Which one is this? The reboot.
Who’s who in this one? Craig (Bond); Dench (M); Wright (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? On release to theatres in 2006.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Mads Mikkelsen as the villainous Le Chifre, who weeps blood and wants to use the poker pot to finance international terrorism.
Who are the Bond girls? Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, the walking Freudian Primal Scene of Bond’s entire psychology; and Caterina Murino as Solange, this episode’s death-bait.
Opening number? A pretty terrible batch of “who is James Bond, really?” lyrics belted out by former Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, though the tune’s catchy enough. The opening credits are a Waking Life-ish haze of roto-animation and CGI, built around a card game theme.
What’s memorable about this one? Daniel Craig. The parkour scene. Daniel Craig. The poker game. The death of Vesper, and the birth of the Vesper. And Daniel Craig. Holy crap, seriously, Daniel Craig.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? I gave it a 7 on release and upped it to a 9 in subsequent years. One of the best.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? Hell, let’s push it all the way to 10. If it’s not the best, it’s certainly in the top two or three.
I decided to come at the Bond series alphabetically simply to break up the nominal flow of things, and decontextualize the movies from one another somewhat; more time travel, less continuity. This franchise is not, and never has been, much of a narrative. I start, then, in 2006, with Casino Royale, the exception that proves the rule.
The success of Casino Royale begins and nearly ends with Daniel Craig. What an intense surprise it was – and is – that nearly fifty years after the birth of the franchise, the sixth (official) Bond to carry the role would prove to be the best one; yes, even better than Connery. I like all of the Bond actors (save one), and further, I had minimal doubt about Craig’s skills when the casting was announced, though it was fun to watch all and sundry promptly lose their shit at the idea. Craig has always been a capable, credible actor; but as a thug with a deeply buried soul, he’s superb.
It is Craig’s dynamic, nearly fetishistic, watchability that allows Casino Royale its great trick. The film doesn’t just reboot the franchise; Royale reboots the core value proposition of the James Bond mythos itself. If the value prop for Bond in the 1960s was a dreamy wish-fulfillment fantasy for men – cars, clothes, guns, and women – Casino Royale reinstates that proposition by leaving it precisely unchanged. Craig, after thirty rangy years of Moore, Dalton and Brosnan, accomplishes something we’d forgotten these movies were designed to do: he makes you want to be James Bond again. A lot.
The result is a character who, in 2006, serves as a weirdly effective balm to the cowed, 21st century male soul. Get mistaken for a parking valet? Glibly trash the bastard’s car. Get in trouble at work? Fly to the Bahamas on the company card and check into the presidential suite. Need info on a creepy local cocksman? Beat him at poker, take his car, and have sex with his girlfriend. There’s a defiant fuck you vibe to Craig’s entire performance that somehow mediates just on this side of unlikeability, and thereby lands squarely on audience fantasy. And all this is before we even get to the poker game, or Vesper.
For all the showmanship on display in Royale’s first act, it’s the girl and the game that I enjoy the most every time I watch it. Far from the film’s soft spot, the act-long poker game that takes up a fat 45 minutes in Casino Royale is its most pleasurable slice. Beyond question, it’s shite poker – Poker for Dummies, even without Giancarlo Giannini narrating every turn of events in the game, and constantly reminding audience about specific poker voodoo like “the tell.” But the entire series of sequences in the casino are such a nice piece of closed-room filmmaking, watching Casino Royale’s principal characters behaving, that it’s endlessly pleasurable nevertheless. Gemstone moments, from watching Bond invent his trademark drink into the ear of a waiting barman, to introducing Felix Leiter to the crowd by having him mimic the order to that barman, but “keep the fruit,” keep the classy gamesmanship alive. I can’t help but think that the poker game in Casino Royale is the best modern representative of what James Bond movies used to be like, before they became, by default, overaggressive action movies. There was a time when these films were thrillers, and games of manners between skilled opponents; by its very nature, then, the poker game in Royale brings us back to that time.
And though the part of Vesper isn’t terribly well-written – too many twists and turns of character arc, to shoehorn movement into too short a screen time – the casting of Eva Green in the role is superb. Green’s innate intelligence and scarcely-disguised fragility provide a working psych profile for Vesper, and by proxy for Bond, which is where things really start to get interesting. The opening fusillade between Bond and Vesper on the train is terrific, but I’m even more fond of the shorter beat where Vesper admits to having had a custom tuxedo jacket made for the secret agent without bothering to have him measured; Green and Craig have brilliant chemistry, and it is on fine display throughout the casino sequences. Vesper does, indeed, get under Bond’s armour, letting us get under it as well, which leads to the kind of grace notes unseen before in this franchise. My favourite moment in the film sees a broken and bleeding Bond returns to his hotel room to clean up after a fistfight, and with bright-blue eyes screaming pain, down three fingers of scotch in a single gulp to ambulate the pain. Casino Royale is a genuine first: a clear-cut emotional read on a previously emotionless character.
The film is too long by a good bit; the entire Miami airport set piece can’t compete with its parkour predecessor, and could be excised wholesale without any consequent loss in entertainment value. Casino Royale also makes the near-fatal mistake of continuing on, well past the expiry of its lead villain, and therefore past its audience’s internal clock of the emotional shape of the story. But the entire denouement / drift-around-the-world sequence with Vesper and Bond feels so earned that we scarcely mind, especially given what comes next. The collapsing building in the finale adds needless action freneticism to what is otherwise one of the series’ deepest emotional beats. “The bitch is dead,” indeed.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, Casino Royale is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on December 8 and 30. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.
Leave a Reply