target practice and struggles to maintain his agility, the assumption that Bond is an infallible super-agent goes out the window and the acknowledgement that he’s an aging, injury-prone human brings a unique subject of tension into the formula.  One qualm moviegoers tend to have with Bond flicks before Craig’s reign was how the plots get too caught up in technological overkill.  Yet this time out, the story wickedly plays with that by introducing a villain who can turn MI6’s tech-savvy gambits against itself, forcing Bond to resort to a bare-knuckled resourcefulness not exactly typical of the series.  This leads to what is perhaps the franchise’s most stripped down climax ever as Bond relies on vintage guns and homegrown objects in a significant Scottish mansion to fend off Silva’s thugs.  By action movie standards, the climax isn’t terribly innovative, but it holds a spit and sawdust rawness that feels particularly flesh for a 007 picture.

Since the current style of Bond films is deep dramatic reflection, its not hard to see how this project appealed to the dramatist in director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead), especially in the way the script touches on his usual ideas of turmoil and disorder erupting in environments rigorously constructed to be devoid of such things.  The big problem with Bond’s dark musings this time is that the script really doesn’t have anything new to say about him.  Mendes’s showmanship suggests we’re in for big dramatic revelations, but Skyfall pretty much tells us things we’ve already firmly grasped from the previous two installments.  For instance, we already knew that Bond was an abandoned orphan and that M has a strict adherence to her duty in spite of her maternal feelings for him.  Lord knows giving Bond some dimensions has made him more exciting, but scraping away at his depths has its limits since the character is essentially a pulp escapist concoction.  

At a time when gloves-off realism and no-nonsense edginess appears to be the primary taste for blockbuster characters, I must admit that part of me yearns for the kind of Bond flicks that were predominantly smirking adventure fantasies.  I’m not asking for another Moonraker, mind you, but I wouldn’t mind seeing Craig show up in, say, a Goldfinger or a Thunderball, if you catch my drift.  Most Bond films usually place themselves on a spectrum between steely gloominess and light-hearted fluffiness, and my idea of a perfect Bond picture is one that meets both of these ideals in the middle.  That’s why my unapologetic vote for Best Bond Movie Ever still goes to Casino Royale.  Director Martin Campbell still dished out the glamourous and fantastical fixings of the series while superbly fusing them with unexpected real world stakes and feelings.  It’s not just that Craig, in his first 007 outing, nailed the charismatic and heroic aspects of the famous agent, but he also showed us how those cooler Bond traits were spawned by the most brutish and despairing of emotions.  The smoldering transcendence of Craig’s performance was such an electric jolt of discovery that the sequels have been struggling to keep up with it amongst their dramatic pretenses.  

Yet Skyfall isn’t totally devoid of traditional fun, for the time-honored genre’s treats do feel considerably prominent enough, especially through the supporting performances.  Ben Whishaw is pitch-perfect as MI-6’s gadget maestro, Q, totally sustaining the self-contained genius and playful jabbing perfected by the original Q, Desmond Llewelyn.  Berenic Marlohe seductively honors the Bond girl tradition of being memorably disposable, especially in a steamy shower scene.  When the eventual natures of Ralph Fiennes’ bureaucratic overseer Gareth Mallory and Naomie Harris’s playfully observant Eve are revealed, you realize they are the perfect fit for certain vintage staples in the series.  Yet the film’s most satisfying throwback, as well as the most entertaining thing in the entire film, comes from Javier Bardem triumphantly hurling theatrical flamboyance back into the Bond villain position.  Armed with pearly white teeth bearing a gruesome backstory, puckish homoerotic urges, and bleach-blonde hair that evokes Christopher Walken in A View to a Kill, Bardem swings for the fences to put himself in the colorful-Bond-foe-hall-of-fame and achieves that goal with a demented pathos.  In a movie that slightly overcooks the solemnity, Bardem brings the stylish playfulness this kind of enterprise cries out for.

At the end of the day, very little can detract from the fact that Daniel Craig makes for a wonderful Bond.  He does the best job of any actor since Sean Connery of reconciling all the crucial shades of the appealing character into a graceful, effortless package.  I’m prepared to follow Craig into any 007 enterprise, no matter how dark or how preposterous.  Besides, it doesn’t really matter what is revealed about the character, for the style of the Bond movies themselves are usually a statement about the eras they’re made in.  So perhaps it makes sense in these crazy times that the current incarnation is striving to have fun, but can’t quite shake traumatized weight and festering poignancy.  But hopefully Bond, and the audience watching him, can get back to a place of uninhibited jolly good fun someday.  

A Performance That Takes 'Flight'

by Brett Parker

In an era where cinephiles grumble about how Hollywood is only investing in CGI-ridden blockbusters, pointless reboots, and Superhero flicks, Flight is some kind of refreshing triumph.  Here is a major Hollywood production with a big marquee star helmed by a veteran hitmaker that is essentially a quiet character study.  Despite an epic disaster sequence in the first act, most of the film is devoted to dialogue and quiet moments that circle around an alcoholic’s internal struggle with his demons.  Although movies like this tend to pop up all the time, it’s usually more so through the independent world and rarely in the weekend multiplex battles.  Although this is a hyperbolic assumption, it feels like its been since the 90s since a studio assembled its big-boy Hollywood tools for even a disposable release based solely on subtle drama and a nuanced central performance.

