Old Yorker

  • Skyfall

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sam Mendes (2012)

    Skyfall, the twenty-third in the series, is only the fifth James Bond film I’ve seen at the cinema (not counting the Casino Royale spoof).  The first of these was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which ended with the murder of Bond’s new wife.  Skyfall climaxes with the death of Judi Dench’s M, which pretty well stands for mother.  As I understand it, deaths of people who matter personally to Bond are highly unusual.  Since I usually prefer sentimental tragedy to heartstopping action on screen, I guess I should be grateful that, by a complete fluke, I’ve twice seen the softer side of 007.  How far the human interest actually goes depends of course on who’s playing him.  The bereaved honeymooner in OHMSS was the derided George Lazenby.  He was awful but-I-liked-him and I really liked Louis Armstrong singing the poignant ‘We Have All the Time In the World’ over the closing titles. The re-orphaned James Bond in Skyfall (it turns out that, like Bruce Wayne, Bond’s mission in life took root in the violent death of his parents when he was a boy) is the more highly- rated Daniel Craig.  Craig’s appearance takes the ‘licensed to kill’ tag to a new level.  His bullet head and alarming musculature have turned him into not so much the user of a lethal weapon but its embodiment.  Although Bond didn’t start life in a comic book, his present incarnation, with his improbably blue eyes and extraordinarily high knee lift when he runs, is more cartoonish than the screen Batmen and Spidermen de nos jours.  Because this James Bond is humourless and Daniel Craig doesn’t make the humourlessness amusing, the character is very boring.  When he sobs at the end of Skyfall, Craig’s Bond is no more interesting than when he’s fighting or shooting or having it off or delivering wit-free one-liners.

    I don’t know how conscious an effort the Bond people made to come up with something special for the franchise’s Golden Jubilee but they have, in the event, succeeded in doing so.  Skyfall is, even in Bond film terms, a huge box-office success and an overwhelming critical one.  It will feature prominently in next month’s Oscars ceremony.  The show’s organisers have announced that it will include a tribute to the series.  The movie will surely be nominated for technical awards and its agreeable title track, by Adele (who sings it) and Paul Epworth, for Best Song.  It’s odds against acting nominations – even though Judi Dench and Javier Bardem (as the villain Silva, an embittered ex-agent turned cyberterrorist) have nods in the Critics Choice Awards and Bardem has a SAG nomination.  But there’s a chance, with ten slots now available for Best Picture, that Skyfall will be in the right place at the right time for one of them[1].  This would be unprecedented for a Bond movie, a kind of lifetime achievement nomination for the canon.  Skyfall was named last week in the PGA list of ten best films of 2012.

    Although David Denby disparages Skyfall as a ‘dark’ betrayal of the traditional light-heartedness of the Bond films and for action highlights which he thinks inferior to what the Bourne movies now supply, there’s not much evidence that either audiences or his fellow critics agree.  I am surprised that fans aren’t bothered with how little Bond features in the early stages of Skyfall (which suits me fine) and how much the story as a whole is concerned with the character of M – especially since, thanks to Judi Dench, there is human interest when M changes from a ballbreaker into a frightened old woman.  But that’s probably just an expression of my prejudiced assumption that the Bond audience is an undifferentiated, thrill-seeking mass.  There are certainly critics who feel more comfortable enjoying ‘dark’ Bond, and who enjoy and seem more than ready to take as evidence of real seriousness the references in the Skyfall script to Britain’s post-imperial identity crisis, to the increasing difficulty of identifying enemies of the state, and so on.

    Various elements combine to make the M story work and Skyfall couldn’t have been released at a better time than late 2012 to exploit these elements.  The embattled M, according to Mallory, the British government’s Intelligence and Security Committee Chairman (who eventually succeeds her), has had ‘a great run’.  When these words are being addressed to Judi Dench, they resonate not just because she’s a national treasure but because she’s well known for playing two English queens each of whom also had a ‘great run’.  That turns one’s mind to a third queen who’s had the same, and who last year not only celebrated her Diamond Jubilee but took part in the Olympics opening ceremony in the company of James Bond.  When we see the porcelain British bulldog on M’s desk in Skyfall (she leaves it Bond in her will), corgis may also come to mind.

