No Time To Die

 

No Time To Die (2021)
Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga
Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (!)
Starring Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Rami Malek
 
Frankly, I'm not at all sorry to see this misbegotten Daniel Craig era of Bond film come to a close. That's no slight against Craig, who has been game enough, and plenty able to cast himself as the suavely misanthropic super-spy with the right blend of macho traditionalism and actorly specificity. But the very idea --pushed hard throughout this pentalogy-- of a grittier, darker tone with a bent towards probing Bond's broken psychology always felt absolutely asinine, the kind of dumbass 90’s defensively self-serious posturing that was already passé by 2006. Why would we want a dour, realistic version of something so inherently unrealistic? Who cares that Bond's life of traveling to fancy places, bedding every beautiful woman he sees, and killing thousands of villainous goons with no consequences scars his soul and leaves him sad and emotionally damaged, when no one has or will ever do any of that?  It’s so ridiculously far removed from anything remotely resembling reality that moralizing about it is a completely meaningless exercise in utter abstraction. What's next, a depressing, realistic origin story for The Joker? That would be stupid, obviously. This is a fun, empty-headed anachronistic antisocial fantasy with absolutely nothing to teach us about the real world. Just let it be its itself.*

This has been my feeling from the very start, and Craig's subsequent run of movies has done little to disabuse me of that initial reaction. CASINO ROYALE has a few fun beats and a magnificent villain in Mads Mikkelsen, but it's also a structural mess which, predictably, has no idea what to do with its self-conscious "darker" tone other than scowl more. And when it became clear that QUANTUMN OF SOLACE would do the same thing and would be larded up with a bunch of tedious continuity porn, I almost stormed out of the theater (and I wouldn't have missed much if I had). SKYFALL was something of a welcome course correction, with much more shameless huge-scale silliness, a worthy theme song and Roger Deakins making everything look lush and purty, but it takes a weird turn into mawkish melodrama in its last act and makes the horrible mistake of centering the story around Bond personally. And finally even though SPECTRE is the most recent one, I remembered almost nothing about it except that it has a good opening, a hot Monica Bellucci, and it turns out Blofeld is Bond's brother like in (spoilers for AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER) AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER. Also it has not just the worst Bond theme song ever, but a real serious contender for the title of worst theme songs in any movie in the history of cinema. And the blandest title in the entire Bond canon, which is particularly galling.** I hope it's obvious to everyone here that Bond movies, like gialli, need baroque, decadent titles. NEVER DIE AGAIN TOMORROW, NOTHING NEW UNDER THE GUN, ON GOLDEN POND, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS. Stuff like that. This might seem like unduly sour nitpicking, but Bond films, even more than other rigidly formulaic franchises, are defined by such a particular and iconic set of distinct signifiers that yes, it's a big problem if you bungle your tile and theme song game. And the fact that the Craig era seems to have been defined by a creative team slightly embarrassed about those signifiers and eager to marginalize them or at least furtively recontextualize them strikes me as folly of the highest order.  
So in fact, I would argue with the title of this movie and insist that it is in fact very much time to die. And the fact that the movie begins with Bond and Léa Seydoux (CRIMES OF THE FUTURE) together, as though I have any idea who she is or any memory of her being in the last movie, put me in a sour mood right off the bat. And then from there we immediately dive back into continuity porn with Blofeld and Eva Green and shit. Goddamit, this is why I swore off the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE movies, and this isn't even going to have that level of stuntwork.

But I warmed to it a bit. The movie bustled along, doing its standard James Bond thing, and doing it pretty well, pretty honestly. Noticeably less anxious, self-conscious fretting about gritty realism, not a lot of drab overthinking but not entirely braindead, either. Still too much annoying continuity clutter and moony melodrama about Bond himself, but at least enough of the desired formula, executed handsomely, that I was willing to provisionally get on board with the film. But then something unexpected happened. Like Saul Tenser in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE,*** something alien and unexpected but maybe kind of beautiful started to grow inside it. Something, in fact, that feels almost like a whole different film, a parallel work of art, not wholly disconnected from the standard globetrotting Bond fare but also not particularly dependent on it: an odd, melancholy drama about endings, about regret for the roads not taken, the things left undone, the future that we won't see.

Or maybe it’s not even a drama, since you can’t really call it a story, per se, and Craig is the only character (technically, much of it centers around Bond’s relationship with Seydoux, who the movie frames as his true love. But she’s nearly 20 years younger than him, their chemistry is middling at best, and she’s transparently more plot device than character, important to Bond only because the movie needs it to be so, and even then only by virtue of being the last Bond girl still sitting at the end of a 60-year-long game of musical chairs). So it’s not getting anywhere on the strength of its narrative. But it's more than a tone. It's like, you've got a normal Bond movie, where he wears a tuxedo and orders a Martini and drives a souped up sports car and what have you, but maybe every fourth scene or so just lingers a little longer than you expect, sometimes just holds a second longer on Craig's face than it needs to, lets him register this look he's perfected of aching, resigned regret immediately masked by a reflexive, protective retreat to macho cynicism. It may be just a look, it may not even be anything more than that -- it's not really in the screenplay, except in the sense that the screenplay is confident enough to place Bond in emotionally fraught situations and then mostly just shut up and just let Craig tell us what we need to know entirely through his eyes. 

