This Bond's no Octopussy—The Globe and Mail
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This Bond's no Octopussy
SIMON HOUPT
NEW YORK—There is no space-based laser beam ready to cook a continent. No renegade Soviet general itching to instigate World War III. No overgrown metal-toothed henchman named Jaws aligned with a mad scientist who's aiming to wipe out the entire population of planet Earth. In the long-awaited new James Bond film, Casino Royale, which opens next Friday, Secret Agent 007 does battle against—wait for it—a banker.
True, the fellow known as Le Chiffre is a banker for the world's terrorists and, therefore, a killer by association. And he has a creepy, damaged left eye that is given to weeping blood when he gets anxious. But still, he's effectively a paper pusher, a middleman, subject to murderous pressure from the thugs above him on the Bad Guy Food Chain. “He's evil, but if you leave him alone he will leave you alone,” says Mads Mikkelsen, the Danish actor who plays Le Chiffre. Noting that he strived to avoid villainous clichés in playing the role, Mikkelsen adds, “I was glad I didn't have to do the pirate laugh when he does something evil.”
No megalomaniac cackling to himself in his mountaintop lair astride the world? No gratuitous cheesecake shot of the Bond Girl? No gadgets? Nothing on screen that couldn't actually happen? It sounds like a Bond revolution.
And like all revolutions, this one is awfully risky. “We're making a change in the whole direction of the series, and we're making it at a time when the prior film had been the most successful [of all Bond movies],” says producer Barbara Broccoli, whose father Albert (a.k.a. Cubby) shepherded the film series from the beginning until his death in 1996.
“What's been popular about the Bond franchise, especially the movies, is the fact that he has been a fantasy spy character,” says Leah Wilson, the Dallas-based author of James Bond in the 21st Century: Why We Still Need 007, a new collection of essays about the secret agent. “There's very little that Bond does that resonates with what real spies do. That change to something grittier, to really grappling with things, in a real way, is a return to the books that Ian Fleming wrote.”
Indeed, the popular if ridiculous gadget master, Q, was a creation of Hollywood screenwriters, not Fleming. Casino Royale is the first film since Goldfinger (1964) in which Q does not appear.
Since its feature-film debut with Dr. No in 1962, the James Bond franchise has served as a stubbornly resistant cartoonish fantasy, a redoubt where men battle over the fate of the world and take occasional time out for fun with gadgets (a descriptor that includes the films' women). Four years ago, critic Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that efforts to move 007 into the present day had proved both fruitless and pointless. “Bond lives in a bubble, and the events of the world outside are no more than patches of colour playing over the surface.”
Not any more. Audiences at Casino Royale may have to brace themselves for a James Bond who is troubled by the brutality of his work. This Bond is a morally ambivalent figure only recently in receipt of his “double O” licence—that is, his licence to kill. He is struggling with the understanding that to keep the world safe from evil, he must sacrifice his own damaged soul.
This new iteration of Bond, after all, is the first to have been created amid the muddled legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. So it is hard to ignore that the Bond of Casino Royale emerges into a sphere coloured by the Abu Ghraib prison incident and a new willingness among the U.S. public to challenge its government on such matters as secret prisons, illegal detainment at Guantanamo Bay and torture tactics such as waterboarding.
“The fact that Bond is really grappling with things now says something interesting about the way we as a culture are starting to think about the things we're involved with, politically,” suggests writer Wilson. “To want to take that more seriously, and really see the human side of it, is an interesting change to the way we've chosen to see spy manoeuvres and espionage in the past.”
Casino Royale pits Bond (Daniel Craig, taking over from Pierce Brosnan) against Le Chiffre in a high-stakes match of Texas Hold 'Em. Le Chiffre has overextended himself by about $100-million in a stock-market scheme, and is trying to win the game to avoid certain death at the hands of his terrorist clients. If Bond can win, though, the British Secret Service hopes to squeeze Le Chiffre for information about terrorism.
Hollywood had already started to confront the moral ambiguities inherent in keeping the world safe from villainy, in films like Steven Spielberg revenge drama, Munich, and TV shows such as 24. If Casino Royale didn't at least acknowledge those skeptical strains in pop culture, “it would make Bond look like an idiot,” says Wilson.
