"This is fascist cinema uncorrupted by moral scruples ... Bond nonchalantly fires half a dozen shots into the back of a helpless opponent... The British cinema will never be the same again."
                                                             - Film and Filming's review of Dr. No

Casino Royale is the best James Bond film in forty years, and the first to truly marry the film icon with the original literary vision of Bond. It is faithful to the Fleming source material, yet it is still contemporary, and remains in the tradition of the action/adventures that EON has been creating for the last few decades.

The first movie of any kind that I remember seeing was Thunderball, in a drive-in double feature. My dad took me, against the objections of my mother (after all, I was only five).  But that's what 007 films were for in the sixties.  They allowed fathers and sons to bond (pardon the pun). Girls, guns, gratuitous sex and violence... the greatest gift a dad can give. And that film was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in my five long years.  I'm sure I had seen movies before, but none of them stuck with me like Thunderball.  It was an adult fantasy of sex, violence and danger - which, let's face it, is much more fun for a kid too see than a children's movie.

So flash forward to 1979, and I'm a teenager, entering a multiplex to see Moonraker.  To my surprise, the dads were gone.  Over the course of a decade, almost imperceptibly, the James Bond films had started catering more to the children: Very little blood, no hint of reality, and no sex (except for the occasional unfunny double entendre).  I realized that Bond films had changed from a series where dads took their sons to watch together into a series where dads dropped their kids off for the matinee. (Nothing more kid-friendly than a film about a government assassin, right?)

Well, nearly thirty years after that, dad can finally return. Casino Royale is for grownups.

EON has tried to return Bond to his more serious roots before, but kind of chickened out with Timothy Dalton's films. With The Living Daylights, instead of crafting a taut, dramatic script for an intense actor like Dalton, they just took a script written for a Moore-like 007 and removed the punch lines, basically stranding a serious Bond in an adventure in which a cello cases is used as escape sled from the KGB. Dalton's second film was darker and more respectful of Fleming's source material, but the end product was foiled by the writers strike in Hollywood, leaving one of the producers to write the script himself, and the storytelling and characters suffered accordingly.

But this isn't the case in Casino Royale. The star of the film, Daniel Craig, would list Dalton's portrayal of Bond as an important influence. In fact, his take on Bond adds the best of all of the previous interpretations, but does so as the film unfolds and his character evolves. An ingenious element in this reboot is that the actor does not have to immediately step into Sean Connery's immense shoes (no offense, Sean), which is the usual downfall of anybody playing 007. The fun is watching Craig's Bond grow into the classic 007 character.  

Another ingenious move was to hire an actor who could actually accomplish this. Instead of just going for an actor with the Bond look and trying to shoehorn him into the characterization, they went for an actor who could make the part his own. Director Martin Campbell has called Craig the Bond of his time, saying Pierce Brosnan could not star in this film and Craig couldn't star in GoldenEye. But I disagree. Craig could handle just about any Bond characterization from the past films (although I doubt he would've wanted to star in a handful of them).  He embodies the best of all the previous incarnations, marrying the icon of film to the man of the books. And Craig's triumph is that never for a moment during the film do you think of any of those previous incarnations. Craig is Bond.

But the most important change was when they brought in Oscar winner Paul Haggis to work on the script. The lame sexual-innuendo-laced dialogue of the last decade has been replaced with actual human banter that shapes the characters. Everybody talks differently, in his or her own voice. (When even M was talking in sex puns in the Brosnan films, you knew the filmmakers were on cruise control.)

So while the kid stuff is still there in the story (you know, sex, murder, bloody violence), there is a maturity to the film that we haven't seen since… well, ever.

A prime example of this can be seen in Judi Dench's "M," whom is finally a character that lives up to Ian Fleming's writing, rather than just being a post-feminist comment on it. Dench has appeared as this character before, at least in name, in the Brosnan films. But this M is no "bean-counter." In fact, she takes on a monstrous edge akin to Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. She molds Bond into a cold killer, as only a loving mother could. In the first scene of the film, Bond announces he is about to kill a double-agent on her orders - no arrest, no interrogation, no trial - and does so, thereby earning a promotion from her. Over the course of the film, she scolds Bond, threatens to have him killed, threatens to expose him to the press, informs him that promoting him was a mistake -- and Bond's response is "I love you too, M." It is truly an intriguing, bizarre relationship, and their scenes together are some of the best in the series. When Craig offers the famous last line of the novel, "the bitch is dead," which always reads so cold, so cruel in print - the screenwriters have given M an even colder response, simply: "You've learned your lesson, then."  She then finishes the conversation and hangs up the phone, having created one more 00 -- and one less caring human being with any chance for happiness.

Which is my real point here. This Bond isn't all grown-up because they've amped up the blood and sex - all of the Bond movies have that in varying degrees.  It's because he's finally allowed the main character to be a tragic figure, after 40 years of escapist comic book movies where double entendres replaced conversation.  It signals that this is a film created for adults. Not since On Her Majesty's Secret Service have we left a Bond movie with the feeling that it sucks a little to be James Bond. But that's a good thing - it's a vast improvement over the feeling I had after the last few films - that it sucked to WATCH James Bond. He's human again, and a human being is much more fun to watch after twenty-one films than an icon, because a human can keep surprising you.

And what a terrific surprise it is.

Copyright © 2006 Jeff Hause