You Live More Than Twice

By Dan Hagen

If Hitchcock had ever directed a James Bond film, the result might have looked something like what I saw last night — Sam Mendes’ “Skyfall.”

The brilliant director of “American Beauty” gives us the kind of extended scenes of suspense that are rare in Bond movies, along with arresting, impressionistic cinematography — characters caught in a blue ballet of underwater battle, or framed lonely against burning buildings like the denizens of some sort of hell.

Daniel Craig as a troubled James Bond 007 in 'Skyfall'

And as the story starts, that’s just what Daniel Craig’s James Bond seems to be — a survivor of experiences too harrowing even for him, old-looking, trembling like an alcoholic with his double-oh skills badly eroded. He’s lived twice, and too much.

The atmosphere feels thematic, and Craig’s Bond seems, on some deeper level of context, to have been aged and battered by the very half-century of cultural changes that have accumulated since these films began.

Women, mere playthings no more, are a serious presence to be reckoned with. The cold-eyed killers of Smersh are as long dead as the Soviet Union they served. But threats still slink in our shadows, and the villains who bring them — the compelling Javier Bardem here — are more unsettling than they once were, in part because we now sense they may have a legitimate grievance against the authority Bond represents. It’s enough to leave even a superman stirred and shaken.

Never fear. From the futuristic 21^st century present, with its electronic eyes on everything and its digital connections among everyone, the film effectively moves backward through the strata of time to an elemental past where secrets must be answered for. 

That past was also Bond’s heyday, a time when a knife, a radio and a single man’s resourcefulness and resolve could supply the answers. And by the time Bond arrives there, on the vast, ancient plain of Scotland, he’s 007 again, ready for duty.

Yes, the Daniel Craig films do lack what the New Yorker observed to be missing from them— that piratical sense of fun supplied by Sean Connery’s gentleman-rogue. We ask more from our fictional heroes than suave swashbuckling these days, and maybe we ask too much, leaving Bond as dour as Bourne. In providing us a Bond worth pondering, the danger is that these films will become ponderous.

But this time out, at least, Mendes knows the exact direction in which to point Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 (with modifications). 

It’s north by northwest.

Daniel Craig: A Bond worth pondering