Broccoli agrees the franchise had to shift. “The world is a very dangerous place,” she said this week, during an interview in New York. “What's interesting is, when we went to do GoldenEye (1995), we hadn't made a film for a few years, and everybody was saying, ‘The [Berlin] Wall has come down and the world is a safe place—is there any need for James Bond any more?' ” Broccoli bursts into laughter. “Well!” she snorts. “Look what's happened, the world isn't a safe place, look at how the world has just gotten more and more dangerous. I think we all like the idea of someone like James Bond out there trying to keep peace and world order—and putting his life on the line for the greater good.”
Casino Royale serves as the origin myth for Bond, tracing back in a black-and-white precredit sequence to his first two hits. Later, after he dispatches two other men during a savage hand-to-hand battle in a concrete stairwell and ends up with their blood on his face and hands, he is shaken by the reality of what he does for a living.
For long-time fans of the Bond films who may not have read Fleming's books, Casino Royale fills in some of the agent's background: Orphaned at 11 after his parents died in an avalanche, he is sent to live with his aunt before going off to boarding school. There, he is recruited by Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond realizes during the course of the film, as he begins to fall in love with the entrancing Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), that any intimate relationship is at least foolhardy and possibly dangerous. That is what sets him on his path of conducting affairs with married women. (Audiences will get a chuckle out of the fact that the mythical Bond is still in the process of being formed: Asked if he wants a martini to be shaken or stirred, he spits back, ‘Why the hell should I care?') “He's a playboy, because he can't make a commitment to another human being, because he doesn't know if he's going to survive,” observes Broccoli. “In the book, he says he doesn't expect to make it to retirement age of 45. This isn't a person who's a great prospect for marriage and family.”
Cartoonish movie franchises have lately found success by turning back to origin myths, notably Batman Begins and Spider-Man, another blockbuster controlled by Sony in which the incipient hero comes to realize he cannot put someone else at risk by forming an intimate attachment. The approach allows filmmakers to exploit the public's belief that there are no heroes any more, that we're all flawed or vulnerable. But just because Batman Begins did more than $200-million (U.S.) and Spider-Man did $400-million at the North American box office doesn't mean the financial risks of taking a dark turn with Bond are any less. Though critics pronounced the last Bond entry, Die Another Die, bloated and absurd, it took in $450-million at the worldwide box office: a record for the franchise. The previous film, The World Is Not Enough, took in an estimated $300-million.
Why not take the audience's lead and follow that up with something even splashier and more absurd? Casino Royale, after all, cost at least $100-million to produce.
There were other considerations in turning to Bond's origin myth. Broccoli and her stepbrother, Michael Wilson, recognized that the last film, Die Another Day, had taken the series into a too-fantastical realm. “This has happened before in the cycle of Bond films. With Moonraker [1979], we'd gone out to outer space, and there was a point of retrenchment in saying, ‘Let's go back to reality.' So [we] did a more personal story with For Your Eyes Only. We just got to the point where we said the last film had taken the fantasy aspect to the limit. And, given the world situation, we said, ‘No, I think we need to do something more realistic and more serious.' ”
In Daniel Craig, the controversial choice to assume the Bond role, the producers have not only bought themselves the best actor of any man to play 007 (as those who have seen his work in The Mother and Enduring Love will appreciate). They have also conjured up reminiscences of Sean Connery, the original Bond. Craig is angular, hungry, athletic and quick as a jackrabbit, and a tough scrapper.
This week, Craig said he approached the role as any other—albeit with a more pumped-up physique, ready for either a gratuitous swimsuit shot or a Brioni dinner jacket. “I wanted to see a fallible human being,” he explained during an interview. “Somebody who makes mistakes, somebody who an audience watches and goes: This might not turn out good, this might turn out bad. I didn't go out to make him likeable,” he continued. “I wanted to show somebody who changed. I did not want him to be the same person at the beginning of the movie who he was at the end.”
