Discovering the Pleasures of Daniel Craig's James Bond
Watching "Casino Royale" was a surprisingly pleasant experience, given my own lack of interest in the spy genre.
I have a confession to make: I have watched only a handful of James Bond films. I haven’t avoided them for any particular reason; it’s just that I’ve never felt the urge to indulge in the violent, kinetic pleasures and rampant misogyny that have, historically, been a key part of the franchise’s aesthetic. However, for some reason I’ve recently felt the urge to start watching them. I wasn’t really in the mood to watch the earliest ones, and I have a great deal of fondness for Daniel Craig, so I figured I’d start with Casino Royale, the first of his outings as Bond.
From the very first moment, I knew that I was going to really enjoy the film, and that turned out to be exactly the case. Even though my film tastes usually run more toward the costume drama and the historical epic, something about Casino Royale just called to me, inviting me to enter this strange, deadly, and piercingly beautiful world of brutal agents, even-more-brutal enemies, and people who yearn for nothing more than power and money.
To be sure, a major part of the film’s appeal is Daniel Craig himself. It might be hard to imagine now, 15 years after Casino Royale premiered, but many people were, shall we say, hostile to his casting, given that his blue-eyed Nordic beauty contrasted so sharply with the tall, dark, and handsome vision of Bond from both Ian Fleming’s novels and the other actors who had portrayed him. For me, though, Craig simply is Bond, a powerful, magnetic, and divinely masculine vision that enraptures the camera and, through it, those of us sitting in the audience. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration (or, who knows, it might be) to say that Craig is the very ideal of male beauty (note that I didn’t say “handsomeness.” Craig is beautiful, with all of its gendered connotations). As critics have noted, Casino Royale renders him into an object of the gaze just as earlier Bond films had done to so many women, with the pivotal moment when he walks out of the ocean in nothing but a bikini the most notable moment of this phenomenon.
For make no mistake, the Bond of Casino Royale is a man riddled with contradictions. While he clearly has a conscience, he’s not afraid to commit truly brutal acts, whether that’s knifing a man in the middle of a museum exhibit or shooting another in cold blood (one of the two kills that earns him his “00” status at the beginning of the film). With his icy blue eyes, his razor-sharp jawline, and his tightly clenched lips, he’s a man always poised for violence. At the same time, he’s someone who clearly yearns for something else, for some shred of human connection, which proves to almost be his undoing when he falls for Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd. It’s not so much that she double-crossed him that breaks his heart; it’s the fact that he allowed her into his heart only for her to sacrifice herself in the end. For Bond, there can be no greater betrayal.
However, Bond is just one reason that I enjoyed this film. It’s also simply gorgeous to look at, and while it doesn’t overindulge in the doodads and gadgets of its predecessors, it still has all of the visual accoutrements that one expects from a high-budget crime thriller, with high-speed chases, elaborate couture, and a villain who is as devilishly handsome as he is cruel. Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre is the best sort of Bond villain: one whose motivations remain slightly opaque but who is nevertheless capable of great cruelty and sadism. It’s just a pity that he dies so quickly, and not even by Bond’s hand. (Though their scene together is a perfect illustration of the homoeroticism that has long existed between two men in conflict. One gets the sense that both of them are taking at least a little bit of pleasure out of their tortured exchange. It’s only when Bond hears Lynd’s screams that the spell is broken).
And then there’s Judi Dench’s M. Given that I’m a gay man, it’s probably no surprise that I’ve been a fan of hers for years now, and there is literally no role in which she has appeared that I have not loved. She brings a certain steely grace to M, one who sees something Bond and is willing to up with his going rogue, but only up to a point. When she threatens him not to break into her flat again, you get the feeling--from the steely delivery, the glint in her eyes, and by the set of her body--that she’s more than able to order his death if she sees him as too much of a threat. During the film’s conclusion, it’s she who shatters what’s left of Bond’s heart by telling him that Lynd had made a bargain to change his life, and you can’t quite tell whether she’s doing it because she genuinely wants to offer her agent some comfort in this dark hour of his despair, or whether she knows that it’s the perfect means by which she can get him to return to the fold.
It’s precisely this pervasive ambiguity that made Casino Royale such a delight for me to watch. Craig’s Bond is just so wonderfully ambivalent as Bond, the perfect distillation of all of the anxieties and fears of the post-9/11 world. He’s the sort of man who is condemned to have no real happiness or human connection in his life. Somehow or another, he’ll always be drawn back into the world of violence, power, and death, just as certainly as the sun will rise in the east. Neither the film nor Bond are sinister, precisely. They are, if anything, simply stoic, accepting the world as it is rather than what they would like it to be.
I suppose, then, that what I found so compelling about Casino Royale, and what I hope to find in the other recent Bond films, is this remarkable blending of the beautiful, the poignant, and the bleak. It’s the perfect combination for the uncertain times in which we live.