“The best acting is when you’re not concerned about the surface. And Bond is the opposite of that. You have to be bothered about how you’re looking.”
“The dead are alive.” The opening epigraph for the last Daniel Craig Bond movie suggests what’s gone and going wrong in the franchise. You know it, the movie knows it, and Daniel (“I’d rather break this glass and slash my wrists”) Craig seems to know it, too. For its part, the film (again directed by Sam Mendes) sets up (again) the imminent demise of Bond and the 00 program, so as to allow for ongoing discussion of walking deadness. It also invokes (again) the many ways this problem manifests, which is to say, the usual ones, advancing technologies and inevitable losses, protracted goodbyes and seeming regrets.
Of course, you can’t kill Bond. For all his out-of-dateness and repetition, he manages to make money. As each 007 retires, another takes his place. As each film introduces a next level (usually with stunts, sometimes with character, and more rarely, with a new concept), so a next installment grinds into production. And as each iteration acknowledges its pending end, so it also inspires all manner of testaments to its longevity, as in the lists of death modes, lists of villains, lists of girls.
So it is with Spectre, the 20-somethingth film, which opens with another spectacular stunt. This Bond film is in fact, different in kind from prior, justly famous stunts, in that it’s not about action, but about camera. A seemingly extraordinarily long take, one shot that takes you over a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City, picks up one and then another figure in masks. It follows Bond in his mask inside a hotel and up an elevator and into a room (with a woman attached to his arm, of course), and then, voila!, the camera takes us out of the room through a window and into awesome mayhem. However it might be digitally rigged and the mundane thematics aside (assassination, surveillance, sex, and oh my god, yet another take on the ur-sign of the exotic, the Day of the Dead in Mexico City), this first shot is precisely lovely, a dance of framing and figures, a display of craft and thoughtfulness and ingenuity.
Then the rest of the movie happens.
The visual stunt leads to a more conventional action stunts, with guns and explosions and fisticuffs on a careening helicopter (courtesy of Red Bull aerobatic pilot Chuck Aaron) over a plaza full of screaming people, a couple of stunty deaths and then, no doubt, the usual reprimand back in London. That is, M (Ralph Fiennes) complains about the costs and the PR before he grounds Bond. This leads to still more completely regular moves, Bond with Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Wishaw), as well as Bond with new gadgets, a new car, and a new off-the-books mission that M can know nothing about. He beds pretty women (Monica Bellucci and Léa Seydoux), he embarks on some chase scenes and some brutal violence, he blows up some facilities. And so on.
Blofeld makes another appearance (this time played by Christoph Waltz), with lots of expository dialogue, and so do the other villains encountered by Craig’s Bond, reprised in photos and memories and even in the flesh. With the camera gazing at Javier Bardem or Mads Mikkelsen or Jesper Christensen, you might note the film’s self-awareness or appreciate its sense of humor. You might also understand the method here, the survey and summary presentation that recalls, for example, the commemoration of Paul Walker in Furious 7. This look-back is less melodramatic, more pragmatic, more a means to wrap up and move on, to explain (again) the machinations and the formula of the film, the love and hate of franchises.
This Bond’s formula is wholly invested in his family background, injuries done long ago and off-screen, relations forged and fractured, conveniently documented in “effects” gathered at the site where we lost the maternal M (Judi Dench). The return of the repressed is too obvious here, including the parallel storyline embodied by Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), a psychologist who wears red lipstick exceptionally well.
Her efforts to break from her bad dad resonate with Bond’s efforts to break with MI6, with M, with his past. As James and Madeleine share assorted burdens, they feel guilty and resentful, goofy and self-conscious: following a prolonged and bloody confrontation with big-man villain Dave Bautista, they exchange glances. “What do we do next?”, she asks, and you can share in the comedy that such trauma is best addressed by a brief bit of sex.
Other traumas here are less easily resolved, though they are just as easily turned into metaphors. Max (Andrew Scott), this movie’s C, insists that human intelligence and decision-making is inefficient, while drones and surveillance technologies are the future and, by the way, the present. Bond has a license to kill, M intones, but also “the license not to kill”: he makes a decision and it’s usually right. It may be that Bond’s exploits tend to bring on lots of exciting on-screen destruction but not so many visible corpses, while drones (and other bombing missions) notoriously create “collateral damage” and not, incidentally, more and ongoing enmity.
If this debate remains academic in this particular movie, another is made immediate and apparently material. This Bond’s death (leading to the resurrection of another in the next movie) is hinted at in Blofeld’s insidious plan to kill his memory first, to remove his psyche not only from the taunting Blofeld but also from his loving Madeleine. He does this with an incredibly literal device — a tiny drill he spins into Bond’s head while he’s strapped to a chair and you watch Madeleine watching, perhaps sharing her agony, but you’re also simultaneously distanced from it.
Craig is right: Bond is about surfaces. You might think that Bond’s loss of memory threatens the loss of his Bondness, which is at least in part premised on his ability to make those decisions M touts, to make and break allegiances, to measure men and women, to determine futures. The movie never quite gets to that crisis point, of course. But it’s a puzzle more compelling than yet another Day of the Dead pageant, as intricate and heady as that first long take in Spectre. How can the franchise ever get there? You won’t know the answer from this film, but that’s inevitable too, isn’t it?