A Bond who is affected by his experiences? That's just shy of a revolution.
SIMON HOUPT
NEW YORK—There is no space-based laser beam ready to cook a continent. No renegade Soviet general itching to instigate World War III. No overgrown metal-toothed henchman named Jaws aligned with a mad scientist who's aiming to wipe out the entire population of planet Earth. In the long-awaited new James Bond film, Casino Royale, which opens next Friday, Secret Agent 007 does battle against—wait for it—a banker.
True, the fellow known as Le Chiffre is a banker for the world's terrorists and, therefore, a killer by association. And he has a creepy, damaged left eye that is given to weeping blood when he gets anxious. But still, he's effectively a paper pusher, a middleman, subject to murderous pressure from the thugs above him on the Bad Guy Food Chain. “He's evil, but if you leave him alone he will leave you alone,” says Mads Mikkelsen, the Danish actor who plays Le Chiffre. Noting that he strived to avoid villainous clichés in playing the role, Mikkelsen adds, “I was glad I didn't have to do the pirate laugh when he does something evil.”
No megalomaniac cackling to himself in his mountaintop lair astride the world? No gratuitous cheesecake shot of the Bond Girl? No gadgets? Nothing on screen that couldn't actually happen? It sounds like a Bond revolution.
And like all revolutions, this one is awfully risky. “We're making a change in the whole direction of the series, and we're making it at a time when the prior film had been the most successful [of all Bond movies],” says producer Barbara Broccoli, whose father Albert (a.k.a. Cubby) shepherded the film series from the beginning until his death in 1996.
“What's been popular about the Bond franchise, especially the movies, is the fact that he has been a fantasy spy character,” says Leah Wilson, the Dallas-based author of James Bond in the 21st Century: Why We Still Need 007, a new collection of essays about the secret agent. “There's very little that Bond does that resonates with what real spies do. That change to something grittier, to really grappling with things, in a real way, is a return to the books that Ian Fleming wrote.”
Indeed, the popular if ridiculous gadget master, Q, was a creation of Hollywood screenwriters, not Fleming. Casino Royale is the first film since Goldfinger (1964) in which Q does not appear.
Since its feature-film debut with Dr. No in 1962, the James Bond franchise has served as a stubbornly resistant cartoonish fantasy, a redoubt where men battle over the fate of the world and take occasional time out for fun with gadgets (a descriptor that includes the films' women). Four years ago, critic Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that efforts to move 007 into the present day had proved both fruitless and pointless. “Bond lives in a bubble, and the events of the world outside are no more than patches of colour playing over the surface.”
Not any more. Audiences at Casino Royale may have to brace themselves for a James Bond who is troubled by the brutality of his work. This Bond is a morally ambivalent figure only recently in receipt of his “double O” licence—that is, his licence to kill. He is struggling with the understanding that to keep the world safe from evil, he must sacrifice his own damaged soul.
This new iteration of Bond, after all, is the first to have been created amid the muddled legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. So it is hard to ignore that the Bond of Casino Royale emerges into a sphere coloured by the Abu Ghraib prison incident and a new willingness among the U.S. public to challenge its government on such matters as secret prisons, illegal detainment at Guantanamo Bay and torture tactics such as waterboarding.
“The fact that Bond is really grappling with things now says something interesting about the way we as a culture are starting to think about the things we're involved with, politically,” suggests writer Wilson. “To want to take that more seriously, and really see the human side of it, is an interesting change to the way we've chosen to see spy manoeuvres and espionage in the past.”
Casino Royale pits Bond (Daniel Craig, taking over from Pierce Brosnan) against Le Chiffre in a high-stakes match of Texas Hold 'Em. Le Chiffre has overextended himself by about $100-million in a stock-market scheme, and is trying to win the game to avoid certain death at the hands of his terrorist clients. If Bond can win, though, the British Secret Service hopes to squeeze Le Chiffre for information about terrorism.
Hollywood had already started to confront the moral ambiguities inherent in keeping the world safe from villainy, in films like Steven Spielberg revenge drama, Munich, and TV shows such as 24. If Casino Royale didn't at least acknowledge those skeptical strains in pop culture, “it would make Bond look like an idiot,” says Wilson.
