Film Review: CASINO ROYALE ****½ (out of 5)
“For those two jobs I was awarded a Double O number in the Service. Felt pretty clever and got a reputation for being good and tough…Now…that’s all very fine. The hero kills two villains, but when the hero Le Chiffre starts to kill the villain Bond and the villain Bond knows he isn’t a villain at all, you see the other side of the medal. The villains and heroes get all mixed up.” — James Bond, thinking out loud in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953)
“A superb gambling scene, a torture scene which still haunts me, and, of course, a beautiful girl.” -- Raymond Chandler, reviewing the book
While standing in line to see Casino Royale, the twenty-first James Bond film made by the Broccoli family’s Eon Productions, I was drawn into a conversation about the cinema of 007 with the man standing behind me. It was the film’s opening night, Friday evening at a giant suburban multiplex jammed with middleclass Midwesterners, good atmosphere for an event movie, and the man and I soon established that we’d been Bond fans since the advent of the franchise in the sixties.
At the time of the first movie, Dr. No (1962), he’d been something like a freshman in high school, making him about six years older than me, but our reactions had been more or less the same: a kid’s proselytizing certainty that movies could not come any better. It’s no longer possible to convey how the first three James Bond movies rocked the world — I know, I’ve tried — because once we’ve moved on from a cultural moment, it takes a whole book full of words to take us back, to describe how threatening and energizing a new kind of film can be. One generation absorbs the phenomenon, the next transmutes it into the commonplace.
Anyway, back to now: the line began to move and we drifted toward the auditorium, trading likes and dislikes, when the conversation turned slightly, uhm, strained. I’d already said I was a loyal Connery-ite and the man had announced that he didn’t care who played Bond, he just liked the action, the action, the action, when he asked me if I owned all the films on DVD, clearly expecting the answer to be yes. After all, haven’t I studied the Bond phenomenon in toto all these years, even read the original novels between films? And I am a confessed, obsessed movie collector. Surely I have all the Bond films in my library.
“No, I own the Connery movies,” I said, “but even some of them –”
“You take this stuff too seriously,” he snapped, moving off quickly to catch his wife, who was securing seating somewhere toward the back third of the house, and I went off to my customary spot about five rows from the front, down where a movie, if it’s any good, can sweep me into its world. If it has a world, that is, if the writing is at all imaginative, if the director understands all this…fancy shmancy world business, if the actors are talented and adept at making me believe that they believe in the…you know…the damned world or whatever of the movie.
It shouldn’t be that hard, especially if you own the rights to Ian Fleming’s novels, because the guy pretty much did your work for you in the exotic-jazzy-violent-sexy world building department. Whatever can be said against Fleming’s literary efforts, and there is much — they pulsate with sexism, racism, imperialism, political paranoia and a winking, half-committed homophobia, like a great deal of post-WWII pulp fiction — their major appeal continues to be their irresistible shadow reality of freaks and grotesques, rabbit hole conspiracies, forbidden sensual indulgence, sudden death and, as the paperback book copy used to say, high tension and electrifying thrills.
The Bond films, on the other hand, have always been designed to reach a much larger audience than any book could ever hope for, at their best never more than sanitized versions of Fleming’s bestsellers. Eventually they were not even that, devolving into harmless three-ring circuses for the entire family, one trip pretty much indistinguishable from another, finally crashing into complete irrelevancy during the Age of Watergate. This development was the much lauded, so-called vision of American producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who had pooled his resources with Canadian Harry Saltzman in 1961 to inaugurate the Bond movies. Cubby was a ruthless businessman, in addition to being an overgrown kid, and his devil-may-care attitude toward story and character began to dominate the films long before Sean Connery left the series. Once Cubby acquired Saltzman’s half of the film rights in 1974, he was free to prostitute the material however he wanted to and he took full advantage, turning the series into film history’s most profitable self-conscious joke.
Oh, but there I go again, taking it all too seriously. Well, I say what the hell, everyone has their special interests that they take too seriously: Star Wars fans take Star Wars too seriously, and proud of it, too; art house cineastes take Fellini too seriously; I’ve been known to take Humphrey Bogart too seriously, and Woody Allen takes both Fellini and Bogart too seriously but never himself, which is one of the many reasons why I like him. In school, whether or not you take your classes seriously means the difference between an A and a C-; in the workplace, the same holds true with nothing less than job security at stake.
Given the indescribable sums of money that event moviemakers earn in exchange for provoking a laugh here and a screech there, I don’t think I’m expecting too much if I insist they take their silly little task seriously and deliver a well told story. That’s all, not asking for frickin’ world peace here, just something that doesn’t insult the intelligence of a twelve-year-old, the age at which I realized the Bond books and movies were veering onto wildly divergent paths. The books at least cared about what happened to Bond, while the fifth film, You Only Live Twice, suddenly seemed, I don’t know…embarrassed about him and his world, self-censoring, distracted by the increasing cultural noise. That’s it: the Bond films became distracted, which is, of course, death to a secret agent.
