Heavy Bondage: Casino Royale

The killing is grimly realistic, as if to suggest that this Bond operates in the real world of real pain and has wounds that may never heal.
- Richard Corliss in Time (November 2006)

Casino Royale
Film: 2006
Book: 1953 (1st in chronology)

Irreverent Synopsis: Bond follows a trail of terrorist money in a particularly impetuous fashion, leaving a trail of destruction and death that does not impress M, especially when he shoots his way through an embassy. However, Bond does eventually close in on Le Chiffre, who acts as banker and money-launderer to all sorts of suspicious characters. Le Chiffre has been making investments and betting with his clients' cash without their knowledge or consent, and he's lost a fair bit of it (Bond implicit in one of those losses, ruining one of his schemes). He plans to get it back in a very high-stakes poker game. After cautioning him to put his ego in check, M tells Bond she wants him to play in that game and bankrupt Le Chiffre, but not kill him. Once Le Chiffre has angry clients after him, she believes they can offer him sanctuary in exchange for information.

Bond is assisted by Vesper Lynd, who is there to oversee the cash investment provided by Her Majesty's govt, and by Rene Mathis, an old hand from French intelligence. Vesper, initially prickly to Bond and shocked by the violence of his lifestyle, warms to him slowly and eventually helps save his life. Nonetheless, Bond loses very badly (partly because he misreads Le Chiffre's 'tells') and is at one point completely cleaned out. Vesper is annoyed at his reckless bets and refuses to give him the reserve money. However, American CIA agent Felix Leiter, who unknown to us has also been playing in the game and is about to lose, offers Bond a fresh stake, feeling Bond's odds are better than his.

Bond succeeds in cleaning out Le Chiffre. Later that night, Vesper is kidnapped. Bond chases her and is himself caught. Le Chiffre tortures Bond to try to get the account codes so that he can take back his money. Bond refuses to talk, and Le Chiffre is apparently about to kill Bond out of frustration when he is shot - one assumes by a disgruntled client. Bond is in the hospital recovering when he is visited by Mathis. Bond confronts Mathis, saying that he knows Mathis was feeding Le Chiffre information, and Mathis is taken away. Bond and Vesper strike up a romance, and eventually decide to just get away from the world on an extended boat trip. However, Vesper sees a one-eyed man in a marketplace and her behavior changes. The next day, Bond finds out simultaneously that the poker money was never given back to the government and that Vesper has just cleaned out the account. Bond chases Vesper, confronting the men she has contacted and fighting them in a house as it slowly collapses. Vesper is hiding in an elevator during this fight and it gradually submerges. Bond tries to rescue her, but she deliberately locks the elevator door and drowns.

It develops that Vesper was being blackmailed. She has left clues for Bond, which lead to the mysterious Mr. White, who also shot Le Chiffre. Bond finds Mr. White, and is seen confronting him as the film ends.

Major Observations: The emphasis of the Shrunken Cinema is, as the name suggests, watching movies on the small screen, on your sofa, after the fact, possibly many times. It is about the insights that come from repeat viewings.

On the other hand, there are a number of people who want to know, "So, have you seen this new Bond yet? What do you think?"

So here's the new Bond. Which I've seen once so far. But this page will change one day. Sooner or later, I'll have a DVD and I will have watched this a few more times, and I'll revise the initial impressions found here. Consider yourself warned.

The main reason the synopsis above is so long is that Casino Royale is a difficult book to summarize, and the film more so. The prior page on Casino Royale didn't bother to talk about the plot of the book, since the Feldman film bears little or no resemblance to it. This film, on the other hand, bears a great resemblance to its source material ... in fact, it goes beyond that; it is the source material and then some.

The book begins, in essence, with M deciding to send Bond to the poker game (and there it's a baccarat game, but never mind that; I think the decision to change games was actually a good one, since the importance of bluffing and facial reads in poker is far more obvious to a modern audience). There is no prior story in the book. "Here is Le Chiffre, go bankrupt him." All material which takes place before that in the film is new. However, the entire action of the book is reproduced here, nothing is cut - which may be why this film is, assuming I have calculated properly, the longest Bond film to date at 144 minutes.