Broccoli agrees the franchise had to shift. “The world is a very dangerous place,” she said this week, during an interview in New York. “What's interesting is, when we went to do GoldenEye (1995), we hadn't made a film for a few years, and everybody was saying, ‘The [Berlin] Wall has come down and the world is a safe place—is there any need for James Bond any more?' ” Broccoli bursts into laughter. “Well!” she snorts. “Look what's happened, the world isn't a safe place, look at how the world has just gotten more and more dangerous. I think we all like the idea of someone like James Bond out there trying to keep peace and world order—and putting his life on the line for the greater good.”
Casino Royale serves as the origin myth for Bond, tracing back in a black-and-white precredit sequence to his first two hits. Later, after he dispatches two other men during a savage hand-to-hand battle in a concrete stairwell and ends up with their blood on his face and hands, he is shaken by the reality of what he does for a living.
For long-time fans of the Bond films who may not have read Fleming's books, Casino Royale fills in some of the agent's background: Orphaned at 11 after his parents died in an avalanche, he is sent to live with his aunt before going off to boarding school. There, he is recruited by Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond realizes during the course of the film, as he begins to fall in love with the entrancing Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), that any intimate relationship is at least foolhardy and possibly dangerous. That is what sets him on his path of conducting affairs with married women. (Audiences will get a chuckle out of the fact that the mythical Bond is still in the process of being formed: Asked if he wants a martini to be shaken or stirred, he spits back, ‘Why the hell should I care?') “He's a playboy, because he can't make a commitment to another human being, because he doesn't know if he's going to survive,” observes Broccoli. “In the book, he says he doesn't expect to make it to retirement age of 45. This isn't a person who's a great prospect for marriage and family.”
Cartoonish movie franchises have lately found success by turning back to origin myths, notably Batman Begins and Spider-Man, another blockbuster controlled by Sony in which the incipient hero comes to realize he cannot put someone else at risk by forming an intimate attachment. The approach allows filmmakers to exploit the public's belief that there are no heroes any more, that we're all flawed or vulnerable. But just because Batman Begins did more than $200-million (U.S.) and Spider-Man did $400-million at the North American box office doesn't mean the financial risks of taking a dark turn with Bond are any less. Though critics pronounced the last Bond entry, Die Another Die, bloated and absurd, it took in $450-million at the worldwide box office: a record for the franchise. The previous film, The World Is Not Enough, took in an estimated $300-million.
Why not take the audience's lead and follow that up with something even splashier and more absurd? Casino Royale, after all, cost at least $100-million to produce.
There were other considerations in turning to Bond's origin myth. Broccoli and her stepbrother, Michael Wilson, recognized that the last film, Die Another Day, had taken the series into a too-fantastical realm. “This has happened before in the cycle of Bond films. With Moonraker [1979], we'd gone out to outer space, and there was a point of retrenchment in saying, ‘Let's go back to reality.' So [we] did a more personal story with For Your Eyes Only. We just got to the point where we said the last film had taken the fantasy aspect to the limit. And, given the world situation, we said, ‘No, I think we need to do something more realistic and more serious.' ”
In Daniel Craig, the controversial choice to assume the Bond role, the producers have not only bought themselves the best actor of any man to play 007 (as those who have seen his work in The Mother and Enduring Love will appreciate). They have also conjured up reminiscences of Sean Connery, the original Bond. Craig is angular, hungry, athletic and quick as a jackrabbit, and a tough scrapper.
This week, Craig said he approached the role as any other—albeit with a more pumped-up physique, ready for either a gratuitous swimsuit shot or a Brioni dinner jacket. “I wanted to see a fallible human being,” he explained during an interview. “Somebody who makes mistakes, somebody who an audience watches and goes: This might not turn out good, this might turn out bad. I didn't go out to make him likeable,” he continued. “I wanted to show somebody who changed. I did not want him to be the same person at the beginning of the movie who he was at the end.”
A Bond who is affected by his experiences? That's just shy of a revolution.
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