- The new 007 takes his job--and his women--seriously
By Richard von Busack
The first James Bond villain, Le Chiffre, in Ian Fleming's 1952 novel Casino Royale, is confronting a captive James Bond. He is on the verge of initiating the customary torture sequence, when he stops to disabuse Bond--and the reader--of any illusions: "This is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed and the hero is given a medal and marries the girl."
This summary comes as close to the center of the Ian Fleming mythos as the wild fantasy that has made the spy series so popular on film. Fleming's books did sometimes end with the girl dead, as in Casino Royale. Often the hero ended up in the hospital, shot, clawed, bitten or poisoned, and consoled only by the knowledge that the world he was saving was probably not worth the trouble. The motto of the Bond family, according to the novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service, is "The world is not enough."
James Bond is well covered on two World Wide Web pages:
007, OHMSS (features a surfeit of links to yet more sites)
Onscreen, 007's fatalism was peeled away. Even so, the most effective moments in a canon of 17 films (not counting oddities like Casino Royale with Woody Allen) came when the movies drilled into the Fleming books for some seriousness. In GoldenEye, one of the very best of the Bond movies, Pierce Brosnan knows he's trying on something mythical.
How is Brosnan as Bond? Laurence Olivier once said that a young actor never knows enough not to debunk heroism. Brosnan isn't as young as he once was, when he was first proposed as 007, and he's learned that lesson. He's wearing the mask; he takes it seriously; he is James Bond.
Yes, his Bond is still something of a blank. People who complain about the blankness of James Bond are the same people who complain that Buster Keaton never smiled. The Bond films are heirs to Keaton's work, in deadpan slapstick and fascination with gadgets and death, as well as the fearful humor about women.
The great Keatonlike moment in GoldenEye has 007 chasing his kidnapped girl through St. Petersburg, Russia, in a tank. Her kidnapper, General Ourumov (played by Gottfried John, a regular in Fassbinder's movies, who even looks like the peculiar Snitz Edwards, Keaton's pal in Seven Chances). The kidnappers take a turn around a traffic square marked by a colossal equestrian statue of a charging general with a sword. Bond's tank crashes through the square and, wearing the statue as a hat, continues the chase as that immortal Bond instrumental theme swells up on the soundtrack.
GoldenEye is the first Bond in six years, and it's the first Bond with a cosmic plot since Octopussy 12 years ago. The threat to the world comes from a mastermind villain controlling the so-called GoldenEye satellite, which can deliver an electromagnetic pulse capable of frying high-tech circuitry.
Pursuing the plot to Russia, Bond is reunited with an old nemesis, a Russian gangster named Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane). Note a cameo by Minnie Driver, the big-boned Irish girl from Circle of Friends, onstage at Zukovsky's nightclub. Note also Alan Cumming, who played the peevish little squirt hitting on Driver in Circle of Friends, as the computer expert Boris, whose Roger Moore-like infantile harassment of the heroine, Natalya, is paid back in grisly fashion.
Natalya (Izabella Scorupco), the imperiled but not helpless heroine, is a Russian technician, the lone survivor of an EMP-ray attack. In crosscutting to her story and giving her a personal conflict with a female killer named Xenia Onatopp (the shockingly tough Famke Janssen), GoldenEye shows a changed emphasis, paring down the three-part, three-woman formula of the previous Bond films to the conflict of a good woman and a bad one.
There is a parallel conflict between Our Hero and his doppelganger, a renegade agent named Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), formerly 006, who voices all of Bond's doubts and repellent qualities. "James and I shared everything," he says, planting an unwanted kiss on Natalya.
Later, having captured 007, Trevelyan calls Bond "her majesty's terrier," asking him if vodka martinis drown out the screams of the men he's killed, if all of the women he sleeps with chases the memories of all of the women he failed to protect. It doesn't take a lot of underpinnings, in short, to make the movie far more engrossing than the overblown actioners the 007 movies inadvertently spawned.
If Eric Serra's music is more appropriate for a ride on an elevator than a ride on a roller coaster; if the rear projection is noticeably amateur in one scene of a collapsing satellite station, GoldenEye is still a success, full of the things that made the Bond movies ineffable: the class, the grand scale, the larger-than-life villains, the perilous heights, the surreal encounters, a finale at the mile-wide satellite dish at the SETI project in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The comic stuff is balanced with a genuine thrust and a genuine threat--together with a new maturity.
There's been much chortling about old Bond having to rein it in around the babes, in magazines from Esquire to Mad, but this reassessment of the hero comes not a moment too soon. Roger Moore, toward the end of his tenure, was like your granddad eyeing your prom date's cleavage. (In the best of the Moore Bonds, the 1981 For Your Eyes Only, Moore for once had to gently dissuade a girl who was eager but too young.) The noted Shakespearean performer Judi Dench, playing M, sizes up 007 as "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur."
Among the brighter aspects of GoldenEye is that the movie gives weight to M's assessment; it doesn't make her a jealous old bitch. Dench was cast as a response to the fact that the real-life Tory government had appointed a woman to the head of MI-6 (although the fact that a woman, Barbara Broccoli, is co-producing the series also might have something to do with it). As interesting as the dynamite in GoldenEye is the occasional wondering about the psyche of Bond, who is rebuked for his coldness, his "cavalier attitude toward life." "It's how I stay alive" is his answer, but a troubling, incomplete answer.
The fact that so many of the women in James Bond movies were bimbos obscures the fact that they weren't all bimbos. Ursula Andress (Honey Ryder) carried a knife on her belt in Dr. No; Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore) was hardly a woman to melt away at the first whiff of 007 after-shave.
Scorupco holds up her half of GoldenEye, while the tall and very crazed-looking Janssen comes very near to breaking Brosnan's Bond in half. The scenes of Bond in mortal peril are the best moments in the series; you wonder how in the world he'll get out of the situations. Whatever else has changed in nearly 26 years since I saw my first Bond movie, I still didn't have any idea how he was going to escape.
I'm not sure if I believe in the type of movie known as a guilty pleasure. If a movie affects you, there's probably a reason for it, and that's a reason worth explaining. The political consciousness of James Bond films isn't something you want to dig into too deeply, for fear of sounding like the "Modern Parents" satirized in Viz comics--the ones who bought their child a nonsexist, nonclassist, nonracist chess set with 32 gray pawns all on the same side.
To a good liberal mind, power fantasies are only as acceptable as their ratio to real powerlessness, thus Hothead Paisan comics or Thelma and Louise are apparently worth applauding in a way James Bond isn't. In GoldenEye, the filmmakers have rendered 007 feasible to women in a way that is more than just sail-trimming. Their transformation of the familiar spy chaser makes for a pleasure that is truly unalloyed. Bond is now as state of the art as his equipment.
Web Watch:
GoldenEye (PG-13; 130 min.), directed by Martin Campbell, written by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein, photographed by Phil Meheux and starring Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, Izabella Scorupco and Famke Janssen.