The Journey Home: “Skyfall”
Except for the barest of outlines, Manny Face will comment sparingly on the action and plot of “Skyfall”, the latest film in the James Bond franchise and the highest grossing of them all; in fact, one of the highest grossing films ever, not adjusted for inflation.
The way I see it, people love James Bond, the idea of him; know what I mean? Regardless of the quality of the picture he’s in, as a movie persona, one of the greatest ever created thanks to Ian Fleming, he’ll never lose. The public will always lay out the cash for a fix of 007.
Daniel Craig’s the sixth Bond in the now 23-film-long franchise. His suave, sexy, dark, daring and dangerous British secret agent rises from him like steam, making him the best Bond since Sean Connery launched the role.
Between Connery and Craig, the franchise has seen a number of pretty-boy clowns as Bond, nearly turning the series into a highly pyrotechnic spy farce.
With Craig’s Bond, the world is a dark, desolate and desperate place, seething with hidden evil. Manny Face thinks Craig increasingly plays the part like a twisted relic out of a time and place no longer recognized and barely remembered, a brooding and inward-turning spy sent in to fight what has grown far more terrifying and much closer to devouring us.
Not even Connery played the role to such intense pitch, and I daresay, depth – forget about the other Bonds; they’re not worth it.
At around 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film is pretty long, making the vast, yawning lull somewhere in the middle practically inevitable. Not even Craig’s performance at that point is able to save it. It’s the interminable stretch when Bond finds the bad guy on some exotic island – a former MI6 British Secret Service agent turned global cyberterrorist who wants to kill M, his former, and Bond’s current, boss, for an alleged act of betrayal on M’s part that has left the cyberterrorist deformed… and evil. It was he who blew up MI6 headquarters in London, to where Bond brings him as a prisoner.
In the great hall of the secret hideout from where the evil spy unleashes his cyber-terror plots against the power structures of the world, foremost among them Britain’s MI6, Manny Face simply wants to say that the display of twisted tubes and spiraling wires laid out on tables, which is supposed to be his sinister nerve center, looks like the high school nerd’s science project that got third prize at the fair. Unlike the other diabolical control centers of the evil geniuses in Bond’s past, not at all does this one convince. Nor, if Manny Face correctly recalls, does Bond bother blowing it up. In the old days, the usual formula had been that this was the best part saved for last. But “Skyfall” has other motives, and other lessons to teach, although the viewer may have to apply some brainpower to tease them out.
So, in London, the evil man escapes confinement and wreaks havoc on the city. But Bond lures him into a cross-country chase to Bond’s childhood manor in Scotland – Skyfall, which, by the end of the movie, is destroyed. Bond drives the famous Aston Martin DB5 of Bond lore to Skyfall, taking M with him: for it is her whom the bad guy is ultimately after. And while Bond defeats the demented monster, M, who is an old woman, dies in Bond’s arms from an earlier received wound.
It is precisely this moment in the film, toward the very end, that makes the film’s drawbacks well worth our suffering. Indeed, it is the very defining moment of the film and sums up what the film is all about.
Craig’s reaction as Bond to M’s death is superb, but better still is the death itself. You can see the life rush out of M’s eyes, and I have never seen open-eyed death done so well. Watch the movie; wait for the moment; see it. Manny Face, himself an actor, stands in awe of Judy Dench’s death – as M. Is it that the British are great actors steeped in and an ages-old tradition of the stage? Shakespeare and all that?
If the Bond franchise had started with “From Russia with Love” in 1963, much of which takes place in Istanbul, rather than 1962’s “Doctor No”, “Skyfall’s” opening chase scene in Istanbul could be seen as bringing the 50-year series full circle.
The film is, after all, a nod to the strength of legacy and tradition and the assumed values that go with these – if you will, the old-fashioned way of getting things done.
The new M, after the old woman M dies, is a man similar to the man who was M when the series began – in the ‘60s.
But “Skyfall” also turns the beginning of the Bond movie franchise on its head, adding something new to the tradition with Miss Moneypenny. Starting with the 1960s films, as M’s secretary, Miss Moneypenny had always been hopelessly in love with Bond without ever having gotten a taste of him. In “Skyfall”, however, as an MI6 field agent, she had already had sex with Bond before getting a desk job under the new M and, at the end of the movie, introducing herself to Bond as Eve (so named in “Skyfall”) Moneypenny for the first time.
That new fact changes our perception of the nature of the relationship between Moneypenny and Bond. Going back to the older films, we will never be able to look at their relationship, or Moneypenny’s flustered yearning for Bond, the same way again.
But this is just by way of Manny Face filing his column for The Checkout. Otherwise, it’s not important. Nor do I understand what is supposed to be important about any of this. What am I supposed to come away with from this film; what was its art supposed to impress upon me? What was the film’s motive in showing itself to me; what, its lesson?
Trust, loyalty, duty. Traditional values. Perhaps a sense of steadfast morality in an increasingly unstable and morally disintegrating world.
Bond had his reservations about M, resentment, perhaps hostility, and even hatred. And M certainly had reservations about Bond, especially after he returned to MI6 from the dead and failed a raft of physical and psychological exams, which would have disqualified him from further work as 007.
So why did M hire him again? Based on what? Was it just loyalty and trust? It was certainly these, but what were these based on? A deep knowledge of your man, perhaps, that if his resources are depleted, within him is a reserve – of something else – something, which is greater than physical prowess or psychological stability. Perhaps this is a spiritual strength, or a strength of will, an unstoppable determination that emanates from within and breaks through the faults, the weaknesses, the shortcomings; that certain something you can’t put your finger on but you know it’s there; the intrinsic quality that trumps the extrinsic quantifiable indicators. That certain something that M had always known about Bond. And Bond knew that she knew, and trusted her to act on that knowledge.
But Manny Face again asks: Is any of this important? What I think – about the film, about Daniel Craig’s acting, or James Bond, his 50-year, multibillion-dollar film franchise, or Miss Moneypenny, or M.
I add my opinion to a barrage of countless others. Every critic who wrote something – positive or negative, it doesn’t matter; and everyone who saw the film and came away with some impression of it. Some critics I read, I wondered if they and I had watched the same film, and if they weren’t talking through their ass. So, yet again I ask: What does it matter, any of this that I write, or say?
In the end, it’s the work that counts, not what’s said of it. The work itself. Uncommented. The work, in the silence of our emptied contemplation – itself.
Or is it just about filing my column for The Checkout, after all? Because it’s my job, because someone needs to read this – but other than that, it doesn’t matter.
There’s The Hunched Cornish – I had not asked for him, although our kinds know each other well. We are natural enemies. So I suppose it’s just as natural he’s where I ended up. Kyiv, Ukraine. It couldn’t have been any other way. And now I’ve got this problem. And there’s my Tango Baby, and The Hunched Cornish surrounds her, making her the very heart of the problem. But I have to get her back, or she will die. How do I know this? I don’t know – I just do.
My life in all this is nothing. I know this – know it without knowing why. Asking the question would be to no purpose. I only know, if it takes my life to save hers, it will be right.
I’m tired. I’m very tired. I disembark from the plane. I have to get to the Catskills.
Know what I mean?
Manny Face, December 16, 2013