Odds & Ends
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Whose Casino Royale is it though?
It's official - Martin Campbell is to direct the next Bond film. It is to be Casino Royale. Brosnan is almost certainly out as Bond. While the Bond fans are predictably ecstatic that Fleming's first Bond novel is to get an adaptation, I feel this news raises more questions than it answers. For months now the rumours have been that Eon and the studio were at loggerheads over the direction of Bond: Eon wanted to get back to basics after the Diamonds Are Forever-like Die Another Day, while the studio was pushing for ever bigger action extravaganzas. Many fans are taking the return to Fleming source material as an affirmation that Eon are getting their way. What makes me suspicious of this interpretation is that if the book is filmed anything like a straight adaptation, then it would represent a complete capitulation by the studio. This would need to be a harder-edged, more purist Bond than we saw even in 1962 with Terence Young's superb Dr No. Casino Royale was Fleming's first Bond novel, and it is probably his best. It is built around a setpiece high stakes gambling sequence, where Bond tries to bankrupt the villainous Le Chiffre. When the mission goes wrong, Bond is viciously tortured, and escapes only to find himself questioning his willingness to go on with the job. The concluding sections focus on his relationship with Vesper Lynd, the female agent who had assisted in his mission, and builds to a really effective and shocking conclusion. It's what all the Bond books should be: a really solid thriller, pulp done exceptionally well. The problem is, it is also resolutely small and serious-minded. There is a car chase, and this could be expanded upon, but the first sections centre on a brilliantly written casino sequence, and the latter portion of the book is basically about a relationship going sour. I don't have a problem with Martin Campbell as director - my issues with his Goldeneye are mostly script-related - but his selection suggests an intention to go for a typically big action movie. If they wanted to do Casino Royale straight, they would have been better to take Quentin Tarantino up on his offer of a year or so back. He would have had the critical cachet to get away with a smaller treatment, and his suggestion to set the film after the events of On Her Majesties Secret Service showed a real instinct for the overtone of despair needed. (Peter Hunt's 1969 adaptation of OHMSS was the last attempt to do a really serious Bond film, and it remains the highpoint of the series). If they think they can just adapt the book and add some action, they are doomed to fail. That has worked before, and indeed the best sixties Bond films (Dr No, From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, and On Her Majesties Secret Service) got by by being faithful to Fleming but strengthening action sequences in the book, or adding them skillfully where they didn't exist before. But the nature of Casino Royale, the novel, is such that this approach wouldn't work. I fear that the best we will get is the approach taking by most of the 70s and 80s Bond films: cherry-pick a few elements, names and settings (just enough to thwart anyone ever trying to do a proper adaptation later), and then junk the rest. The Bond films long ago lost the knack of being great films (and the four sixties films I name above are truly that - great films, amongst the best action-adventure films ever made) while remaining true to the books. At the end of the day, the same old tension - between fidelity to the Fleming character, and the expectations of movie audiences - will still exist. The fact that this announcement has a bit each way doesn't do anything to resolve that underlying tension, and without a figure like Tarantino to act as circuit breaker, I'm not sure it can be done. Labels: bond Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 5.2.05  
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