By the standard of focus alone, Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie in forty-two years, a fast, furious, funny, face-smashing thriller, not just an action-cubed clone of interchangeable set pieces but a real story about Bond’s first mission: what kind of man he is and where he came from, how he acquired a license to kill, the downside of that privilege, and what he was like before he acquired all those sartorial and culinary fetishes, when the chase was all he lived for.
The temptation might be to lay most of the film’s success at the feet of British actor Daniel Craig, because his debut as 007 is the most original and engaging performance in the role since Connery first looked into a camera and said “Bond [full stop]. James Bond.” A subtle and perceptive actor, Craig gives Bond a matrix of human traits that have hardly been tried outside the covers of a book: he’s constitutionally careless, in spite of his obvious physical discipline, deadly at hand-to-hand combat, but also sloppy and needlessly destructive, a barely contained sociopath whose most redeeming feature is the executioner’s creeping fatalism, a nagging awareness that every day is a desperate foot race with the Grim Reaper, one he is ultimately destined to lose. Daniel Craig’s Bond, like Fleming’s, lives high and rashly, banging every willing woman he can get his hands on, betting everything he has on every hand, only because this drink, this fight, this babe, this moment may be his last. Every man’s predicament, ratcheted up to 11.
It’s a startlingly revisionist performance, one that’s sure to be divisive for movie fans who like their superheroes more jovial and omniscient, more agreeable, but they’ve had their Bond movies (at least fifteen of the previous twenty by my count, all available on DVD once again after a brief hiatus). Craig will be Bond for a new generation, people who’ve never seen Connery or Moore or those other guys but who are sophisticated enough to realize that spying is a filthy business, even heroes are flawed, and it’s not the end of the world if an entertainment admits these things. It might even help the suspension of disbelief.
But full credit must also be given to the producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and especially to Ms. Broccoli, who fought for Craig to take over the role amid the ridiculous howling of fans who were hung up on the color of his hair. That was the least of her worries: Cubby’s youngest child, she inherited Eon Productions along with Mr. Wilson, her stepbrother, when their father died in 1996, and they’ve been trying to remake the series ever since. While the Bond-inspired competition grew more intense with each year, culminating in those crackerjack, Robert Ludlum Bourne movies over at Universal, Eon Productions was hemmed in by a long tradition of repetition, laziness, and a fan base whose standards had been systematically lowered over the years.
Something radical had to be done and frankly, I didn’t think the Broccoli heirs had it in them. Although, in their defense, it’s easy enough to reinvent, say, Batman, when the last movie failed in a previous century, but how do you reinvent a character encrusted with decades of success no matter how mediocre the packaging?
First, you read a book for a change. Sorry, but it’s true.
Then, you make it about Bond again. Because, you know, it was never about the gadgets or wall-to-wall girls or the world on the brink, a certain kind of martini or car or caviar or self-deprecating humor, or even a preternaturally bizarre opponent worthy of our hero’s, heh, dark side (like he has another). Once upon a time, the Bond phenomenon began with a young man, barely thirty, his personality forged in wartime nastiness, who channeled his worst impulses into battling the meanest dragons out there, charging fearlessly into the abyss and never, ever, ever giving up, no matter how hopeless his situation became.
Everything else that has come to mean Bond over the years is a mere flourish on this template, a patina of kinks and wrinkles accrued with age and cynicism, but a patina that works if you’re protecting the bottom line, which makes it kind of extraordinary that Broccoli and Wilson have finally chosen to bulldoze right through all expectations and produce a movie that honors the character of Bond himself: not the fickle audience, not previous actors who once made the role their own or Cubby’s creaky formula or other movies and stories, but the character Ian Fleming invented on holiday in 1952, an icon of modern fiction that sold millions of books before he ever had a movie star’s face.
Casino Royale establishes a new Bond World to go along with its reanimated protagonist, one that should make Fleming turn right side up in his grave again, a malevolent universe of blood, betrayal and deadly danger, unexpected twists and hair-raising reversals that would have worn any previous movie Bond to a frazzle. It’s 007 for a new century, all right, with the odd but welcome virtue of adhering to a literary formula more than fifty years old: just because we know Bond will win in the end, that doesn’t mean it should ever be easy, for him or us. Always let us see him sweat, miscalculate, doubt his profession, lose a friend, bleed, fall prey to his own libido and find himself down for the count, seconds from death before he gets this caper figured out. Make me feel like a kid again, make me wonder how Bond and me are going to get out of this one, and I’ll follow you anywhere.
Casino Royale turns this all-important trick repeatedly and with muscular panache, and while it certainly has its flaws, lackadaisical contempt for its own storytelling mission isn’t one of them. Sure, it tries to do too much, a couple of the action sequences go on too long, but thank the movie gods, the Broccoli heirs have finally awakened and greenlighted a Bond movie that, for once, doesn’t apologize for its big, arrogant, macho balls.