But it's a powerful look, and not because I've finally come around to the drab idea that this is a penetrating insight into why being a suave, indestructible superspy-lothario is emotionally crippling. Rather, the thing that gives this surprising emotional heft is that it actually has nothing to do with being a superspy. It's about being an emotionally wounded old man, with too much accumulated hurt to be able to entirely trust anyone --to be open and vulnerable the way that love requires-- and experiencing that inevitable moment when you realize you've spent your youth pushing people away instead of letting them love you, and you find yourself alone and empty, with only your regrets and your haunting questions about how it might have all gone differently to occupy your time. And then the old excuses start to ring hollow -- was it really that I am an international superspy and couldn't risk a romantic partner who might betray me to the massive clandestine criminal network run by my estranged stepbrother that wants to kill me? Or was I just afraid of being happy? The specifics emerge naturally from what we understand about the essence of James Bond, but the feelings are richer and more universal. This could be the story of a super-spy, or a gangster, or a high-end chef, and though the specifics of the story would change, that haunted expression would mean the same thing. Combined with Linus Sandgren's (LA LA LAND, FIRST MAN) lush, painterly cinematography,**** and the unrushed editing of Elliot Graham (MILK, X2) and Tom Cross (WHIPLASH, LA LA LAND, HOSTILES), it feels weirdly, unexpectedly evocative, and gives the whole enterprise a curious vibe indeed, a mostly straight-faced silly action romp which is threaded with an implacable but genuine sadness. And the two impulses don't contradict each other, somehow; they balance each other, with the scuzzy fun of Bond fighting it out with a cyborg-eyed motorcycle henchman keeping the middle-aged ennui from sliding into gloomy mawkishness, and the gently insistent emotions giving the action a little insulation from the featureless, plastic churn of some of the more mercenary Bond films.

None of which is to say it's a good movie, exactly. The action is adequate, but mostly lacking in any real showstopper "oh shit!" moments, the design is nice-looking but a little bland, the acting is mostly a moot point outside of Craig himself (Rami Malek is going for something with his bizarre, affectless villain performance, but he's such an uninteresting character the result is pretty dull). The dialogue, scene by scene, is actually rather witty (I’m going to credit a final script-polish by Phoebe Waller-Bridge for that), but the story as a whole is a complete mess, an awkward thing which spends almost half its runtime lurching around trying to tie up unnecessary loose ends from the rest of the series in a way so tossed-off and arbitrary that it makes me angry all over again that this series leaned so hard into its manifestly useless continuity, before finally settling down and pivoting to whatever silly bullshit this movie is about, which it then doesn't seem to quite have time to develop, or even coherently explain (the villainous "Lyutsifer Safin" --yes, that's a real name-- has like three different motives and backstories which are all laboriously spelled out, but they don't seem to meaningfully fit together; as near as I can tell, it's a complete coincidence that he happens to kidnap Bond's girlfriend, --not because she's Bond's true love, but because he happens to already knows her from an unrelated series of events during her childhood and was already obsessed with her?-- on the same day Bond was already planning to fight him because of his evil plan to destroy the world, which was in fact originally SPECTRE's [the organization, not the movie] evil plan but then he stops them because he also hates SPECTRE***** for unrelated personal reasons, but then does the exact same thing they were planning to do? And to understand any of this, the movie relies on you remembering whatever the fuck the deal was with Seydoux's character's father in the previous movies, which seems like a pretty long shot. And it's all made weirder by the fact that everything in the scenario insistently points to "Safin" being an older Japanese man, while Rami Malek is very noticeably not that). Like the Billie-Eilish-sung title track, the plot gets the essential elements right, but can't seem to build like it needs to.

And yet, for all that, there really is something here. Between Craig, director Cary Joji Fukunaga (SIN NOMBRE), and the ace production team given a limitless budget to fuss around with, a genuine mood is evoked, one which is hard to quantify but impossible to ignore. James Bond will return, of course –even the credits tell us as much—but this is the first and only Bond film which really feels like a goodbye, a bittersweet farewell to maybe not just the Daniel Craig Bond, maybe not even the Daniel Craig era, but maybe to the whole baggage-laden 60-year 25-movie whirlwind itself. There’s something percolating here, not necessarily stated but certainly felt, which is very distinctly aware that Bond as a character has become unsupportably anachronistic. This is not necessarily a new revelation --GOLDENEYE begins with Bond getting dressed down as a "dinosaur," and that was nine movies ago-- but if Bond was a old-fashioned throwback in 1995, today's he's an outright relic of a dead civilization, and utterly alien artifact, functionally incomprehensible and incompatible with the modern world. There’s very little left in the basic concept which doesn’t read as something of an ugly holdover from a specifically mid-20th-century Imperialist fantasy that isn’t very relatable these days – the poisonous misogyny, the flippant violence against endless expendable hordes of foreigners, the inescapable, curdled nationalism of spies violently reshaping the world to fit their own political ends. Even the character's personal idiosyncrasies have aged into obsolescence -- do cool kids fantasize about donning a immaculately starched tuxedo to sip fussily prepared Martinis anymore? 

