Shaken and Stirred: NO TIME TO DIE

With No Time to Die, his fifth and reportedly final turn as 007, Daniel Craig gets something no James Bond ever has before: a satisfying finale. His Bond has worn his emotions closer to the surface, albeit just behind a steely exterior. Craig brings wounded eyes and tactical ease, springing into determined action with his blunt force instrument of a body—all blocky and taut and primed like an English foxhound to hunt and sniff. And there’s a soul there enlivening a character who could’ve, and sometimes has in previous versions, passed into a collection of cliches and traditions. In comparison to other actors’ runs as Ian Fleming’s British super-spy, Craig’s films, from the sturdy fuel-injection traditionalism of Casino Royale and scattered momentum of Quantum of Solace to the more stately glossiness of Skyfall and Spectre, have violence a little more real, and a tone that’s a balance between grandeur and grit, fan service and surprise. They share with their inspirations a willingness to let plot steep in the hot water of the usual movements, chases, snooping, and peril. What’s new has been a more serialized and serious Bond shorn of overt camp. Allowing the adventures, the danger, the deaths, and the loved ones lost along the way to accumulate from one entry to the next allows Craig to play emotional notes no other could, and this film leans into it with a weary professionalism and earnest appeal between the massive explosions and topsy-turvy supervillain nonsense plotting. As Bond sizes up the odds and realizes he’s yet again the only thing standing between a mad man and a mass casualty event, he knows what he has to do, and we’re glad to see him do it all again.

The experience is a real Movie movie with a capital M, and so much of one, stretching across the big screen and a runtime nearing three hours, every sequence luxuriating in its outsized images and spectacle. No weightless gloop and flimsy trickery here, no autopilot superheroic animatics or tossed off second unit coverage. One of the best innovations of Bond in the digital age is how the filmmakers have known there’s no better effect than picturesque filmic cinematography, stunning wardrobes, striking art direction, flirtatious sex appeal, and bone-thwacking, tire-squealing stunts. The effects of all that are expert, and there’s as much dazzle to an establishing shot sweeping over a lush forest or island or handsome European city as there is a car with machine guns in the headlights or a stealth plane with unfolding wings. Along the way, this movie confidently hits all the standard 007 tropes with the retrograde mostly bled away: a melancholy romance with a sad ending; a woman (Ana de Armas) in a deep-cut dress who can help in a fight; the tense debriefs with M (Ralph Fiennes) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris); the gadgets and tech help from Q (Ben Whishaw); the meetings with regular CIA contacts (Jeffrey Wright); the parties of villainous conspirators; the secret island base full of faceless factory workers making weapons of mass destruction. It’s pure Bond-ian pleasures done up in confidently outsized frames and well-photographed glamour. These pleasures are shot and staged by Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective) with a fine visual imagination—looking through beveled glass, sliding around corners, drawing out the spacial relationships in intricately designed sets. The appeal of each stunt and twist is given all due impact as the screenplay (credited to Fukunaga, Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and series regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade) makes sure action and pathos is delivered with clockwork precision.

The film is so very serious and elegantly muddled, with a dry crackle to the dialogue and the weight of weary finality to the suspense. Fittingly we get the iteration of this character our times deserve. His problems are adding up. He’s once again retired, his designation given to a younger recruit (Lashana Lynch) who appears to be his equal in skill, if not in baggage and bad habits. Nonetheless, he’s called into a plot that takes Bond through his usual motions in pursuit of a mysterious villain that’s all tangled up in plots of the past and ominous future danger. This foe, interestingly perpendicular to the usual Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) of it all, is a stock spooky weirdo (Rami Malek, well-cast) speaking in a strangled whisper. He’s out for the MacGuffin that’ll let him, well, who knows exactly, but it’ll kill a lot of people. (That it’s a bio-engineered virus stolen from a lab gives the story all the deadly charge it needs these days.) Meanwhile, a maybe-foreshortened love story carries over from the last one, with Léa Seydoux’s mysterious French blonde given added dimension and tragedy. And both throughlines are placed in the contemporaneous geopolitical confusion that’s replaced the Cold War for Craig’s Bond. (As a vector for British identity on the world stage, this iteration is framed by the Iraq War and Brexit, after all.) Everything’s complicated, everything’s connected, and everything’s important, but how, exactly, is a tangle. It is high-stakes Lucy-and-the-football with the same people on all sides making similar mistakes of apocalyptic contingency plans and misplaced trust, reaping unintended consequences over and over to calamitous effect.

