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A Quantum of Notes


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#1 Revelator

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Posted 18 December 2008 - 08:43 AM

I didn't go into QoS with particularly high expectations, though not with abysmal ones either. I was worried about the idea of the Bond films trying a direct sequel for the first time, and while I had liked Casino Royale, I thought it was overrated and managed to fluff or soften many of the book's set-pieces. I left QoS feeling impressed in several areas, with only a few objections.

1. Marc Forster's direction is hard to evaluate. The last time a predominantly drama-oriented director was assigned to the franchise was with The World Is Not Enough, and Michael Apted's direction proved sluggish in the action scenes. The opposite applies to QoS--the action is so frenetic that I actually came to dread it, though it eventually became more visually coherent as the movie progresses. My first instinct was to check the editors' backgrounds. The first editor, Matt Chessé, has worked on several of Forster's previous projects, and I ruled him out. The second, Richard Pearson, worked on The Bourne Supremacy, and one can do the rest of the math from there. I wonder if Chesse worked on the drama sections while Pearson handled (or mangled) the action.
There's also something else to consider--whether Pearson was trying to cover up bad direction. At least 17 assistant directors worked on QoS. A movie of this size and scope would be problematic enough, but it was also put together fast enough to follow up on CR's heels. So you have lots of people working very fast and dumping the results in editor's lap to figure out. Since Pearson had worked with Paul Greengrass, he was used to working with frenetically shot footage. But Greengrass is obviously a more experienced hand at this sort of thing than Forster and his assistants.
My main objection to the action scenes are their sense of space. They almost don't have any. The spaces are flat, and the compositions, designed to be seen quickly, aren't very inspired. There's none of the kinetic poetry you can find in the best Bond action sequences, when you know exactly what's happening, and can appreciate the movement of objects across space. Quick cutting isn't inimical to this sort of action--in the Wild Bunch Sam Peckinpah slaughtered about half the inhabitants of Mexico in about five minutes screen-time, but you could trace the path of every bullet and track each falling body, even the screen was full of action. Forster is obviously going for a more impressionistic approach, but this doesn't excuse not bothering to situate the action. It may all be a blur to Bond, but unlike him we're meant to enjoy the fights and chases.
But in all fairness to the director and editors, some action scenes do work quite well. The opera sequence is the best layered sequence in the movie--unlike the horse racing/interrogation intercutting, which merely enforces a one-level metaphor, the rise and fall of the opera music and the onstage action are astutely counterpointed or analogized by the first non-violent and then violent interaction between Bond and Quantum, which takes on a progressively more dramatic tone. Here what was once a static metaphor becomes a fluid one.
Against all this I do want to praise Forster for the non-action scenes, which have legitimate style. His direction revives much of what had made the Bond films worth watching in the first place: his travelogues have real local color (the shots of Bolivian locals, the lizard heaving himself across the desert--even the captions are artfully rendered) and the interiors have a sheen and sleekness that were less accented in CR. We get a better sense of the opulence of the surroundings when they are opulent, while areas such as the desert look especially unforgiving and harsh--but of course this is more due to the cinematographer than the director. In any case, I think this is the first Bond film to look fully modern.

2. The title song might have worked with clearer, more powerful vocals (which Alicia Keys might have been capable of, even if she is a boring singer). The backing track itself is spiky and sometimes intriguing, and even with the regrettably mixed vocals it's still easier to listen to than Chris Cornell's pouty sludge. But why can't they require these artists to actually put the film's title in the song? "Quantum of Solace" may not be the world's most natural sounding song title, but if you know what it means I think it can be worked into the lyrics. After all, "Goldfinger" once sounded strange to Anthony Newley too. The title graphics are notable for the return of the naked ladies in the sand, and the imagery is more psychedelic. But on the whole the images doesn't add much that's new to the Binder/Kleinnman model.