It's not so ancient as to be outside living memory; us old guys remember a world where it was easy enough to slip into the concept of Bond. The world that produced him was present enough, or at least a recent enough memory, that whether or not we could personally identify with it, we understood it, it read as a comprehensible worldview that you could immerse yourself in for the purposes of this particular brand of silly fiction. But it’s increasingly hard to do that today; indeed, the whole pivot towards moody introspection that the Craig era embodied seems obviously (though blunderingly) calculated towards re-orienting Bond to something vaguely closer to a recognizable modern outlook. But is there anything left of this concept after we’ve stripped away the dated anachronisms and problematic undertones? NO TIME TO DIE provocatively posits that Bond, having resigned from MI6, has been replaced as 007 by a young Black woman little inclined to respect her antediluvian predecessor (Lashana Lynch, CAPTAIN MARVEL). She seems like a cool character in her own right -- one can easily imagine further movies chronicling her adventures. But James Bond is an archetype, and she has her own separate archetype -- if any young British superspy with their own style and outlook can be called "James Bond," the designation means very little. 

And yet, the classic archetype, which has proved surprisingly durable over the course of six very eventful decades --malleable enough in its manifestation to successfully evolve even as the fundamental core remained remarkably rigid-- has finally and obviously ground to a halt, with no clear way forward. If Bond is to be resurrected, he’ll have to be born anew as something completely different, and I, for one, can’t imagine that being particularly practical or even desirable. But that’s OK; the old dies so the new can be born. I’m nearly 40. The world moves on, and I understand it less and less, spend more and more time looking back at the comforting past which may have been horrible, but was at least familiar. I don’t feel any inclination to defend that past, but I also can’t deny that it made me what I am, defined my outlook on life, even if it defined that outlook through revulsion as much as acceptance. And so with the passing of Bond, so too I acknowledge the passing into irrelevance of a part of myself which grew up in a world where he made sense. It wasn’t a world I would want to go back to, but it was home, with all the contradictory comforts that provides, and it feels oddly meaningful, in some way, for NO TIME TO DIE to offer us old folks an opportunity to acknowledge and eulogize the end of that particular, strange, corny, impish, appalling, extravagant, crass, bloated, misguided, every-evolving and never-changing antisocial macho power fantasy.

Goodbye then, James. We hereby bid you farewell with the same lingering mix of melancholy and relief that we leave you with in your last moments on-screen here. With the bittersweetness we might associate with a high school romance or childhood celebrity crush, say. We wouldn’t want to go back there, wouldn't want to live through it all again, but as a nostalgia-tinged memory safely in the distant past, we’ll remember you fondly and allow ourselves a certain sense of grief at our parting. And a part of you will always be with us, even if it’s just as a reminder of the road we’re glad we didn’t take.

You know, I guess it actually was Time To Die, after all.






* In saying that, I make a strong distinction between the film series, which almost immediately degenerated into a sequence of increasingly absurd, gaudy, Saturday-morning-cartoon action extravaganzas, and the relatively more staid (but still not very realistic) series of novels by Ian Fleming, which seemed to provide some vague inspiration but little else for the film series. I have never read any of them, though, so I can't be more specific than that. But I have seen every single James Bond film, most multiple times, so when I say get me more of that, please you can be quite sure I know what it is I'm asking for.

**  I was once grousing about that title and someone said something like 'well, they were probably just excited to get the rights to the name "S.P.E.C.T.R.E" back, and wanted to celebrate.' I mean, who among us could be coldhearted enough to stand in the way of a huge corporation's overwhelming expression of joy at re-acquiring a trademarked brand name? It was around this point that I began to wonder if I was an amnesic alien abandoned on Earth as a social experiment. 

*** Hey, I guess he probably wouldn't do it, but how great would Viggo be as a Bond villain? Oh man. 

**** With its serene palette of moody pastels and curiously propensity for unusually wide shots that feel wistful and beautiful but also make Bond himself a curiously small figure in the frame, this is almost without any doubt the most visually lovely Bond movie, and the first to feel like it has a genuinely distinct visual style, give or take the hideous digital BOURNE-chasing of QUANTUM OF SOLACE or the luxurious Roger Deakins work in SKYFALL.

***** Also, --SPOILERS-- I can't even begin to describe how asinine it is that "Safin" is running the third multinational super-secret criminal syndicate to be grandiosely introduced and then unceremoniously disposed of in this five-movie cycle, each one lavished with oceans of tedious exposition despite being functionally identical. This is the curse of continuity; if you haven't planned ahead, you just leave the next guy the task of laboriously sweeping aside all the previous clutter in order to do their own thing, and it's powerfully tedious stuff by this point.