    All this implies that the movie is a fortunate one-off, that some of what’s contributed to its success is unrepeatable.  Skyfall is a good, suggestive title.  It could refer to Bond’s plummet, from the roof of a train speeding through the mountains in Turkey into deep water miles below, which is the climax of the especially spectacular pre-opening credits sequence.  In fact, it’s the name of his family home in Scotland – so kind of Rosebud.  The Bond filmmaking supremacy would be unwise, I think, to go in for psychological stuff next time round, especially if Ralph Fiennes, although he gives a perfectly decent performance as Mallory, is going to be a fixture as M for the foreseeable future.  The supporting cast in London is, with one exception, well worth watching.   (The exception is Helen McCrory as a sarky government minister at a committee of inquiry into M’s running of MI6.).  Ben Whishaw is amusing as the cardiganed nerd Q whose improbable youth alarms Bond and Rory Kinnear excellent as M’s chief of staff.  Kinnear’s characterisation of this competent, somehow thwarted young man is crisp and, given how little he has to work with, amazingly complete.   Naomie Harris is a very beautiful Moneypenny;  she reads her lines appealingly, if without much variation.  In Scotland, Albert Finney appears as the Bond family estate’s gamekeeper that time forgot.  It’s good to see Finney though his voice is oddly clotted, and inexpressive.  Javier Bardem, with a bleached mane of hair and weird hooded eyes, has terrific camp dynamism in his early confrontations with Bond.  It’s hardly Bardem’s fault that he becomes less fun to watch as Silva becomes more seriously villainous.   Overseas, Ola Rapace, as a mercenary, makes a good combatant for Bond.

    It’s to be hoped that Sam Mendes resumes more personal filmmaking in the future but perhaps having a hit with a relatively impersonal project like this one – Skyfall is Mendes’ first unarguable screen success since American Beauty – actually makes it less likely.  Mendes’ Richard III at the Old Vic in 2011 was remarkable both for Kevin Spacey’s Richard and for scene changes so sharp they were more like cutting in a film and gave the play remarkable momentum.   A James Bond movie is a less surprising medium for dazzling editing but there is plenty of it (thanks to Stuart Baird) and plenty to look at that doesn’t leave you exhausted (thanks to Roger Deakins):  the London and Shanghai cityscapes, especially by night, are very beautiful, as are the shots of a procession of luminous orange dragons, in Macau.  I’m not a connoisseur but the trashing of inanimate objects here at least has traces of wit, more than can be said for The Dark Knight or Inception or Prometheus.  Thomas Newman did the score and the title sequence is gorgeous.  The screenplay is by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan.  One of the things which always puts me off the Bond movies is being told that everyone enjoys this kind of thing really – that if you say you don’t enjoy it you’re just being a spoilsport.  I’ve seen enough action films, with or without spies, to know I don’t enjoy them really.   I did enjoy quite a few bits of Skyfall but the closing legend ‘James Bond will return’ still sounds more of a threat than a promise.

    6 January 2013

    [1] Afternote:  The film didn’t get a Best Picture nomination.

  • Love & Friendship

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Whit Stillman (2016)

    According to Wikipedia, there have so far been twenty English-language television adaptations of Jane Austen’s six novels.  (This total includes both one-off TV movies and serialisations.)  Pride and Prejudice tops the table with five; Emma and Persuasion are next with four; Sense and Sensibility has been done three times; Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey twice each.  Adaptations for cinema are relatively (and surprisingly) few.  Only two of the novels have been done more than once – there are three Pride and Prejudices and two Emmas, no feature films of either Northanger Abbey or Persuasion.   The use of Austen scenarios as the basis for stories transposed to different times, places or genres has, however, become a movie sub-industry in the last twenty years or so.  Examples include Clueless (1995), Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), Bride and Prejudice (2004), Material Girls (2006) and, earlier this year, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  In 2007, Becoming Jane tried to turn Austen’s own life into an Austen novel-on-screen.  When this film appeared, you could almost hear the barrel being scraped – sense the movie world’s frustration that Jane Austen failed to write more screenplays-to-be in the course of her rather short life.

