Cinefantastique Online

With QUANTUM OF SOLACE, the next generation of James Bond films continue in the satisfying mold established by 2006’s CASINO ROYALE. In other words, the familiar franchise elements are on display (cars, guns, women, martinis), but they are treated seriously, instead of tongue-in-cheek. The truly amazing achievement is that – after all these years and all the bad puns, self-parody, and formulaic regurgitation – the new Bond films manage to make the audience take 007 seriously again, instead of smirking at the same-old-same-old.

Marking the first full-blown sequel in the franchise (the old films had some continuing characters and the odd reference to previous events, but little direct continuity), QUANTUM begins where CASINO left off, with Bond delivering Mr. White to M for interrogation about the mysterious organization that blackmailed Vesper Lynd into betraying Bond, resulting in her death (more or less by suicide). A mole inside MI6 effects Mr. White’s escape, and the rest of the film follows 007’s attempts to find a thread that will reveal White’s organization. This leads to another villain, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who is engineering a coup in Bolivia for reasons that will benefit the organization.

Without the template of an Ian Fleming novel, QUANTUM’s screenplay (by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade) wanders a bit. CASINO ROYALE did not stick closely to the book, but it retained almost all of the essential plot points, creating a solid structure upon which the screenwriters could elaborate. This time, they seem to lose track of the plot: Bond starts off trying to track down an organization and ends up bringing down merely one man; meanwhile, Mr. White is completely forgotten. And 007’s tracking efforts, far from showing his skills as a super-spy, really come down to lucky coincidence that the script hopes we will not notice: this installment’s Bond girl Camille (Olga Kurylenko) literally drives up out of nowhere and tells him to get in the car - a lazy plot device that literally drives the rest of the film.

Fortunately, we can forgive these lapses because the story is as much about Bond himself as about tracking down the bad guys. QUANTUM OF SOLACE actually manages to continue the character arc that began in CASINO ROYALE. One would have thought that the previous film had developed the character to the point where he was fully formed and ready to go on a series of missions without looking back, but QUANTUM OF SOLACE continues his maturation process.

This is a Bond film where emotional moments are as powerful as the action. It is genuinely touching to see 007 knocking back his signature martini (3 measures Gordon’s gin, one measure vodka, 1/2 measure Kina Lillet, shaken over ice and served with a thin slice of lemon peel) – because (although it is not mentioned in this film) we know that he named the drink after Vesper in CASINO ROYALE. This is the perfect use of what Hitchcock called the “Plastic Material” – objects, costumes, props, settings that tell us what is going on in the character’s mind. Bond need not deliver a mournful and uncharacteristic soliloquy about the depth of his sadness over the betrayal and death of the woman he loved; he expresses it in a way that maintains his macho mystique.

On this level, the story succeeds perfectly, taking the young 007 to the next level. A running joke in the film is that Bond leaves a trail of dead bodies wherever he goes – usually suspects who might have provided useful information if he had managed to avoid killing them. Threaded into this equation is the X-factor of how deeply Bond mourns the loss of Vesper: Does he want to avenge her? Or is he a “cold-hearted bastard” who just wants to get on with the job? And which would be preferable? These questions are nicely resolved in the denouement, which also ties up the loose thread about Vesper’s former boyfriend (the one who was supposedly kidnapped and tortured, until she agreed to betray Bond).

Some critics made comparisons to the Jason Bourne franchise, but this seems a bit misguided. The Daniel Craig version of 007 returns to the character’s roots in the original novels. Author Ian Fleming wrote about pain, fear, and the combination of courage and endurance that it took to overcome them and keep going anyway. That is very much what we see in Craig’s Bond.

The difference is that the screenwriters have extended the character’s reach: he is no longer affected only by the visceral impact of physical torture, body blows, and knife wounds; he also carries around hidden emotional scars. It never would have occurred to Fleming to have Bond seriously distraught. Even the maiming of Felix Leiter in Live and Let Dieis merely a plot device to fuel revenge – Bond spends precious little time feeling sorry, and Fleming avoids providing a man-to-man scene where Bond comforts his stricken friend; in fact, Leiter simply disappears from the novel. Compare that with the relationship between Bond and Matthis in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, in which fatal consequences provoke not just a desire for revenge but also the pang of regret.

Not everything works so well; in fact, the film suffers from a few gaffs so obvious it’s hard to understand how the survived into the final cut. One pretty (and of course disposable) female agent shows up wearing a raincoat that reveals no visible signs of any kind of clothing underneath; she literally looks like a set-up for a bad sight gag that never appears. (On the plus side, her demise deliberately evokes a similar image in GOLDFINGER, although this time the beautiful body is covered in “black gold” – i.e., oil.) There is also an unbelievably bad moment where Bond disposes of the body of a friend by callously tossing him in a trash dumpster and insisting that the dead man wouldn’t have cared – a line that brings derisive laughter from the audience.

Perhaps most distressing is the interrupted interrogation of Mr. White, which strongly hints that torture is on the agenda. Films and TV shows have been celebrating the “taking off the gloves” approach since 9/11, and one hardly expects Bond to express any liberal pieties about international law and civil rights. Yet it is hard to imagine that, having suffered through being tortured in CASINO ROYALE, Bond would not have some pretty strong feelings on the subject. If nothing else, he should doubt its efficacy: after all, he suffered as much as a man can endure and still refused to crack, and even if someone confesses under torture, one can never be sure whether the confession is genuine or merely offered up in order to make the torture stop.

Kurylenko, as the new Bond girl, is properly exotic, and her revenge sub-plot dovetails nicely with Bond’s mission. However, her back story is a bit of a stretch: she’s half Russian and half Bolivian, the screenplays way of retaining the exotic European feel of the Bond world while tying her into the South American plot. Alas, try as she might, she cannot hope to compete with Vesper Lynd, but then – who could? (Well, maybe Tracy Bond, but the new series of films will have to wait a while before tackling that subject.)

Almalric’s Mr. Greene follows in the footsteps of Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre, offering up another effectively evil Euro-villain – this one more laid back than most, with more than a faint wiff of sleaze underlying the charm. (For some reason, he reminds one vaguely of Roman Polanski, for whatever that’s worth.)

Action scenes are imaginative and exciting, but they suffer from the attempt to top CASINO ROYALE – they are over-edited to the point where the slam-bang impact outweighs both the suspense and the joy – you sometimes can barely get a glimpse of the incredible action, which is so cool you wish the camera would linger a bit more. By contrast CASINO ROYALE’s work was clean and efficient: the movement itself was enough to take your breath away; you didn’t need the extra added layer of hyper-editing.

To his credit, director Marc Forster handles the drama much more astutely, serving up the performances in a way that allows the actors to do their job, unhindered by excessive technique. This allows the audience to invest in the core story, as Forster and the cast mine the script for the emotional resonances. You expect to be thrilled, but you don’t expect to shed a tear in a Bond film. This may be the first time in the franchise’s history where the drama outweighs the derring-do.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008). Directed by Marc Forster. Written by Paull Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade. Cast: Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, Jeffrey Wright, David Harbour, Jesper Christensen.