The film focuses on Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), a veteran commercial pilot for SouthJet Airlines.  When we first meet Whip, he is waking up in a hotel room surrounded by empty booze bottles and a naked flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) smoking a joint.  After dealing with an argumentative phone call from his ex-wife (Garcelle Beauvais), he does some lines of cocaine and is heading out the door towards his next flight.  But as he tries to nurse a hangover while flying an airliner flight out of Florida, the plane spins into a chaotic nose dive, making a deadly crash seem imminent.  Thanks to Whip’s risky instincts and experience, he is able to roll the plane upside down and crash the plane into an open field rather safely, saving a majority of the passenger’s lives.  

As Whip is pulled from the wreckage and hospitalized, the media hails him as a hero for saving the lives of all but 6 of the passengers, for the crash would’ve surely killed everyone on board if it weren’t for his quick-thinking skills.  However, big problems loom after the crash once its revealed that Whip’s blood tests in the hospital show he was intoxicated on alcohol and cocaine while he was in the cockpit.  An airline union leader (Bruce Greenwood) and an attorney (Don Cheadle) inform him that if they all don’t mine their way around this investigation carefully, he could go to jail for a very long time.  Whip tries to keep a low profile by avoiding the press and keeping all information about the crash on a carefully-plotted need-to-know basis, but the stress of the investigation causes his alcoholism to kick into high gear, and it becomes apparent to everyone that he has a serious problem that needs treatment.  Can Whip keep things together enough to avoid jail time?  Is there no turning back from his dark decent into alcoholism?  

Robert Zemeckis probably isn’t exactly the first filmmaker you’d nominate to helm an intimate portrait of addiction until you catch on that the script fits in perfectly with his usual taste for putting a human face on the unpredictability of the universe.  Of course the film’s opening depiction of a plane crash--undoubtedly one of the best and scariest plane crash scenes ever put on film--is right up Zemeckis’ FX-expert alley, reminiscent of the familiar skill he showed with Cast Away’s pivotal plane crash, yet Whip’s emotional torment in the face of catastrophe recalls similar struggles Zemeckis’s protagonists have faced in the past.  Whip’s ordeal greatly reminded me of the way medieval chaos forced Beowulf to confront his grandoise ego (Beowulf) or how injustice in a freakish cartoon world caused Detective Eddie Valiant to deal with his prejudices and haunted past (Who Framed Roger Rabbit).  Plus, the way Whip gradually is forced to reconcile the mess disaster has wrought in spite of himself reminded me of the ways Marty McFly and Chuck Noland had to work through their indifferences and hangups to try and make an out-of-whack world make sense to them again.  While most filmmakers rely on pulp plotting to guide their way through earthbound cosmic fantasies, Zemeckis has always favored humanist drama to pull great moralistic values from hectic movie-world concoctions.

Although Flight is a considerably exceptional depiction of addiction, some parts of the film can’t help but have some Hollywood corniness.  With some scenes that depict the harrowing side of drugs and alcoholism, you have a hard time telling whether it’s truthful or Hollywood puffing things up.  The very worst thing about the film is the soundtrack selection, which selects the most obvious of pop songs to hammer home emotional cue points in the plot with the upmost clumsiness.  While using Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright”  to express Whip high on cocaine isn’t too bad, using The Rolling Stone’s “Sympathy for the Devil” for the entrance of Whip’s drug dealer and Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” to show Whip dumping out alcohol really made me cringe.  Rule of Thumb for Future Filmmakers: if you’re making a movie about Alcoholism, opening the film with a song called “Alcohol” is the opposite of elegant.

In spite of the film’s small flaws, it’s Washington’s superb performance that sustains your interest all the way to the bittersweet end.  Washington is a treasured movie star who has earned our sympathy through an image of great command, confidence, and spontaneity.  The electricity and wallop here comes from the way Washington uses those gifts to try and bury a desperate vulnerability below the surface of a troubled character.  Washington shows great precision in his depiction of an alcoholic by relying on quiet reactions and careful physical unease as Whip wrestles with the bottle.  The best scenes in the film are when Whip tries to rely on his arrogance and assured demeanor to put a mask on the alarming struggle so obviously eating away at him.  Everything comes to a head in a final scene in which Washington allows a poignant release for Whip that hits the audience like a gut-punch and Washington’s expert lyricism makes us feel like its the perfect outcome for the character.

In spite of some of its fluffier parts, we feel for the most part that Flight is an admirable depiction of its central character’s demons.  Credit for this is due to the way screenwriter John Gatins (Real Steel, Hard Ball) sees Whip’s journey to a logical, cathartic end instead of easily tidying things up for a labored happy ending.  Some will probably condemn Zemeckis for the way he makes a man’s struggle with addiction entertaining-- a freakish contradiction the more you ponder it--but I admire the way Zemeckis harkens back to the ancient Hollywood tradition of centralizing big moral themes on a large Hollywood canvas.  While an indie version of this same concept would probably hold more true grit, I admired the way this Hollywood vehicle isn’t afraid to discover its own damaged soul.