3. The casting was pretty much spot on. I think this just might be the Bond film with the most character arc. It certainly does more with Felix Leiter than any other Bond film, and it's a pity we didn't see more of Wright. Leiter is of course more prominent because for the first time a Bond film isn't on the side of the Americans. After eight years of Bush this is only to be expected, and one should remember that the film will make most of its money outside American anyway. And given what US foreign policy in South American has actually been like in the past 55 years, it's regrettably not hard to imagine our government acting the way it does in QoS. This is the first Bond film to oppose Bond to America, though whether this will continue under Obama remains to be seen. I'll be optimistic and guess that the world is eager to think differently of us. I do wonder if it was Haggis or Purvis and Wade who were responsible for this angle of the script. I'll plump for Haggis, who has spoken of LeCarre as an inspiration for his Bond work. I had first groaned when I heard this, since LeCarre and Fleming are not birds of a feather, but in any event this angle worked, and while Fleming could skillfully pretend that the British and Americans had the best of intentions, modern audiences are too cynical or sophisticated to trust in governments and their agents. Is QoS the most left-wing of Bond films? I would say so, and that its politics are handled far more subtly than I had anticipated. One should also say that the film does tend to lose interest in the mechanics of oil/water plot as the picture heads toward its finale and becomes eager to clear these off the table and get to the final scenes.

3. QoS is also the shortest Bond film, and I think what's missing is more character interaction. I wanted to see more of Bond with Felix. Out of the secondary principals only M gets enough screen time, and unfortunately she comes off as wrong a few too many times. I hope we're not creeping back into the old days when it seemed like the entire Service would fall apart without Bond to tell M where to send him and what to do. I thought Mathieu Amalric was wonderfully effective as the dirtbag Greene and would have liked a bit more of him as well. He plays the Euro-sleaze angle to the hilt; he also has classic Bond-villain eyes, with his pupils almost encircled by the whites--he would have been a better LeChiffre than Mikkelson. The film might have benefited from another scene of him interacting with Bond--he do get to see him bitchily diss Bond at the party, but that wasn't quite enough before the action climax. Perhaps one of those gaming/sporting match scenes so typical of the Bond films might have helped--sometimes the formula has it uses.
Camille was exactly the right sort of Bond girl the film needed, and her backstory is just right--she feels a bit like Melina Havelock in Fleming's For Your Eyes Only, right down to her partially losing her nerve as getting revenge. Still, the relationship between the two seems slightly incomplete and not full enough. At the risk of sounding coarse, they probably should have slept together. I say this less because of prurience than because it would be a cumulative Bonding experience for the characters (pun unintended), who don't quite spend enough time together (it would have fit into their stranded-in-the-desert scene, despite the cold). And it would have made their final (slightly Moonraker-style parting) even more bittersweet, and rounded off the relationship between the characters. Instead Bond must get his rocks off with Fields only, and this feels wrong. Fields is that old Bond cliche, the expendable sex-toy--the second-tier Bond girl who's there for Bond to sleep with and then get killed since she's longer of interest. The entire concept is misogynistic and bad for the film's sense of drama: sex with Bond is only reserved for the minor character, while Camille is too good for carnal relations. The character herself could have been dropped. She seems mostly there for comic relief, to give Bond his sex allotment and thereby pacify the audience, and die in a Goldfinger homage that is itself unnecessary. A good Bond film has no need to explicitly remind us of its predecessors, which we carry in our heads anyway.
As for Craig himself--well, it's hard to argue with success. Craig is really the first Bond since Connery to have a genuine physical presence that translates into all-around charisma. Moore and Brosnan were both physically slight in comparison, and while Lazenby and Dalton could easily hold their own in action scenes, one never sense that female audiences would have swooned if they took their shirts off. Craig is really the first Bond since Connery to have become a sex symbol in the part, and this bodes extremely well for the series' future, since Bond--contrary to what one might expect--needs a large female audience to thrive. Craig's physical assurance is such that he'd sometimes at risk of lapsing into an unflappable hulk--once he puts his action hero face on he's set to go. A friend of mine not-insultingly called him "Super Mario Bond"--he's able to coast on his inner strength. He perhaps needs more bits of buisness, more touches of savoir-faire to better indicate the bon-vivant side of Bond's character. Right now he does battered Bond quite well.

