Daniel Craig (Francois Duhamel/Sony)
A spy’s life is spent in the shadows, hiding in plain sight, behind corners and reflections, ducking into tunnels or underground for cover. So heights are especially dangerous—an agent is exposed and vulnerable to attack. Even from friendly fire.
Sam Mendes’ entry into the James Bond canon comes along as the franchise marks its 50th anniversary and as its star Daniel Craig enters his mid-forties. Skyfall is one of the most thrilling of all the Bond movies—this is No. 23—but it also shows a more vulnerable, more somber 007 than we are used to seeing. The danger comes not just from job insecurity and the perils of jet-setting intrigue, but from a failing body, starting with that part most crucial to agents and audiences alike: the eyes.
The exciting opening sequence starts in a blur, from which Bond emerges, a light trained precisely at his steely eyes. Can he see through that? Impaired vision comes up again and again in this sequence and throughout the movie. Rear view mirrors peel off cars, a hard London rain obscures the view from MI6, smoke and mirrors make it hard to see what is what and who is who. CInematographer Roger Deakins, longtime lensman for the Coen brothers as well as for Mendes, takes all that dark imagery and makes this into one of the best-looking Bond movies ever. (Though forgive me for thinking Craig looks funny when he runs).
Shadow-play and mirrors are part of one of the movie’s many gorgeous set pieces, an homage to Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai in which this 21st century Bond engages with the past. The Bond series is known for looking to the future of technology, supplied—for the first time since 2002’s woeful Die Another Day—by the man known only as “Q” (here played by young Ben Whishaw), but this movie looks backward, to Bond’s past and to M’s (Judi Dench, my favorite Bond girl) and to cinematic history. The opening scene reaches a climax on a moving train, an image that goes back to the birth of cinema as well as one of the best Bollywood sequences ever.
The movie may have sky in the title, but the operative word is fall. This is a Bond fallen from grace, and he spends much of the movie taking cover underground and scurrying in tunnels. Some Bond fans may miss the campy sexual innuendo typical to the series most popular titles, but here that sex is sublimated and even threatened. There are Bond babes—Naomie Harris as Eve (an agent of Eden?) and Bérénice Marlohe as the mysterious Sévérine, but the lead female is Judi Dench’s spymaster, M. The movie pivots around Bond’s relationship with “Ma’am,” (say it like a Brit) who has something of a reverse Oedipal relationship with her favored boy agent, and whose maternal managerial presence affects the film’s villain. Javier Bardem’s swishy Raoul Silva is the closest the film comes to camp, and teases at the alpha hero’s metrosexuality.
Judi Dench (Francois Duhamel/Sony)Director Sam Mendes is best known for the heavy-handed, overrated American Beauty, and he fills his 007 blockbuster with plenty of visual leitmotifs and grand themes. But creative constraints can be as liberating as creative control, and recurring themes of darkness and fragility adds depth to the action movie tension without making it any less of an action movie.
In keeping with the theme of shadows, major set pieces are constructed around what you can’t see. An aging London infrastructure that crumbles under villainous intent is a metaphor for the aging body as well as the franchise’s grey hairs, but the death and dying that looms over this most hedonistic of heroes is packaged full of sustained thrills and cinematic eye candy. A fire-lit Macau casino features compartments borrowed from medieval Asia, and a crumbling Scottish estate brings an appropriate sense of gloom to the big finish.
Does Skyfall rock? It rocks hard, and somberly and even mournfully. But this isn’t your father’s Bond movie. It doesn’t celebrate the glamorous lifestyle of a dashing spy so much as it makes you worry about him and his Ma’am.
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Directed by Sam Mendes.
Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan.
With Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Albert Finney and Ben Whishaw.
Running time 143 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense violent sequences throughout, some sexuality, language and smoking.
Opens today at an IMAX theaters, and everywhere else Friday.
