Skyfall

Skyfall – My heart sank during the first ten minutes of the new James Bond film, Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012). With a beautiful female sidekick, Bond races around Istanbul, crashing cars and avoiding machine gun fire. He hops on a stolen motorcycle, chases his enemy across the rooftops of the Grand Bazaar with the iconic Blue Mosque nearby, crashes through two dozen street vendor carts, then, intentionally smashes the motorcycle into an abutment to launch himself 150 feet onto the top of a speeding train where the battle continues, Bond employing a large caterpillar earthmover to roll over six or so cars transported on the train and, then, sweeps the caterpillar bucket into the back of the adjacent coach to keep the bad guy from uncoupling the car – all of this while avoiding machine gun fusillades and grenade blasts. After more hurtling around, Bond gets shot and falls at least a thousand feet into a mountain gorge somehow located in suburban Istanbul. The stunts at the film’s outset are ludicrously overwrought, defy gravity and all other known laws of physics, and everything is noisy and cataclysmic. Fearing more hysterical and absurdly destructive action, I felt myself withering into a state of numb resistance, the state of mental fatigue in which I endured The Dark Knight and The Avengers. But, then, to my delight, it became clear that the opening episode in this film is a joke, a caricature of the bravura action sequences beginning other Bond films and, thereafter, the film achieves a witty, compelling surrealism, a kind of bricolage that mashes together all known suspense thrillers and ends squarely in the noble territory of the American Western, albeit channeled through Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. The film’s tongue-in-cheek and operatic surrealism is announced in a title sequence so elaborately spectacular and weird as to be nearly indescribable – Bond’s corpse sinking in a vast oceanic abyss while demonic-looking scarlet jellyfish rain down onto the sea-bottom which sprouts tombstones, nude mermaids beckoning like Rhine Maidens while guns and bloody targets bearing Bond’s silhouette also settle into the sandy reefs far beneath the ocean. Adele croons the title song and we are off to the races. Opening sequences involving terrorism in London, an assassination in a glittering science-fiction Shanghai skyscraper (which is an amalgam of Hitchcock, Welles’ Lady from Shanghai, and Bladerunner), and, then, a set piece in gambling Hell in Macau are all extraordinary. The plot makes no sense but just when one senses Mendes’ directorial ingenuity flagging, Javier Bardem makes a spectacular entrance on a ruined island littered with smashed Mao statutes and the film gets even more deliriously bizarre. Bardem makes an astounding villain, delivering a great hammy performance and Mendes gambles on the chemistry between the dour Bond and his nemesis, eschewing the more expansive canvas of the first half of the film for tighter focus on the two adversaries. After some big battles in London, including a train-crash that is hommage to Fritz Lang’s spy movies from the 1920’s – the train caroming into a cavernous vaulted sewer tunnel looks like a demonstration of Einstein’s relativity gone berserk – Bond retreats to his family’s abandoned mansion, deep in the mountains of northern Scotland (Mendes uses shots duplicating famous images in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps) for a final shoot-out with the bad guy and an army of henchmen. The last thirty minutes of the film repeatedly cites Rio Bravo down to the detail of loyal, old curmudgeonly man with the shot-gun, Albert Finney in the Walter Brennan role. In fact, Mendes’ Bond alludes to John Wayne’s Chance in Rio Bravo in an exchange made famous as the epigraph to one of the editions of David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film: “A gimpy old man and a drunk? Is this all you’ve got?” to which Chance replies: “It’s what I’ve got.” Listen for a variation on this exchange in the final minutes of Skyfall. The duel at ranch house on the moor also reaches surreal and phantasmagoric heights: Bardem’s dyed blonde-hair illumined by the searchlight of his helicopter as he stalks around the manor hurling grenades and, then, an underwater wrestling match in a cathedral of dark and icy waters lit from above by the burning house. Judy Dench is excellent as Bond’s taskmaster; there’s a great cameo by a young Q; we get to see the Aston Martin in action once more; and, in an insert shot, one of the doomed Bond girls, demonstrates that martinis still must be “shaken, not stirred.” (One of the film’s in-jokes is the fact that no crisis is so severe as to prevent the luminaries at MI6 from sipping Courvoisier as they discuss the dire state of affairs). This film is a master-class in Bondology and, to my amazement, the picture, although overlong, is fantastically entertaining.