Other changes from the book are minor. In the book Mathis is not the one feeding information to the bad guys; Vesper is. Clearly this change is meant to make Vesper's character a little more sympathetic. In the book she commits suicide, plain and simple, taking an overdose of sleeping pills; the blackmail information is a bit different, and there is no Mr. White. Le Chiffre is the banker for SMERSH, not a loose assortment of terrorists, and it is SMERSH who shoot him. (They also carve an M in the back of Bond's hand to mark him as a spy.) And Le Chiffre, infamously, beats Bond in a delicate place with a carpet beater, not a rope end - but otherwise that scene is preserved completely intact in its nastiness.

I was a little astonished that the producers had the guts to keep that scene, and to kill Vesper. In fact the one thing that was making me reluctant to see the film is that I knew they were going to chicken out and change the ending. When a review tipped me off, obliquely, that they hadn't, it made my day.

Seeing this film - with minimal gadgets, no Quartermaster or Moneypenny, no bad jokes, believable and, yes, even sexy romantic scenes, grit, and willingness to take chances - leads one to ask an obvious and shocked question: "Who are you and what have you done with Michael G. Wilson?"

Really, if I had not seen the Wilson and Barbara Broccoli producer credits quite clearly at the beginning of the film, I would not believe it. What got into these people, that they were willing to actually step back from their established claptrap and let this film happen, gloriously? Did MGM/Sony put the fear of god into them? Was there some writing on the wall?

It couldn't have been money - the Brosnan Bonds did quite well. Fears of continuing relevance? Well, I buy that, but I didn't expect them to.

I have praised Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, the writing team who came in at the time of The World Is Not Enough, for their understanding of Bond's character. Unfortunately it was also clear that while they knew how to write Bond, they were not so good at romance or dialogue or any bits of the film that weren't tense and gritty. This film has a lot of tense and gritty, but it also has a hell of a lot better work in the downtimes, when the film stops to breathe. One wonders whether third credited writer Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), the extent of whose cleanup work is a mystery, might have had something to do with the difference here. (Purvis and Wade have reportedly already been retained to work on Bond #22.)

This is a very good reboot of Bond, with Judi Dench on hand to provide the one strand of continuity needed. It's a film which is probably more closely grounded in the real world than any other Bonds, putting it in the company of the quiet, realistic Bonds such as For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights. (It is a better film than either of those.) The return to the real world was overdue. The fact that we could quibble, after the film, over the plausibility of some of the mapping tools Bond uses or the ability of MI6 to analyze his blood sample remotely with that sort of speed only underscores that fact that, last time out, the man had a damned invisible car.

And now you want to hear about Daniel Craig, I suppose.

If you're coming to this page out of context, you might want to go have a look at the Thug vs Thief page, but to recap: Bonds are assessed on a number line with remorseless, near-sociopathic killer at one extreme and suave, dandified, but not especially fearsome gentleman thief at the other. The best Bonds - that would be Connery and Brosnan - have a certain amount of balance. The Bond who, to date, has been most faithful to Fleming's rendition of him in that particular novel has been Lazenby. Love him or hate him, that's the way he is written in OHMSS.

Craig, so far, shows signs of being one of the good Bonds.

This despite the fact that he's the most physically unattractive man to play Bond yet, at least from the neck up. He has little rat eyes, too small and too close together, and the fact that they are an ungodly blue does not save them. He has Alfred E. Neuman ears tacked onto a spitball-shaped head. He has horrible hair. The people who are in the Brosnan school, like me, will find this a step down.

