So I saw Skyfall the day after it came out here in France, that is, Saturday. For my American audience, it is as if I got a special reviewer's preview. That is, as Riley Griffith's character in Super 8 said, "production value." So I have to take advantage.
This film follows the trend in the last two Bond films, those starring Daniel Craig, of upping the ante as far as intelligence and substance goes in Bond. My mother loves Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan and I cannot deny their skill. It is not because Daniel Craig is a better actor, though he definitely is better than Pierce and maybe better than Sean, but it is based on someone who is obviously hiding. The two writers that all three share in common also wrote Die Another Day and that is, in my humble and, in this case, extremely accurate opinion, the lowest Bond has ever gone. Who is behind this? I cannot put my finger on it, but someone is keeping these men honest.
All this said about this Daniel Craig era of Bond, this movie really does do something more. Casino Royale blew my mind as it created a version of Bond that was two things I wanted. One is accurately violent, which in my mind is a great relief after decades of clean kills, polluting the essence of violence; the blood and guts hidden, violence became stylized, even pretty. (I should credit my brother, Steve, with that idea. I believe he said something similar to me when we went to see Die Another Day in theaters many moons ago.) The second was that it made Bond openly broken. If he was a sexual deviant, it was because he trusted no one and was a bit of a misogynist. This blew open Bond for me, intellectually.
Quantum of Solace did what I didn't believe possible. It allowed a Bond girl to escape Bond's dirty clutches and go unsexed. Think about it. James Bond didn't have sex with a Bond girl. It also cleared the way with the Vesper story, which need resolving.
Skyfall's brilliance is that it asks extremely large questions about Bond and the nature of action films. I attribute this, in part, to the direction of Sam Mendes. Sam and I have been at odds since his first film, American Beauty. To this day it is the only film that I have heard good things about, set down determined to watch, and simply pulled it out before it was finished and never came back. We've grown closer in mind, but it wasn't until Away We Go, still number 3 all time, that I began to like him, even trust him.
All of that may be interesting, but now I'd like to get down to it. For wit, I went with a 9.5. This is up .5 from Quantum of Solace, though I should guess that was on the low end of 9, while Skyfall is definitely on the high end of 9.5. I cannot give it a 10 as it doesn't feel unquestionable. Occasionally the jokes go a bit low, reminding one that these writers wrote Die Another Day, but overall it is written beautifully. As before, it does things that are shocking, unheard of in the old Bond, or most other movies that aim for this Hollywood action film crowd. People die when you don't expect it, almost as it might happen if one were a real spy.
An absolutely brilliant performance by Javier Bardem. He again steps outside himself and finds another type of character. One might be tempted to compare this with his other famous psychopath from No Country for Old Men, but though he is clearly criminally insane, this character has more in common with Javier's character from Vicky Cristina Barcelona than with the silent, cold-blooded type in the aforementioned Cohen Brothers film. Daniel Craig keeps up the same level from the other two, with the intensity and the emotional intelligence intact. Dame Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, and Albert Finney are quite good as well.
If I could return to what this film does in particular, it asks the question about why we still need spies like Bond and therein confronts its own raison d'être. Why do we need stories about men who chase down bad guys? Aren't we beyond good and evil? Aren't we beyond such apparent categorization of good guys and bad guys? M confronts this question during an inquest into her work as head of her department. She answers that things are not simpler, but more complicated. We don't live in a world without shadows or secrets. Everything is now done in the shadows and secrets are everywhere. I like her answer to that question, but I think I like the film's answer to the questions about itself even more. The film argues that though many people who would once have been seen simply as "baddies" might be something more substantial, there are still very clear, very real and dangerous threats in the world today. These unquestionable evils are not less dangerous than the giant Soviet Union. They may be much more dangerous. I'm not sure that is very well said, but the movie, I think, says it better.
I think that covers why it gets a 9.5 for wisdom. I gave it a 9 for wonder. I thought about a 9.5, but found that I gave Snatch a 9 for wonder. That makes me think that I have been over-estimating wonder for a while. Who knows? Overall, this movie does a great job with car chases, explosions, helicopters, etc., but it doesn't rely throughout on fancy, newfangled equipment, but allows itself to give two sides, high technology and low. Even the low technology half of the film has a good deal of shooting and a helicopter fight scene. (I don't think I'm ruining anything to mention that James Bond beats the helicopter.) The music adds little but a sense of nostalgia.
This film, in my mind, is a definite step up from Quantum of Solace and progress in a series is the highest compliment I can give. If you haven't, as I'm sure you poor, backward Americans haven't, see Skyfall.
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