Screen Vistas: BONDATHON: CASINO ROYALE

It's easy to forget that Die Another Day did very well financially. So well that corporate logic would dictate that the next installment should be exactly the same and come out as fast as possible. But public perception of the film cooled very quickly. Add to this the general darkening of action cinema post 9/11, and The Bourne Identity completely reinvigorating the espionage genre it was clear that a change was necessary. Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson would need a new, darker, more relevant Bond if the franchise was going to survive.

That new direction ultimately came from a very old source, the very first James Bond novel Casino Royale. The book had been adapted twice before (once as a TV movie, and once as a spoof), but never faithfully, and never as part of the official franchise. The timing was perfect, as this most recent adaptation landed near the start of the reboot craze that swept mainstream cinema and TV in the mid-2000's.

As a reboot, Casino likes to play a bit with series conventions. The film doesn't start with Maurice Binders's famous gun barrel or an outrageous stunt sequence. Instead we are introduced to Daniel Craig's James Bond in a stark, brutal black & white sequence where he earns his Double O status by killing a traitorous section chief and his contact. The construction of the scene with Bond waiting in the dark for his target mirrors a similar scene in Dr. No where Bond ambushes and guns down an unarmed assassin.

This reference to 60's era Bond isn't accidental, the film works to evoke the 50's and 60's while still remaining modern. This ethos is exemplified by Danial Kleinman's credit sequence. The sequence was inspired by the card suit images that adorned the novels 1st edition cover and features fighting Saul Bass-esque silhouettes that would all look very 60's if the animation wasn't so clearly computer aided. The theme song itself by Chris Cornell and composer David Arnold is an updated version of the instrumental theme from On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

After the credits we meet Bond (now officially 007), slowly uncovering a banking plot. There is a man named Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson) who serves as a banker for dictators and international terrorists. Bond foils one of his side plots leaving Chiffre's cash supply dangerously low. In order to keep his clients from murdering him he sets up a massive, high stakes poker game at the titular casino in Montenegro. M (Judi Dench) orders Bond to infiltrate the game and make sure Le Chiffre loses. To help out, Bond is joined by a skeptical accountant Vesper Lynd (Eva Green).

I'm not much of a card shark so the films poker scenes are all Greek to me, but there is a local agent named Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini) who exists to explain such things to us. But even then, the poker would probably get really tiresome if it weren't peppered with violent attempts on Bond's life and intrigue as to whether Bond is a sufficiently skilled gambler to defeat Le Chiffre. Also the Casino sequence is a fairly brief. Just as we think the film is over, there is a pretty massive shift and the film re-centers on Bond and Vesper's relationship as they float about Venice leading to the most effective tragic moment in the entire series.

By 2006, the public was still getting used to the idea of the reboot, and while the buzzword has gotten a bit tiresome in the intervening years, it still holds power for skilful filmmakers. Its fun to see Bond get his Double O number, acquire his first Aston Martin DB5, drink his first martini, etc. It was fun for me in '06 when it was my first Bond film, and it's fun in '12 after marathoning the entire series. In lesser hands all of these moments would play as distracting fan service, but director Martin Campbell earns the vast majority of them.

It helps that we've never seen a James Bond quite like Daniel Craig. The other actors were playing fantasies, Craig play's a person, more specifically he play's the Bond of the novels. The Bond of the novels is ultimately a very fragile man and Craig latches on to that aspect. From the fragility comes the paranoia and the coldness and the suave front. "The armor" as Vesper calls it. Timothy Dalton got close in the 80's, but Craig is the man who finally brings Fleming's Bond to the screen.

The film really puts this more fragile Bond through the ringer. The action in this film would be good on it's own (every scene is excellently constructed and executed), but is heightened by the knowledge that Bond might not be able to hold it together. If the last few films felt overly cartoonish, this one goes the other way. Bond is a violent man in a violent world and the film doesn't apologize for it. In the 2000's action films seemed to become more and more sanitized. The ability to digitally darken blood to a less visceral brown seems to have made the PG-13 rating more restrictive, it's refreshing to see Royale going the other way with it. It's a bit shocking that the film's famous torture sequence snuck past the MPAA in any form considering it's conception.

If we've never met a Bond like Craig, we've certainly never seen a Bond girl quite like Vesper Lynd. We've seen similar ones, there's a tragic angle that mirrors On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but the difference here is that the film treats Vesper like a real person. Bond and Vesper don't fall in love via convenient musical montages, but by actually talking to each other and developing a relationship that we can believe and invest in. It also helps that Eva Green is a hell of an actress who pull off even the cheesiest lines of dialogue.

The film is pretty true to the novel. There are plenty of superficial changes to update it (terrorists instead of Soviets, poker instead of baccarat). The first hour of the film is new material to compensate for the relative shortness of the novel (my audio version clocked in at 2 hours shorter than most of the books). Still, the film gets so much right from the book, I wonder if there's any reason to read the novel at all. Sure it contains copious amounts of information about gambling, but it also features more 50's sexism than you can shake a stick at. In the book, Bond doesn't much care for Vesper. Even after he falls in love with her, she's just a silly child to him. It doesn't help that book-Vesper is given to wild unexplained mood swings that give the impression that Fleming just doesn't know shit about women. The film is much better than the book, while we're at it, it's much better than the majority of the other Bond films. If you've never seen a Bond movie, this is definitely the place to start. I don't want to say that it's the best of the series as Skyfall has been getting such excellent advance notices, but its certainly close.

Grade: A

Enjoy these other Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again