Review: Skyfall

Indulge me for a moment, if you will; these habits are hard to break:

Which one is this? The new one!

Who’s who in this one? Craig (Bond); Dench (M); Whishaw (Q).

Where did you first encounter this one? About three hours ago on the splendid IMAX screen at the Scotiabank Theatre.

Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Javier Bardem as bent MI6 agent Raoul Silva, who wants revenge… against M.

Who are the Bond girls? The ever-delightful Naomie Harris as Bond’s partner, Eve, who is blown completely off the screen by the scorching heat of Bérénice Marlohe as Silva’s concubine, Sévérine.

Opening number? Adele locates the precise center of London pop circa 2012, over a fascinating in-continuity credits sequence: Bond’s edge-of-death hallucinations of drowning, skulls, blood, and tombs.

What’s memorable about this one? The train. The photography, and the direction. The big five-oh. The third act. Skyfall.

What do you rate it, out of ten? Skyfall is not the best Bond movie of all time. It must settle for fifth place: an extraordinarily sharp 9 out of 10.

Well done, Commander. Fifty years of this? I would have disintegrated after three. You’ve crashed more cars, drank more martinis, and bedded more ladies than anyone who’s also been fit to visit Japan, India, Brazil, Afghanistan, Turkey, space, and the bottom of the ocean. Skyfall makes this a virtue, shooting James off the back of a speeding train and bringing him back to the MI6 fold a hollow, haunted man, acknowledging with a wink that a man who was a blunt instrument at 30 is under threat of being a dull one by 45. And yet, fifty years young, it is impossible to imagine a franchise as aged and venerable as the Bond frame coming away from its golden anniversary as current, and vital, as our James has done here. Skyfall sure doesn’t feel like a fifty-year-old.

Right, the train. Skyfall opens in Istanbul, and no sooner can you hum “From Russia, With Love” before Bond and his partner are mayheming their way across the city in pursuit of one of those preternaturally skilled agents with one of those preternaturally important stolen dossiers. It’s grand destruction in the most enjoyable sense, loaded with stunts and gags, but what matters is what comes after, when Eve, under orders from M, kills Bond – or seems to, as we’d have very little purpose coming to a James Bond movie if 007 were actually to die in the first five minutes. Bond has only lived twice or thrice before, but the resurrected Bond who kicks around the South China Sea after Adele has ceased her serenade is a brutally damaged man, drinking and fucking his way to the bottom of the proverbial barrel in a state of perfect purposelessness – which tells you a bit about the man, I think. Purpose arrives quickly enough, though, as the MI6 building in London is destroyed and M and her organization are forced underground.

If Casino Royale reconfigured the secret agent to make sense in the movie universe in which he now lived, Skyfall takes the next logical step and does the same for the secret agency – and, to my great delight, does so by forcing it backwards in time while simultaneously pulling it forward. And so we have such entertaining assets as Churchill’s old bunkers beneath the city for a new base, or Ralph Fiennes as a bureaucratic prig named Mallory, who may be worth more than he’s letting on. Best of all, though, Skyfall actually arrives at a reboot of Q that somehow manages to be appropriately modern – he’s a hacker, natch – while winsomely oldschool. Our new Q is a bit like the old Q. (Keep your eye on the bottom of his coffee mug.) All of this allows Skyfall to dangle in pristine timelessness, reaching back to the old, while striding forward to the new.

The London around Q, Bond, and M is a London transformed. Director Sam Mendes and director of photography Roger Deakins have scrubbed the high-key gloss out of the Bond universe, venturing boldly into digital capture which can be both chillingly naturalistic (London is a gloomy alabaster mausoleum) and sharply stylized. When Bond ranges to Shanghai, Deakins and Mendes stage a sequence in a darkened skyscraper – lit by the endless neon kaleidoscope beyond the window, which bounces and gleams off the manifold glass surfaces within – which is as ingenious as it is inventive. It is not only one of the most visually distinct Bond fight sequences in the whole series, it’s also one of the best: just look at that long, brutal brawl in silhouette!