Great supporting cast, especially the stunning French actress Eva Green as Bond’s first love, Vesper, and charismatic Dane Mads Mikkelson as his first nemesis, the sadistic terrorism profiteer Le Chiffre. Beautifully directed by Bond veteran Martin Campbell (The Mask of Zorro, 1998) who must have just been waiting for someone to hand him a decent script. The title song is not bad, while the rest of the score by David Arnold is great, weaving classic, brassy quavers through every arrangement. It’s very John Barry; sleazy as a Signet paperback book cover, wry as a Bond comment on heroic fate.
“They’re upset about the color of his hair — the fact that he’s blond. Really, people can be such morons.”– Eva Green on the Craig controversy
Casino Royale: produced by Barbara Broccoli & Michael Wilson; directed by Martin Campbell; screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, from novel by Ian Fleming; director of photography, Phil Méheux; edited by Stuart Baird; music by David Arnold
with Daniel Craig (James Bond), Eva Green (Vesper Lynd), Mads Mikkelsen (Le Chiffre), Judi Dench (M), Jeffrey Wright (Felix Leiter), Giancarlo Giannini (Mathis)
2 hr., 24 m.; Sony Pictures, rated PG-13
release date: November 17
NOTES:
IAN WHO?: First film in the series since On Her Majesty‘s Secret Service (1969) to actually adapt a whole Ian Fleming novel to the screen, transposing every major scene and large swatches of dialogue, including Bond’s famously cruel, Mickey Spillane-ish final line. I won’t reveal it in the interests of a spoiler-free review, except to say that in the film it comes about two minutes before the final blackout, as Bond is making his report to London.
The writers also pull off one of the most difficult tasks in the Good Hollywood repertoire by greatly extending the scope and number of incidents three or four times to make Casino Royale into an event movie, without losing the author’s original intentions, violating the known laws of physics, ignoring recent advances in psychology, or resorting to a single bad pun.
HAIR SPLITTING: If we take Fleming’s description of Bond as the last word on the subject, and I do, then none of the six actors who’ve starred in the Eon productions have been more than a reasonable match.
The literary Bond is described as “saturnine.” His father was Scottish, his mother Swiss. He stands 6’ even and a slim 165 pounds. Hair: black, with an unruly comma above the right eye. Eyes: a “cold” gray-blue. A three-inch, “faintly piratical” scar runs down his right cheek. Women find him handsome and are usually both disturbed and attracted by the “cruel” cast to his features, especially in the eyes and mouth.
Connery is the only Bond actor with Scottish parentage; he’s also the only one with whom there’s been any mention of a scar, and it was relocated to his lower back, no doubt for daily makeup reasons. Worse than blond, he was already developing a working class bald spot when he took on the role at 32, and always wore a toupee on camera.
Forget that Superman comma of hair, no one’s ever bothered, and Roger Moore’s brown locks often looked blond, depending on the light. All Bond actors have topped six feet except Mr. Craig, who’s an inch under, close enough for all practical purposes; all have weighed more than the guy in the books except Brosnan, who weighed 164 when he took the role. Craig is the third film Bond with blue eyes.
As for “rather cruel good looks,” well that’s kind of subjective, isn’t it? Everybody makes like they’re mean at some point when portraying Bond, giving themselves a pinched look here and there, but really only the early Connery, and now Craig, have had a genuinely cruel appearance in my book.
YOU THINK THEY CAN TAKE IT?: Purportedly the first Bond film in which it rains…definitely the first in which the majority of scenes take place at night…At 38, Daniel Craig is the youngest person to debut in the role since George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was also the series’ longest film (2 hours, 20 minutes) until this one beat it by 4 minutes. It’s probably the end credits…
Or maybe it’s the rolling Aston Martin crash, which seems to go on forever, and set a new world record for air cannon stunts by achieving a full seven revolutions. As my dad quipped when the car came to an upright stop, “Is that all?”
THAT PESKY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THING: When Eon Productions bought the film rights to the Bond novels in 1961, Casino Royale was not part of the deal. The book had already been sold and turned into an Americanized, one hour episode of CBS’ Climax Mystery Theater in 1954, starring Barry Nelson as “Jimmy” Bond and Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre. It’s pretty dismal viewing now, unless you’re curious about live TV drama from the era.
The rights then found their way into the hands of producer Charles K. Feldman, who sat on them for a decade while he packaged some other things, only to discover he had the hottest property in town when world wide Bond Mania broke post-Goldfinger (1964). Eon Productions tried to block a feature film, but they needn’t have worried. Feldman’s “spoof,” released in 1967, was Casino Royale in name only, an incomprehensible, campy mess with a dozen stars, ten writers and five directors all working at cross purposes. The film rights to the book finally came into Eon’s possession in 1999 when they were acquired by Sony in the MGM/UA buyout.
In the constant litigation Eon has pursued over the decades to protect their Bond monopoly, they’ve repeatedly claimed exclusive rights to the character, though no court has ever agreed, never mind people who grew up with a Fleming page-turner in hand. Bond himself remains the property of Ian Fleming Publications, Ltd., literary executors for the author’s estate since 1952