    But there are more.  Although she died, aged forty-one, before completing Sanditon[1], Austen left behind juvenilia that include the story Love and Freindship [sic] and the novella Lady Susan.  These are both epistolary in form.  Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship is, in spite of its title, an adaptation of the latter; he makes some use of the letters that comprise the original Lady Susan to enrich his screenplay.  The Wikipedia entry on ‘Jane Austen in popular culture’ from which I’ve taken most of the information above[2] also includes, under the heading ‘Looser adaptations’, Stillman’s first feature film, Metropolitan (1990).  The suggestion that this is derived from Mansfield Park isn’t substantiated, however (nor is it mentioned in the separate Wikipedia page on Metropolitan).  Even so, the overwhelmingly favourable reviews of Love & Friendship reveal broad critical consensus that Whit Stillman is unusually well equipped to make a Jane Austen movie.  I’d previously seen only one of his films but I can’t disagree on the basis of the light, crisp touch he showed in Damsels in Distress – set in a somewhat rarefied world with its own moral and social code, and dominated by verbal exchanges between quick-witted young women.   In his interview in the June 2016 Sight & Sound, Stillman expresses an enthusiasm for Austen which he convinces you is genuine and strong.

    When I first saw the trailer for Love & Friendship, I assumed – because of the prevailing performing style and I didn’t know the source material existed – that it was a Jane Austen spoof.  Even after seeing the whole film, I haven’t quite got the idea out of my mind.  (The satirical register of the opening legends on the screen, which summarise each of the dramatis personae in a single phrase, perhaps contributed to this.)  The cast’s dry, understated delivery is a welcome and an effective means of avoiding faux-Regency archness but also gives the line readings a distinctly modern sound.  In Bright Star, Jane Campion’s actors also sounded like twenty-first century people but this made their early nineteenth-century characters more immediately engaging and expressive.  The effect is different in a comedic film like Love & Friendship – not least because of our familiarity with cinema and television comedy period pieces whose humour depends largely on a disjuncture between the historical sets and costumes and the modernised characterisations.   But though the playing in Love & Friendship doesn’t, I think, bring the characters in the story closer to being people we actually recognise, it does succeed in making them more really believable within their own time and conventions.

    The style of delivery that I’m trying to describe is especially pronounced in the performance of Kate Beckinsale, in the lead role of the unscrupulous adventuress Lady Susan Vernon.  She has so many lines there are times you feel Beckinsale needs more vocal colouring but her level acidity is a good counterpoint to Lady Susan’s amusingly intimidating costumes (by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh) and she’s undeniably the heartless heart of the piece.  Among the supporting parts, Tom Bennett’s interpretation of the brainless but appealingly wealthy Sir James Martin has been reasonably singled out for praise:  Bennett is very witty – it’s the icing on the cake that he makes Sir James not only ridiculous but genuinely likeable.   Another fine contribution, in a much smaller role but thanks to a similar fusion of comic skill and empathy with the character, comes from Conor McNeill, as an eager, scripturally erudite young curate.   Morfydd Clark is excellent as Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica.  Other particular assets in the cast include Emma Greenwell, Justin Edwards and Lochlann O’Mearáin.

    Chloë Sevigny, although I found it relatively hard to make out what she was saying, has strong presence as Lady Susan’s American friend, Alicia.  Even Stephen Fry is bearable, as Alicia’s husband.  Fry’s acting is more conventional screen-Austen; the same is true, at a much more skilful level, of James Fleet’s and Jemma Redgrave’s – and this makes you aware of how well Stillman has orchestrated the performances.  The choice of familiar classical music on the soundtrack seems designed both to give us our bearings and to throw into relief the film’s distinctiveness.  I admire its stylistic wit and coherence more than I enjoyed watching Love & Friendship but Whit Stillman’s achievement in making a Jane Austen movie that stops short of being subversive yet feels fresh should not be underestimated.

    27 May 2016

    [1] Sanditon nevertheless spawned the 2013 TV series Welcome to Sanditon, set in a fictional Californian town.

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen_in_popular_culture

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