Skyfall, a photographer's Bond, and the theme of obsolescence

There are times during Skyfall when I felt like Sam Mendes was scoffing at Marc Forster, his predecessor in the lineage of James Bond directors. By my reading, the film was thoroughly aware of the recent history of the franchise, not least because it linked the new Bonds to the very old ones in some trivial homages. But also, the film's didactic content -- its message of old and reliable methodology versus whiz-bang novelty and gimmicks -- is also a comment on the way the series has been going so far. Lucky for us, part of Sam Mendes's message required him to prove himself, and he did that by making a damn fine Bond film, on par with the excellent Casino Royale... kind of a rebuke to Quantum of Solace, which is fine by me.

An argument in the background of the film, the ground to the figure of chase scenes and assassinations, was the confrontation between M (Judy Densch) and the Board of Inquiry that was investigating her conduct in running MI6. Given that espionage and terrorism is largely conducted online in our modern age, the board asks M a practical question: does MI6 even need human agents at this point? In response, M argues for the continued human engagement and expertise that her agents (like Bond) can provide. This explicit argument is just a few token lines of dialogue in the film, but its implications resonate through the whole narrative, affecting its characters, its themes, and its progression and resolution.

This whole debate is, of course, underwritten by the strong presence of Q and Silva in the film. Q is Bond's new Quartermaster, is a young, precocious computer hacker who seems to feel that he can solve most problems from his control room. He regards agents as clumsy but necessary appendages: "Occasionally, a trigger must be pulled." Silva, the arch-villain of the film, is a vengeful ex-agent who turns out to rival Q in the realm of digital espionage. He uses YouTube as a medium to broadcast the identities of the MI6 agents around the world; he masks his own digital signature by hopping around remote servers; and he transforms his laptop into a sort of reconnaissance bomb that, upon being connected to the MI6 computers, takes them over and breaks open the compound's security systems.

Bond villains always have to seem superhuman; in this case, Silva is a dangerous combination of Q's high-level computer skills and Bond's unbelievable physical and social prowess. He is a strong parallel to Q, in that both of them seem to think they can rule the world by dominating it through their computer terminals. Q is fortunate in that for him, as opposed to Silva, being proven wrong by Bond doesn't mean getting killed.

These themes of Old-Busted-versus-New-Hotness are infused into a categorically excellent action movie, which is what a James Bond film really needs to be. What made Casino Royale so brilliant was its ferocious attitude and its groundbreaking action sequences; for Skyfall, the action is smart and serviceable, but not necessarily brilliant. We've all seen fights on top of trains; we've all seen arenas with unlikely creatures in them. We've all seen the Home Alone sequence where a house is rigged with traps. What's fucking fantastic about Skyfall is its visionary cinematography, its insistence that every scene look like a painting, with mesmerizing relationships between light and color and shadow, ballets of figures and silhouettes and backgrounds playing off one another. It's a photographer's Bond film. Were any of the old ones like that? I don't remember them well enough to say.

But how gorgeous was the empty office in Shanghai, surrounded by glass, with the pulsating monitor visible across the gulf outside?

And how perfectly composed was Silva, staggering over layered crests of pasture, barely illuminated by the flames of a burning mansion off in the distance?

How chilling were those shots of Bond suspended in a frozen lake, fighting to get to the surface as a henchman sank into the abyss below him?

Mendes brought his stylistic strengths fully to bear in this Bond film, and that turned out to interface neatly with the film's larger thematic issues. Quantum of Solace, the previous Bond film, was embodied in Skyfall by Silva and Q, who thought that high-tech, high-fidelity solutions were the way of the future. In case you don't remember (or didn't see it), Quantum of Solace was fatally sabotaged by its action sequences, which were totally incoherent, shot in a queasy shaky-cam style, with debris and flames flying by the camera and no respect for space or continuity. This is what you get when you invest a lot of your resources in equipment and post-production... quick effects, crane shots, tons of coverage, but no economy, continuity, or coherence. Marc Forster must have seen the Borne films and thought that style was a great fit for Bond. It turned out to make the film intolerable.

Bond represents Skyfall, the film itself, as a refutation of the Quantum aesthetic. Bond is a human element, running on cunning and judgment and loyalty, whose skill as an agent allows him to defeat Silva's vast resources and technical capabilities. Skyfall is the low-fi rejoinder to Quantum of Solace, showing fans that the way to make an excellent Bond film is through the traditional techniques of writing, pacing, and cinematography. Both Bond and Skyfall go back to fundamentals, and in being so goddamn good, they prove that the new Hotness can't replace the old standard... at best, it can build on top of it.

Road to Perdition (2007): Machinist Gothic

Sam Mendes' Road to Perdition has a lot on the surface -- well-trodden themes of father/son loyalty, that slick neo-noir cinematography, some clever camera work, a host of oily, volatile secondary characters -- maybe too much, according to some.  For a director who got famous making morally ambiguous, thematically twisted films like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Road to Perdition seems almost too straightforward, too direct about its hero's journey.  Michael Sullivan is indeed a comic book character, and you could be forgiven for mistaking Road to Perdition for a boringly typical comic book movie.

