'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.