Still, that’s just the background chatter and burbling subtext for another movie that interrogates the idea of whether or not a James Bond type of secret agent could make much progress in the world today, even in a fantasy like this. The movie’s answer is that he might as well try to make things better while he can. The result is lushly, and with even a kind of terse melodrama, presented. It’s a curtain call with real closure—studded with all of what Craig does well, and little of what Bond movies don’t. It’s large and romantic and thrilling and taking big satisfying chances. (I especially liked the ways in which it shifts the meaning of the term “Bond girl” in at least a couple ways never before tried.) Craig is allowed to play with a full range of set pieces and sentiment, showcasing his equal ease taking in sobering revelations or interpersonal humanity as he is driving a motorcycle up a large public staircase to launch himself over a wall. And in the end, the movie gives him a fine farewell, wrapping up loose ends without overworking the frayed edges, and delivering a heaping dose of stiff-upper-lip sentimentality. When so many franchises are playing safe and teasing more, how fulfilling to see an entry in a long-running series leave it all on the table. With real closure, and real poignancy, and even a gentle touch in its final scene, No Time to Die uses its time well.

Shake IT Off

Scares in It, the second screen adaptation (though the first for the big screen) of Stephen King’s clownish tome, are constructed so homogeneously that the whole two-hours-and-fifteen-minutes is ultimately an exercise in tedium. When you know it’s nothing more than regular intervals of a talented teenage cast’s cliched bantering punctuated by sudden appearances of a deadly supernatural clown-shaped evil and its attendant assorted monster manifestations (a knockoff Modigliani, a leper, a geyser of blood, and so on), you can almost set your watch by it. It drifts on cultural nostalgia for what is, in my frustrated experience, a thick, shambling novel long on iconography and short on thrill. There’s a reason why only Tim Curry’s marvelously funny/scary performance as Pennywise the Clown is the sole lingering element of the 1990 miniseries. This new adaptation – scripted by True Detective: Season 1 director Cary Fukunaga with co-writer Chase Palmer and revised by Annabelle’s Gary Dauberman – takes King’s narrative of childhood innocence fractured by fears and treats it so very seriously. Here the story of a town besieged by an evil in their sewers and the plucky young teens who are the only hope of stopping it grows ponderous and empty. We’ve been here before, and there’s nothing new to show for it, aside from yet another 80’s-set genre period piece. (Funny how a novel from the 80’s – a clear inspiration on Stranger Things – now feels like a copycat of its own copycat, completing a cultural circle of some sad note.) 

Director Andy Muschietti, whose Mama was a superior exploration of similar child-endangerment themes, makes a movie proficient and dull, whipping up reasonably good effects at maximum volume, but failing to string them along in any momentum of excitement or dread. (He also returns to the same small bag of tricks over and over – the slowly canting angle when something bad is about to happen; the long pause with negative space before a blast on the soundtrack; the creepy flat stare and otherworldly lilt of Bill Skarsgard’s clown villain.) The pulp jump scares – and that’s all that’s here, mild jolts of surprise with none of the under-the-skin stickiness one expects from quality horror – sit queasily next to flatly cartoonish manifestations of adult malfeasance towards children. Every grown-up is preposterous and monstrous – shot low and ominous, makeup forming mottled complexions, wobbling tottering mounds of wardrobe shrouding them in ill-fitting un-fashion – as uncaring at best, abusive at worst behavior leads one to think children getting dragged down drain pipes by Pennywise is hardly the town’s worst problem. The experience is a flat line, no modulation and only the slightest of nice grace notes – a shyly flirtatious glance, an authentically trying-too-hard raunchy one-liner from a nerdy kid – to bolster the bludgeoning familiarity and routine gloopy rhythms.

Casualties of War: BEASTS OF NO NATION

Beasts of No Nation is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of civil war in an unnamed African country. It takes as its inciting incident an attack that leaves a young boy orphaned, then conscripted into an army of child soldiers. It’s certainly not an uncommon trope of world cinema to put a young child in harm’s way as a pure prism through which to view the evil that men do, and to tearfully consider the resiliency of the human spirit even and especially in the face of a tragic loss of innocence. See Grave of the Fireflies, or Empire of the Sun, or Pan’s Labyrinth, or Forbidden Games, or, you get the picture. But where those films found authentic and nuanced juxtaposition of the beauty of childhood and the horror of war, Beasts of No Nation is content to be gorgeously grim and thin.

Writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga (of tense immigration thriller Sin Nombre, a functional Jane Eyre. and the overrated True Detective’s first season) certainly has a command of filmmaking craft, making a technically well-made picture. It’s attractively photographed with lush jungles and dusty villages, staged with slick competence for violence and chaos, and cut together with a languid patience that turns action eerie and stasis thickly slow. He tells a harrowing story (adapted from Uzodinma Iweala’s novel) through numbing aestheticized glossiness, wallowing in misery and violence while swooning on its own style. A pretty and forceful work, it’s nonetheless a self-satisfied approach to a real world crisis, content it’ll shock and jolt with its strong performances and confident unease without a need to dig beyond the upsetting surface details.

