Cast: Daniel Craig, Dame Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, JavierBardem, Naomie Harris, Bérénice Lim Marlohe, Ben WinshawDirector: Sam MendesRuntime: 140 min.Verdict: Utterly reactionary. Completely dilutes all of itsattempts at some sort of relevance by paying tributes to itself. And yeah, staticand inert. Genre: Action, Thriller
Consider,dear reader, the fictional universe of Superman/ Clark Kent, the flag-bearer ofAmerican exceptionalism. Imagine a tale where Daily Planet is under attack,where Perry White is another of Superman’s “father figures”, where a formerdisgruntled journalist is exacting a calculated revenge by knocking off onejournalist at a time his main aim being the destruction of White. The otherjournalists are mere bait, and what he wants is White and White alone. Supermanhas got to stop it. To raise the stakes, let us have the disgruntled journalista man with superpowers after having been bitten by a spider. And to spice upmatters, let us make Superman physically unfit complete with high blood sugarlevels and a failed kidney. Maybe even a groin injury. And a pulled hamstring.It doesn’t make much sense, I admit, but considering the production house’sinsistence, it is still a Superman picture. To make an independent low-keylow-stakes Superman picture is not merely an oxymoron, it is plain ridiculous.Why should an archetype of a nation with such great power be reduced to a sillystreet-side quarrel? And if that is indeed the case, why, in the lord’s name,should we be the bystanders to such an utterly uninteresting non-event? Dear reader, do not mind that the above concoction is somethingof a rhetorical question, and I would rather you focus on the fact that Idirect this question towards you when we consider this latest James Bondpicture from Mr. Sam Mendes. I repeat, it is a James Bond picture. An espionagefilm. An espionage film that isn’t Tinker,Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and there’s no way a commercial entity like a Bondpicture would have the courage and integrity to go the way of Mr. Alfredson’s masterpiece.It can only pretend, before function-less hot women and action sequences andsilly one-liners knock on the door demanding their presence. In an uneasymixture as this, if the stakes are as high as M’s life, when there’s the wholeof the world begging to be included in the picture, including those dozens ofMI6 agents, I’m not sure how such a narrative could end up being anything butdramatically inert. There’re several elements, like Silva’s (Mr. Bardem) islandfor instance, that could still acquire a personality of its own and lend someof that to the narrative, but Mr. Mendes generally limits them to ornateappearances. I am assuming several of you have already watched the film, and Iask you to imagine a less complicated and hence less ludicrous Silva master-plan,where he simply blackmails the stakeholders that he would keep revealing thedetails of MI6 agents each day James Bond doesn’t personally deliver M to him, theflash-drive being the bargaining chip against any military intervention. Itsimply doesn’t shrink the narrative further, it makes it leaner and poetic. Itbrings a dimension of ethical uncertainty to the proceedings, a la ChristopherNolan picture, where James Bond carries M on a boat through the heart ofdarkness, and crucially, it gives us the opportunity to ask suchself-congratulatory (yet I believe involving) questions as – (a) Did Bondsecretly want to get rid of M, for the sake of the countless agents, and forhimself, and (b) Why doesn’t M give herself up, and save the lives of all heragents? Then, there is the island, the island of disillusionment, this islandunhinged from the world, and maybe, just maybe, Silva could’ve constructed itin a manner so as to remind Bond of his past. A journey for all, you know. Imight sound boastful here, but this picture in my head is getting increasinglyawesome. Something like a super riff on FromRussia with Love, and almost certainly a game-changer. But then, nevermind. What I intend to highlight is Skyfall’s failure at a very basic, action-picture genre-stakesnarrative level. The crucial factor for any Hollywood actioner is the helpless collateral,like in Premium Rush, where the moneybelonging to a mostly innocent Asian woman is at stake. Or The Dark Knight Rises, where the lives of Gotham’s 1% and 99% areat stake. Or Taken 2 where it’s thewife. And so on and so forth. Skyfalldoes have two of them – a woman by the name of Sévérine (Ms. Marlohe),and well, the identity of several MI6 agents. Mr. Mendes squanders both ofthem, Sévérine by wasting her in a rare confusing shot (I realized she was deadonly after she didn’t make an appearance for a good fifteen minutes), and theagents who’re (a) faceless and, (b) are anyway exposed 5 a week so as to becomea minor stakes in the middle of the film until M takes over those duties. AndI’m finding it incredibly tough to buy M as collateral to base the entirenarrative upon. A film as Rambo IIIdoes have the Colonel hostage but there’re several Afghans at stake too. Imean, it is like having a Nolan Batman picture with the mayor kidnapped, orcoming back to my ridiculous scenario from above, where Perry White is the hostage.I mean, why the hell would I need Bond for that? Why is M so damn important? And answer to which might be, to pull back James Bond from allthe campy world-saving escapism into a