Likewise, Deakins knows the value of lighting a beautiful lady, and when Bond comes upon Sévérine in a casino in Macau, the camera tracks the cascade of patterns on her sheer, backless dress with a sense-memory that, even three years ago, cinematographers were still loudly insisting digital cameras were incapable of. Mendes is no slouch with striking, diverse visualization, and when the casino gives way – at last! – to Silva’s berserk island hideaway, a ruin of abandoned computers and broken stone, we find a nook in the Bond villain visual space that has, somehow, never been exploited till now.

With Silva, Skyfall plays its most quavering note. A riot of oldschool Bond cliché in his fine suit and bone-white hair, foppish Silva would veer terrifyingly close to homophobic mockery, were it not for the matter-of-factness with which Bond rebukes Silva’s attempts at sexual intimidation. (Really, James? Well, of course, I suppose.) Silva is what this installment needs, a precise counter-argument to the hero – quite completely deranged, to boot – and if the “justification” is laid on a bit treacly-thick from his end, one cannot deny the propulsion that Silva provides for the film. I admit it takes some time for Bardem to find his way into his groove, though he develops by leaps and bounds, scene after scene after scene, till he’s (nearly) in full-on Joker territory as Skyfall spins its third, spellbinding act.

From here, there will be spoilers.

Until Silva is captured by MI6, one can legitimately complain that the film occasionally feels adrift, holding pauses too long, failing to find the center of the thrilling dynamism of its own visual style. All this is put paid in the third act, however, where Skyfall not only takes a quantum leap upwards in edge-of-your-seat thrills, but turns the “you’re damn right, it’s the fiftieth anniversary” dial up to eleven as well. Anyone who isn’t squealing with glee when Bond flips open the cap on his gear shift doesn’t like this franchise as much as I do – but the ecstasy of finding an organic opportunity to use the Aston Martin (even in the novels, Bond did treasure his keepsake old car) gives way when Skyfall transitions into its stripped-down finale. Not for nothing was I momentarily fooled, upon the appearance of Albert Finney, into believing that this franchise had done the unthinkable and conjured up Sean Connery to play some angry old Scottish ghost. By bringing us to Skyfall, Skyfall locates an emotional nexus for its finale which delivers, perhaps, the most clear-cut portrayal of James Bond in fifty long years. There is a kind of pristine clarity to the man in hunting leathers, standing guard with a shotgun on the darkening moor. We have known him for all these years, and yet can feel like we know him for the first time.

A few parting, even more spoilery, thoughts.

I am as thrilled with the new M as I am dismayed by what happens to Eve. The fate of Dench’s character will come as no surprise to anyone who is watching how keenly Skyfall is stitching opportunities for Mallory to emerge from his initial impression of government stooge into… fucking badass spymaster. It will be fun to knock about with Ralph Fiennes for the foreseeable future in the franchise. After a whole movie, however, where Naomie Harris gets to run around in the field and shoot guns and have sex with Bond, it is quite a letdown when Eve coughs out her surname – Moneypenny – and sits quietly down behind that desk. A secretary? Rarely – and this is saying something! – has the Bond series so demeaned a character.

And finally, a word on Ms. Dench. No single performer, filmmaker, or craftsman has done more to usher the Bond franchise into the 21st Century than Judi Dench as M, over the course of the last seven films. I was always charmed beyond measure by the subtlety with which Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace nudged Geoffrey Palmer into the corner of a frame or two as M’s offscreen husband, pairing Dench with her old As Time Goes By co-star in deferential homage. In Skyfall, M is a widow, and embattled, and seems to feel the last grains of sand slipping out. Skyfall is a fitting sendoff, but Dench will certainly be missed.

I’ve been counting down the James Bond movies in alphabetical order here on the Substream for the past month in a series called From A to Bond, which you can visit here. If you live in Toronto, all of the James Bond films (till now) are playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. If not, the entire series (till now) is available on blu-ray.