At 52, Bond Is Edgier, More Human

In October this year, the James Bond franchise turned 52. From an inside joke to a gut-wrenching life and death question, the Bond narratives have travelled a long way. The franchise has now acquired a sense of immediacy and finally a Bond film has grown up to tell stories about real people in unreal situations, about connections made and missed.

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Daniel Craig’s three films as 007 have an astute sense of timing and have humanised Bond  and made the franchise less about gadgetry. Bond no longer saunters with superhuman grace into cheesy dens and gets out of them with a creaseless tuxedo. The films are now about the inner workings of the human soul and what happens to it when it is uprooted from its foundations. For me the definitive Bond moment that changed the franchise and turned it inside out was when a quietly empathetic Bond (in Casino Royale) sits next to a shivering Eva Green in a shower in a marked departure from the misogyny Bond has flirted with in earlier films.

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This Bond has wounds, visible and invisible. He is implacable like a beautiful beast, is a magnificently sculpted killing machine but sometimes his fingers shake, his blue, ice-chip eyes grow moist and red rimmed with pain. This is a man who talks about things coming full circle, about resurrection, about wavering between pulling the trigger and holding fire and the tough moment of indecision when you don’t know what to do. About accepting mortality, limitations and defeat, even death when it is inevitable and then gritting your teeth and rising again from the dead. This Bond reads subtext and  says stuff that is more profound than the sexist puns he was once known for. The universe he inhabits needs more than just cars that can spit out bullets and swim in water though in a key sequence in Skyfall, when Dame Judi  Dench’s M asks Bond, “Where are we going?”, it is the Aston that will take them “back in time.” Though a tad uncomfortable now and comically overdone, it is still a signature Bond moment that must be revisited once in a while for old time’s sake though we all know that times have changed and Bond has moved on.

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The theme too is not so much about saving the world but keeping what matters safe within and also negotiating the antipathy and the inevitable push and pull between trust and betrayal, grief and healing. The action stuns but the quieter scenes and the words spoken or not spoken stay with you.

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There has also been criticism that these recent Bond films are not exactly Bond films but attempts  to keep up with a cinematic reality altered irrevocably by The Dark Knight. There is no doubt that Christopher Nolan turned what was after all just another comic book  into a frightening , evocative, allegorical world going to hell where we must fight ourselves to save ourselves and those we love. But what Sam Mendes brought to James Bond with Skyfall, was a sense of Shakespearean theatre (honed no doubt by his experience with stage productions) and literary complexity where even Tennyson can be quoted and not sound out-of-place. And he did all this without losing out on pace,  the taut tension of cat-and-mouse games and supremely entertaining  set pieces.

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Revisit Javier Bardem’s entry as Raoul Silva ((Tiago Rodriguez), the spy who lost his way like  Milton’s beautiful-ugly fallen angel in Paradise Lost and whose suffering like cyanide must eat into everything it touches. He is a master manipulator of information networks, perversely given to theatrics and when he first walks into the frame for a long minute, saying his piece about rats eating rats in a cruel game of survival, you forget you are watching a James Bond film because this man is more than just a villain.  He is refined, condensed, pure evil,  the offspring of great suffering , of betrayal that can taint any soul, Yes, he is Milton’s Satan. He is also deliciously sardonic, given to ironical chuckles, swaying of head and tongue clucking and he enjoys every little game of nerves he plays with his adversaries. This is not just cinema. It is theatre and right from the first moment he speaks, Bardem is unforgettable and instantly immortal.

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 Most of the key actors Mendess picked including Ralph Fiennes and the delightful Albert Finney have theatre backgrounds.  And by God, it showed. Finney demonstrated  just how a one liner like, “Welcome To Scotland,”  can bring an army of villains down and send the audience in raptures. M too is far more complex in this film than in any other and this was as much her film as Bond’s.

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Craig as always is fascinating to watch. His face is made for cinema. As is his reigned in energy, his determinedly calm body that explodes into violence when called to defend a country , a woman he could have loved (Berenice Marlohe as Sévérine) or the mother-figure he cannot bring himself to hate even though she can sacrifice him to save something bigger than their barely concealed affection for each other. He is a man not of flourish but yes, his come-back lines can bring the house down whether he is looking down upon an annoyingly conceited Q or throwing a punch-line towards Silva. Naomie Harris despite the dated though well remembered name she is given in the film, is a revised version of Bond women who were either seduced or killed or both in film after film. Adele’s vocals and the opening sequence connected the film to some of its best traditions. The visuals and the song  both mourning losses Bond has suffered and will suffer.

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Mendes in tandem with his favourite cinematographer  Roger Deakins created operatic gorgeousness in frame after frame be it the Martin chasing the past on a mountain road in Scotland or Bond in Macau, surrounded by an orgiastic display of fireworks and golden lanterns. And yet, nothing is excessive and always  nuanced. Like the loss of a key agent and M, dry-eyed.. framed against a weeping night sky. Dench can do no wrong and the line I will remember her for in the film is, “To hell with dignity. I will go when the job is done.” Yes, maam.

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This film also reminded me of just how much we as an audience and our cinema have been shaped by Bond through the decades. Right from the ‘dhan tana’background score we borrowed in the 70s  from Bond’s theme music to our  own Bond take offs like Suraksha to Shaan, and Gunmaster-G-9  and Shakaal and dens with alligators, we have claimed bits of him as our own. Now that Bond has evolved beyond his franchise, will we too come up with a spy who can evolve beyond Bond? But till that happens, 007 belongs to us in a way no other spy ever has. He maybe 52 now and weather-beaten but even when he shoots  and misses, he is still Bond..James Bond.