But this figure has a ground -- there is a thematic inner world to the film, expressed in both a literal and a metaphorical layer, that brings a formal unity to the whole thing.  You won't appreciate everything this deceptively well-constructed film has to offer until you recognize its inner life, the way all the parts interlock seamlessly.

Of course, we shouldn't pass by without mentioning the beautiful, polished images created by Conrad C. Hall, who won the Oscar that year.  This world is dusty and exposed by day, inert in its overcast grays, but at night, it's all angles and shadows... more than shadows, it's a funhouse of black surfaces and bottomless abysses.  It's an indifferent world, freezing cold or stuffy and still, with the blessing of a cool breeze only at the end, on the beach, as the plot folds back upon itself.

That polished cinematography is the first clue to how the film functions on a symbolic level.  Each scene is meticulous, the camera work is orderly and slow-moving, and every element is isolated in the frame, so that all the spatial relationships can be clearly identified.  These people are parts of a well-oiled apparatus, oriented to one another by their loyalty, their malice, their dependence, their pivotal, inescapable utility.

That's the subtext to the whole film: we are inside the machine. Here, before the camera, Mendes and Hall and Hanks lay bare the internals of a great mechanism, and Michael Sullivan Sr. is the rogue component, the cog that's slipping its axle and forcing everything to grind to a halt.

When Harlen Macguire asks Michael what he does, he tells him he's "a salesman. Machine parts." This is the first time he gives a cover story, but it doesn't seem to come out of nowhere... he's spent the whole film assembling various firearms, hiding them away, and explaining their use. In fact, in practically every sequence, the camera fetishizes machines -- we start with a shot of Michael Junior riding his bicycle, and eventually, he graduates to a full motor-car, becoming his father's getaway driver. Harlen the hitman is not simply a murderous reporter -- he's a mechanical eye, a walking camera that captures the souls of the people he murders. It's a world of telephones and combination safes and locks and keys.  Everything in the film seems to jingle and click together and "turn over," the totems of a clockwork world that seems to run more smoothly than our own messy digital universe.

That's the literalization of the film's unifying principle. In reality, the whole Irish underworld of the early 30's is a machine, and all the characters are locked into functional relationships with one another. Michael Sullivan, Sr. is the most reliable part in the whole apparatus at the film's beginning, a trusted enforcer for the local boss. Connor Rooney is the companion piece to his father, and John Rooney is the transmission for the whole local system, functioning on its own terms to serve the larger Chicago machine.

Both Michael Sr. and John Rooney carry fatherhood as an inescapable constraint while they fulfill their functions -- murder, profiteering, regulation, organization.  John, like a well-designed automaton, remains constrained by this obligation even when it turns out his son is betraying him. Knowing he's being undermined by his own kin, he just keeps idling along, acting as the responsible patriarch, keeping the rest of the community in line, making money for his family and his bosses.  He never stops working right, even up to his final stand in the rain, surrounded by his orderly but ineffectual circle of bodyguards

As it turns out, it's Michael Sullivan Sr. who catastrophically malfunctions, provoked as he is by Connor Rooney's subterfuge. Once Sullivan's button is pressed, he switches into revenge mode. He can't be dissuaded by bribery, coercion, or even his desire to protect his son. He will destroy this machine from the inside, even after it's taken care of him since he was young. Michael Sullivan knows that there are some sins that are unforgivable -- there are some breakdowns that can't be prevented.

And maybe that sheds some light on the film's moralistic father-son relationship, too. Michael Sullivan Sr. doesn't seem to be able to extract himself from this system of reflexive violence... being a loyal enforcer, he's totally defined by it.  But he struggles profoundly with his attitude toward his son, who he gradually initiates into the criminal lifestyle, while paradoxically trying to protect him from it.  He gives his son a pistol to defend himself, he teaches him to drive a getaway car, he tells him to keep a lookout.  At the same time, his misgivings are palpable... he distrusts his own father-figure (John Rooney) with the boys, he tries to deliver his son to his wife's sister, and he distances his son from the violence he carries out, albiet erratically.  This is the behavior of a firmly entrenched part of a machine, trying to ensure that his son doesn't find a place in that same machine.

And unto the end, in Michael Sullivan Jr's vulnerability -- in his inability to master the stick shift, his intense love for reading and religion, his dislike for math -- he's the most organic element in this plot, the bit of soft tissue that needs to be protected from the grinding gears of the criminal underground, lest he be torn apart.  This comes across as clear as day when he sits with his father inside an old farmhouse, providing compassion and patience and sips of water.  The boy is not a machine... he's the one real boy in this world of pinnochios, the sole human touch.

The father-son relationships, the intrigue and depravity of the crime world, the Midwestern road trip through heartland prohibition... these are just the flesh of the story.  Dig deeper, and you find its iron-clad, mechanical heart, all angles and edges and parts that lock into place... and then, even deeper inside the film, there's Michael Sullivan Jr., the soft soul peeking out from inside the great machine.