The Times website has recently begun allowing folks to access its archives, and I've spent the last few days looking through old articles from the Times Literary Supplement. The following is a film review of GoldenEye, but since the author discusses Fleming at length (and knowledgeably), I decided to share it here, though I don't share his high rating of Brosnan.
Boys with toys
Will Eaves
Published: 1 December 1995
Admirers of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels have always taken a dim view of the films. After Thunderball (1965), they certainly had little to do with the books in terms of plot, but then plotting, as his editor E. L. Doctorow used to complain, was never Fleming’s strong suit. More importantly, Anthony Burgess complained that Bond had become “gimmicky”; that the cinema’s obsession with devices, rather than desires, misrepresented the hero. In fact, because Bond is a Cold War warrior, the distinction between different kinds of devices, or gadgets, is germane to both books and films.
Good gadgets are life-enhancing (Rolex Oyster Per-petual Chronometers, Lotus sports-car submersibles), whereas bad ones (deadly weapons) usually serve the needs of a bloated state (the Soviet Union) or crime syndicate (SPECTRE).
In GoldenEye, the seventeenth Bond film and the first since the collapse of Communism, the Cold War is no more, political loyalty is cheap (the arch-villain Janus, as his duplicitous name suggests, is a renegade MI5 agent), but the gadgets, good and bad, remain. GoldenEye itself, spuriously named after Fleming’s Jamaican home, is an old Cold War “rumour” that turns out to be real a satellite that fires an electro-magnetic pulse capable of wiping out whole communications infrastructures.
Smaller utensils for the hero, now played by Pierce Brosnan, are supplied by the octogenarian Q (Desmond Llewellyn), and include an exploding Biro and a wrist-watch detonating device. One of the catches is that Janus, who has filched GoldenEye from the Russians, remembers how to deactivate the watch. “Is Q still up to his old tricks?” he smirks, before pressing a button. The director, Martin Campbell, places the emphasis on know-how, not fire-power; the technology is unmysterious. We even hear GoldenEye referred to, prosaically, as “the world’s greatest cashcard”, which implies that anyone could use it.
The film opens with an extraordinary stunt: an unpiloted plane drops off a mountain edge into the abyss; Bond rides a bike after it, free-falls a thousand feet and catches it. But this, we are soon informed, is a stunt set in the past part of MI5’s photo album. The rest of the film, set in the present, is largely concerned with 007’s ambiguous status as a man of action. In one long sequence, Bond carves up most of St Petersburg in a tank and skewers a bronze pegasus on his gun turret; he goes on to rescue the beautiful Russian computer programmer Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) from Janus (Sean Bean), but Natalya is not a hard action fan. “Boys with toys”, she sniffs, and quietly sets about hacking into GoldenEye’s nerve centre in the virtual world, while Bond drums his fists on the wall in the real one.
The suggestion is not so much that Bond has been emasculated by the political and technological transformations of the past six years, but that the link between sex and heroic endeavour is no longer an automatic reflex of the plot; there is, if you like, no clubbable spur to his philandering. Fleming’s readers will not fear this approach. We are told often enough in the novels that Bond’s womanizing offends M’s “Victorian soul”; it even offends a puritanical strand in Bond himself. Aptly, then, M is now a woman Judi Dench in a severe suit with a budget to balance. She calls Bond “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur”; the boys at MI5 dub her “the evil queen of numbers”; Brosnan keeps his counsel. This is shrewd characterization, for Fleming’s 007 is as incompatible with sexual partners, in the long term, as he is wary of his boss. All girls leave him in the end, apart from his housekeeper, and who is M if not the national housekeeper?
Solitariness should be essential for the film hero, as it is for the hero of the books. The trouble with the gags and gadgets in the films was never their improbability the Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky recently revealed that the missile-firing cigarettes and jet-propelled back-packs were taken seriously by the KGB but the fact that they were wielded, for the most part, by a chatty, sociable animal. But Bond, like most snobs, loathes the lack of distinction that conviviality implies. This is not true, say, of Buchan’s Richard Hannay, an obvious source in other respects, in whom national and personal grace are combined.
There is, instead, something “alien and un-English” about 007. As we discover in Moonraker (1954), Bond is “not the sort of chap one usually sees in (the club) Blades”; he is “a difficult man to cover up. Particularly in England.” One explanation for this is simply that Bond is not English at all, but half-Scots and half-Swiss; another is that his un-Englishness brands him a knight errant out of place at home, mentally scarred because the violence of his moral code disqualifies him from enjoying its social benefits.
GoldenEye gets to the heart of this when Janus taunts 007 with a vision of his funeral “nothing but some doormen and a few tearful restaurauteurs”. His jibe also reminds us that James Bond is, above all, a spy, and that spies work under cover, condemned to anonymity. A well-known, or iconic, spy is therefore a ludicrous idea, and one that Fleming satirizes in From Russia with Love (1955), in which the Soviet organization of terror, SMERSH, identifies Bond’s celebrity as the weak point of the Secret Service.
This truth has always presented problems for the films, which necessarily make stars of the actors who play 007, but it also gives a fresh face a natural advantage. In this respect, Brosnan is ideal: distinctive but not yet famous, assertive but never brash or cocky. He acts well, too, though not with the thespian scowl that troubled Timothy Dalton’s interpretation of the role.
Rather, Brosnan makes the right moves, perfecting a walk with the leisurely swing of a nine-iron, and a swerving run for the action sequences that suggests something of the art of wedeln (hip-waggling) on the piste. He is handsome without being a dandy; tough, but not invincible; wry, but not, as Roger Moore seemed, an aspiring comic. All three qualities are put to good use in his flirtation with Janus’s fellow conspirator, Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who kills her lovers by crushing them between her thighs. Bond and Onatopp meet first in evening dress and enjoy a vodka martini; they spar again, less amicably, in a St Petersburg sauna; she comes to a nasty end, finally, half-way up a tree. Her name is the one amusing thing about her.
Onatopp is also a lot smarter than Bond. Like Natalya and Janus; like M; like Samantha Bond’s theatre-going Miss Moneypenny, even. The whole cast, in fact, is a step ahead. On one level, this is true to the Fleming blueprint; Bond is not a great thinker. He has read Poe, Bram Stoker and Ambrose Bierce, and he has heard of Wagner, but too much thinking or cultivated introspection is “the death-watch beetle in the soul”. At the same time, we should not have to remind ourselves that 007 works for military intelligence. He takes pleasure in his craft and in his craftiness; in the wit which sets him apart from villains who may possess superior intellects but who, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, have no curiosity.
Much of his learning, in other words, is a device, not a desire, designed to force the enemy’s hand. It is in this spirit that 007 saves Britain in Moonraker, when his “half-remembered lessons from a card-sharper” help him spot a fascist cheating at bridge. Sean Connery draws on similar reserves of cunning in the film Diamonds Are Forever (1971), when Bond quizzes an assassin, posing as a wine waiter, about claret. There is little comparable craft in GoldenEye; once only, we see Bond break Onatopp’s winning streak at baccarat (it’s his game, after all) and so no sense of Bond’s delight in benign gimmickry, the eccentricities of taste and learning that give his character depth. The lesson of the books, if any, is that power without the power to detect the value of useless information is a thing to be feared. It should be so, once again, in the films.