On the other hand, the people in the Connery school may find reason here to go back to Bond films again, and that's the real reason so many critics are applauding so loudly. If you have been waiting for the Connery heir, you have just found it. (Including the attractiveness, or lack thereof. But Craig is less handsome even than Connery, who got a certain rugged charm as he aged, but looked like nothing more than a weasel in 1961.)

Like Connery, Craig is mostly a brute - the kind of person whom you really wouldn't want to be friends with because, while he does his job well, he is basically an asshole. But, also like Connery, Craig has saving graces - the saving graces that Dalton (still the Ultimate Thug Bond, and that's not a good thing) lacked.

Neither Connery nor Craig is capable of being actually suave. They lack the finesse for it. But they can play suave when they need to, and the fact that you know and they know that it is an act, a cover story, is not fatal. Dalton, by contrast, was completely incapable of even pretending to be suave. The most uncomfortable moments in his films are the ones where he is called upon to wear a tuxedo and drink a martini.

Where Craig actually improves upon Connery, for me, is that it is believable to me that women might actually see something compelling in this ugly brute. That is, he has sexuality by force, if not by charm. I never got that about Connery, who always just looked like a wife-beater to me. I never understood why any woman would bother to withstand Connery's casual misogyny long enough to actually sleep with him. With Craig, I can get a glimmer of why.

So, yes, I like this Bond. I'm sorry he's not a gentleman, and I'll want to see a few more movies before I firm my conclusions, but on the whole, well played.

Minor Observations: The business about needing two kills in the line of duty to achieve 00 status is not an invention of the film. It is alluded to twice in the books, once in a Bond aside about the 00 being a fairly meaningless distinction, and once at some length in Casino Royale itself, where Bond describes the two kills he had to make and why.

Once again M shows that she will tolerate nearly anything from Bond, including his unauthorized use of her own secure computer and breaking into her apartment! But she will not tolerate his revealing what the M stands for - possibly because it doesn't stand for anything.

("M," in case you did not know, is Fleming's take on "C." The first head of MI6 in the real world, George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, tended to drop the "Smith" and signed his memos "C." Later this became a code name and future heads of MI6 were referred to as "C" regardless of their right names. Fleming did the same with his fictitious Miles Messervy - yes, his name is revealed in one of the books - and therefore it stands to reason that future heads in the Bond universe would continue to use the "M" initial the same way, as a title.)

Fleming was not noted for vivid physical descriptions of his characters, but at the beginning of the book we are treated to Le Chiffre's MI6 dossier, so his appearance is pretty well spelled out. Le Chiffre weighs 18 stone (about 250 pounds) so I have always expected him to be a fairly bulky man, but I don't have a problem with Mads Mikkelsen's portrayal. By the by, the asthma inhaler is in the book as well. (Putting a tracer in it is an invention of the film.)

The bombmaker who performs the incredible parkour style leaps and movements in the chase sequence early in the film is, in fact, one of the originators of parkour, Sebastien Foucan.

The really horrifying car freeroll stunt, which had a special team and trashed three very expensive Aston Martins in the course of filming it, apparently set a new record for most car rolls (assisted by a cannon).

Michael G. Wilson makes his usual cameo. He is listed as "Montenegrin Police Chief." The one that Mathis has arrested? I'll need another look.

Speaking of cameos, did you see Richard Branson in the airport, going through a metal detector?

Tsai Chin, who plays Madame Wu (in the private gambling sequence aboard Le Chiffre's yacht), also played Ling ("Why do Chinese girls taste different from all other girls?") in You Only Live Twice. Long time between Bond films, but apparently not the longest: Says here that Diane Hartford, who has a bit part as a card player here, also had a bit part as a dancer at the Kiss Kiss Club in Thunderball - forty-one years between Bonds. I mention this to prove that there are people even more compulsive about these factoids than I am.

The "007 stage" at Pinewood Studios burned down just after principal photography on the film had finished. The 007 stage had been so named, in Albert Broccoli's honor, when it was rebuilt following another fire - the one that delayed the start of photography for A View to a Kill.

James Bond Will Return