real psychoanalytical self-consciousworld. The dramatic and serious James Bond. To what end, one might wonder?While Goldeneye described, in asupreme moment of wit and economy, the archetype as a sexist misogynistdinosaur, Skyfall does take the painof going all psychoanalytic on our posterior, complete with mommy issues, notmerely to address and deconstruct the archetype, but milk the iconic symbol ofBritish exceptionalism that James Bond has been for the past so many decades.Him being weak, him finding it tough to get to six pull-ups (I do sets of 7daily) ought to be read as a failure at a national level. James Bond would havebeen a knight a few hundred years ago, or at least a noble, but here, runningaround on the roads, as Mr. Mendes intercuts him against Silva’s men dressed ascops, as M (Ms. Dench) recites the lines from Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, he resembles not thebureaucracy but the working class. It is real tough to reconcile with thisidea, but Skyfall, which seems to be asparanoid about its relevance as a franchise, as it is of its eponymous figure,so much so that it fantasizes a world almost a hundred years into the past. There’sShanghai, featuring yet again this year (after Looper) as a dazzling futuristic world, almost cementing itself asthe capital of the new world as far as Hollywood is concerned. And coming in aJames Bond picture, where Tomorrow NeverDies had a bike action sequence set amongst the slummy face of China, and Die Another Day, where the East (Korea)was a war-ravaged area of megalomaniacs, it might be something of an acknowledgmentof the order of things. More importantly it wonders about the significance of spies.Robert Baer, in that wonderful book of his, Seeno Evil, mentions how the CIA did not have one decent field officer orlinguist in the Middle East during the early nineties. That very goodold-fashioned intelligence on the ground is what Skyfall is trying to preserve, and it feels, for better or worse,out of place in a franchise that actually helped rewrite and romanticize, with futuristicgadgetry and technological prowess. When Q, in a rather patheticself-referential comment, disses all of that history as some joke (which it is),romantic or whatever, and intends to rewrite it tethered to a realnuts-and-bolts world. I’m all for such corrections, but there is a certainself-congratulatory tone to Q and the film, where the deconstruction is notmeans but an end. More importantly, the details of the deconstruction all comein broad strokes, with Bond finding it tough to get to six pull-ups, and declaredmentally and physically unfit. And yet he gets an opportunity to provide us withhis customary introduction to a woman in a casino, which happens to createsomething of an ungainly combination. Something like those super-tight trousersthat Bond seems to wear and is rarely elegant or comfortable in. I bet ahundred bucks if we freeze frame that moment where M announces him his resultsand he stands up and leaves, we would get a fine shot of his trousers and theunderpants stuck up his crack, which, in a rather fine way, becomes symptomaticof this entire exercise. I mean, Bond sure seems to be in pain while hanging byan elevator cabin, but then he isn’t particularly troubled in the field. Throwin those komodo dragons to bring back ugly memories of those crocodiles in Live and Let Die, and I wasn’t sureabout the tone anymore. What’s troubling is the inherently reactionary view of things,of Aston Martins and British Bulldogs, of the majesty of the Westminsterskyline (should that be interpreted as: The east can be all light and show butnothing trumps this view), of the Scottish moors. Mr. Deakins’ shot of Skyfall,up from a hill, closely resembling a John Ford shot, is so evocative here one mightalmost instinctively utter “throwback”. The new world order, the working class,the nature of intelligence and all such questions posed by the narrative are evadedby the film’s desire to run back to the past, in a land devoid of all thediplomacy and secrecy and technology. It is an uncomplicated land, ethicallyand strategically, a land that alludes to a great past (which I assume to beimperialism), a land which almost desires hand-to-hand us-versus-them combat, likethe wars of the early years of the last century, and one feels Skyfall intends to have that land assome kind of base upon which to write a new history and a new world order. There’refilms out there that might be wrongly labeled as reactionary when they merelywant to present a world with beliefs, and a narrative filled with conviction.Mr. Mendes’ Skyfall isn’t one ofthose. Its half-baked questions are lost amongst the celebration of Britishicons. And then I think of those komodo, and I am filled with a sense ofdisgust that all of this might be only to serve as a Launchpad for a newfranchise. Probably drenched in Scottish whiskey and narcissism I suppose.
Note 1: Here’s apsychoanalytic reading of the film that might be a worthwhile read – http://www.leninology.com/2012/11/skyfall-conformity-rebellion-and.html
Note 2: Here’s Jim Emersonconsidering the film’s staging, and despite Mr. Deakins’ work, some of theset-ups, like in the water tunnels, a clear reference to The Third Man, aredull and uninspired.http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2012/11/skyfall_hey_kids_lets_put_on_a.html
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