|
|
CASINO ROYALE
|
Two movies, one trapped inside the other's cracking brittle carapace, fight for screen time in Casino Royale. We open and close with the bread-and-circuses Old Bond who blows up buildings and guns down dozens of villains while racing through death-defying stunts, and in between is a reinvented and retro Bond throughout the film's lengthy middle.
Though some might plump for Sherlock Holmes and others for current flash Harry Potter, I think that James Bond is the most successful fictional character ever invented, measured in both longevity and breadth of fandom, so to take on the role is to inherit a worthy mantle, and the movies are seen in cycles, not unlike the reign of kings, each film a monarch's wife (as manifested, of course, by the Good Bond Girl). As each successive Bond actor wearies of playing shaken-not-stirred, their films consistently migrate from drama to farce (with Roger Moore reaching absurdity peaks never to be topped). Even after only three outings, Pierce Brosnan had become so bored that he was clearly camping through his later paces. In the new grimmer post-9/11 world, the producers obviously wanted a brutal Bond, so they give us Daniel Craig (Elizabeth, as a Catholic monk assassin, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, as Lara's studmuffin) bludgeoning his way to his first kill in a grainy black-and-white hexagonal-tile men's room. And to match the tougher Bond, they give us a less-implausible story, with Bond playing ultra-high-stakes cards against the villain Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson, King Arthur).
Casino Royale is the only Fleming novel that never got a proper movie treatment (it was dismembered into an odious 1967 spoof including Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond), and the Bondophilic filmmakers have restored to Bond his spiritual patrimony, using most of the original Royale plot. Le Chiffre (French for the cipher) is paymaster for a terrorist network whose funds he has lost through imprudent stock speculation. Now he must recoup his losses via a mega-card game, and Bond, the Service's best card-player, will be his principal opponent.
Though the original novel Casino Royale was deeply rooted in a very specific time and place (Deauville, 1950), applying verisimilitude would be anachronistic and put off the adolescents who make up a large chunk of Bond fandom, so the producers have updated the story ("Christ, I miss the Cold War," grouses M, reduced to a tut-tutting nanny instead of the head of counterintelligence) in largely successful ways, with Texas Hold 'Em replacing the mindless baccarat, Montenegro standing in for tired old Norman Deauville, and wi-fi passwords covering for cashier's checks.
Bond is aided by the usual constellation of supporting players: Interpol's Rene Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini, Seven Beauties), the CIA's Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), and the shyly seductive Vesper Lynd (newcomer Eva Green). Bondian Easter eggs are scattered about, from the poisoning sequence (borrowed from The Prisoner), the showdown hand (stolen from The Cincinnati Kid, right down to the utterly ridiculous card play leading up to the showdown), the 1964 Aston Martin DB II straight out of Goldfinger, and even the cameo appearance of Sixties iconic mannequin Veruschka as one of the ten glitterati card players.
Le Chiffre, Fleming's first villain, is an early-model of the asexual amoral genius to whom Fleming would later return with Dr. No (Mark II) and Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Mark III). "Do you believe in God?" Le Chiffre is asked. "No, I believe in a reasonable rate of return." But unlike the amputee Dr. No or the vengeful Blofeld, Le Chiffre is colorless -- or rather, his colors are never used. He has an unexplained facial scar reminiscent of a saber slash, a nervous mannerism of breathing from an asthma inhaler at moments of stress, and a tendency to weep blood (a malfunction of the tear ducts, not an emotion, he comments, dabbing it away). Though he delivers the Bond torture sequence with a raspy whispering relish, we understand neither where he comes from nor what made him who he is. Bond movies require an outlandish and mesmerizing villain, and though Mikkelson does his best to menace up the role, he is neither.
For that matter, Casino Royale is not so much a film in its own right as the coronation of the new Bond, Daniel Craig. He's rugged -- it's refreshing to have a Bond where the best upper-chest development is his, not hers -- unrefined, tough, cold, and taciturn, a throwback less to Connery's cruel eroticism and more to Steve McQueen's granite Bullitt.
The old-Bond Royale is a flaming red (when the DVD comes out, skip the first 35 minutes and the last 8), the new-Bond Royale a passable yellow (grading on the Bond curve), leaving hope for a better Bond in the 2008 model now in pre-production.
Le Bond est mort, vive le Bond!