4. Earlier I had said I was worried about QoS being the first Bond sequel. But instead of wrecking the film, this has given it something no other Bond has. This is the first Bond movie with a sense of symmetry. The gun barrel at the end is only the most outward sign of this (and it's a brilliant touch, one that lets us know that the Bond series has fully rebooted). It's deeply present too in the way the film rounds off Vesper's arc, returning to her boyfriend and showing Bond forgoing vengeance (when he says the dead don't care for revenge we're reminded of him saying Mathis doesn't care about his corpse being in a dumpster). It's also present in the film's set of teacher-pupil relationships: M schooling Bond, Mathis schooling Bond, Bond schooling Leiter, Bond schooling Camille, and finally Bond schooling M. This is visually echoed in the scenes of Bond holding the characters: he cradles his old teacher Mathis as the latter dies (the scene has a real frisson, since this level of male tenderness has never been explored in any of the the other Bond films), and later Bond, himself now in the teacher role, holds Camille as they go to their near deaths (when Craig brings out the gun, I was reminded of that moment in LALD where Bond decides to kill Solitaire and himself if they can't make it out of Mr. Big's trap--here Bond of course uses it to escape, but at first I think we're meant to assume the worst). Because of their dramatic resonance, these scenes have far more dramatic heft to me than the shower scene in CR, which came off as far more contrived.
So QoS rounds off the Vesper story in a way Fleming never did. This is partly due different priorities. In the novel of CR, when Bond said "the bitch is dead" he meant every word. Her love to him was utterly dead, and he was only focused on devoting himself to the struggle with Smersh. That utter coldness is what makes the book's finale so unsettling and chilling--he really has thrown his feelings away. By contrast, the movies CR and QoS don't believe that Bond stopped loving Vesper, and feel the need to let Bond lay his love to rest. Whereas Fleming eventually made Bond a sort of Byronic hero--melancholy and haunted by loss and battered by life--the Craig films have done so post-haste. This is a reflection of our contemporary expectations in modern storytelling--we are hungry to explore pop-culture from every angle, hungry to drag out more neuroses to make otherwise familiar characters a new hook.

5. A few last words on the action scenes. They're frequent and serviceable, but don't seem very creative. One can certainly thank God that they're down to Earth, but their distinctiveness lies mostly in setting. The desert is a terrific location, though more perhaps could have been done with it. I was also somewhat disappointed by the action of the climax, which is basically people running around in a burning building in the desert. The plane chase is not bad, but it doesn't hold any surprises either--you know exactly what's going to happen, and any pleasure you can take in just watching things unfold is dashed by the cutting. The CGI of the parachute jump is certainly better than that in DAD, but we accept it because the scene is already so busy anyway, what with the scrambled editing and swirling camera and so forth. Compare it to the uncluttered staging of similar material in Moonraker and you can see what's been lost. The earlier sequence suffers since we can plainly see that these are stuntmen, rather than Roger Moore and Richard Kiel, but we're at least seeing real bodies plummet in real air, and the camera doesn't try to jazz up material that is already riveting. Action movies trace their DNA way back to Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton, and as those great, great filmmakers showed, sometimes you just gotta step back and watch bodies at work.

6. QoS is both more and less innovative than CR. It is the first Bond sequel, yet its format is also conventional, which drama stringing together action setpieces. The latter seem a bit less tacked-on than in so many other Bond films, or as in the first half of CR. CR's format was more daring--the first half mostly action, the second mostly drama--but also brokenbacked. But within its conventional structure QoS puts Bond through what seems to me like a greater character arc than what he went through in CR. Bond makes a greater engagement with ethics here, and so do Leiter, M, and Camille. This Bond film is more attuned to more of its character's arcs than any other. And I cannot help feeling that its ending--which ends in Bond refusing to kill the man he once so wanted to and gaining a sense of peace in doing so--is quite radical for the series, more so than CR's sudden burst of final action. So while QoS is superficially more conventional, it is just as innovative as CR. And it leaves the series in very good shape. It's probably the best second film since FRWL. Unlike TMWTGG or TND it does not rehash the formula of the previous film. Unlike the much underrated LTK, it comes at a good time, when innovation is welcomed by the public and Bond's only real screen competitor is Bourne. FRWL itself represents a sort of Bond picture we'll probably never see again--a story directly from Fleming and a fully coherent one with only one shoehorned action sequence, the sort of film one can call more of an adventure film than an action film, without the busyness that occasionally marrs QoS. But that is about as far as one can complain. I welcome QoS into the class of first-tier Bonds, and I hope it bodes well for the future.