Early scenes show us a happy boy (Abraham Attah) with a wide smile and easy laugh. He runs through his village playing with friends, joking with family members, and having a good time. Sure, he knows there’s a war going on, but it’s far away, and the soldiers stationed at the outskirts of town are pleasantly willing to chat with a bunch of kids. But soon the conflict arrives, his family is dead or missing, and the film’s rambling charm is cut short by fear. Enter a commandant (Idris Elba) and his army of lost boys, a collection of young men from their pre-teens into their twenties who do his looting and killing in the name of freeing and protecting their country. (Here’s where the film’s lack of geopolitical specificity muddies easy comprehension of the various combatant’s objectives.) For the boy, nothing will be the same again.

Through persuasive indoctrination scenes, the boy comes to believe his only option is to fight for this army. He’s told his combat will avenge his dead father and brothers. He’s told he will one day be reunited with his mother. The cost is high. The commandant abuses his underlings in every sense of the word, physically, emotionally, and sexually. He puts his new recruits through a brutal hazing, building hardened soldiers out of innocent boys trapped under his command. They toughen, growing callous under his forceful command. When the boy is handed a machete and told to kill a prisoner with it, he hesitates, then slams the edge of the blade into the pleading man’s skull. He’s frightened, partly because of his panic, but partly because of the sense of power, agency over life and death. It’s a good, cheap metaphor for systems of abusive power and how they are passed down through generations. What follows is a procession of horrors and battles—gore, torture, psychological mind games, drugs, weapons, ambushes, and heavily implied rape.

One scene sparks to life: a freshly victimized boy limps out of the commandant’s room; another boy sees and offers silent support. They lean on each other, wordless understanding passing between them. A moment like that shows how much simple humanity is otherwise missing from the spectacle of monotonous pain. But it’s right there in the performances, strong work in a frustratingly vague movie. Attah, in a very strong acting debut, goes from adorable scamp to shell-shocked veteran in a performance of great pain and sadness. Elba, on the other hand, is an unknowable presence, a towering charismatic evil whose only characterizing comes from his greed and ferocious calm, even as he strengthens his grip out of flashes of insecurity. He’s warm and terrifying, like a demented football coach, giving pep talks before sending boys to die.

Fukunaga moves from miserable detail to miserable detail, with nothing more to say than “Isn’t this awful?” And it is, obviously and clearly in every aspect of the situations. But there comes a point where unflinching misery becomes simple gawking. The pain is undifferentiated, unmodulated. We’re to be in awe of its awfulness, but it makes for a thin experience, one simple idea expressed repeatedly with no context, no insight, no additional nuance or tenderness, and no forward momentum. It’s one brutal obvious point after the next. Fukunaga can stage a rough battle with clarity and make it hurt, but his interest in the horror of war seems perfunctory, with pretty sun-dappled images and a swooning score of distanced dazed synths. The characters remain sparsely understood, a sea of background extras behind two leads who work hard to provide additional layers behind first impressions. They’re compelling despite a film that’s more interested in showing off its pretend realism than digging into its scenario’s real moral dilemmas.

Quick Look: JANE EYRE

Cary Fukunaga’s new adaptation of Jane Eyre starts with the titular character fleeing across dark, windswept moors in a Gothic storm, signifying this version’s stylistic interests to be that of smoldering, roiling darkness. Aside from setting the striking mood of the opening scene, it’s a decision that marks the narrative disjunction of this film. This is not the opening of Charlotte Brontë’s great 1847 novel. The script by Moira Buffini starts quite a ways into the story to give us this unexpected shot of gloom before circling back to the beginning. There’s a tension between the film’s mannered choices, its dull dustiness, and its rawness, tenderness of mood. The adaptation’s time shifting is occasionally inelegant, confounding even, but what drags the production along is the emphasis on the pained emotions moldering underneath. Mia Wasikowska stars as Jane Eyre, beaten as a child, sent away by a cruel aunt, ground down as a schoolgirl by strict schoolmasters, and eventually finding employment, arriving at the imposing, dark Gothic property of Mr. Rochester. As played by Michael Fassbender, Rochester is a mysterious man, charming, clearly drawn to his young employee, but also clearly possessing some half-hidden capacity for ugly surprise. The two actors do a fine job with the material and Fukunaga surrounds them with a capable cast filled with respectable performances from the likes of Jamie Bell and Judi Dench. There’s a tense emotionality hidden down each and every dark corridor, in the dim, candle-lit nighttime rooms where cozy creepiness lurks about every conversation. A stiff, reverential take on this classic literary material may have been too predictable, but covering the approach over with rearranged chronology and atmospherics does little to hide how standard this is, a great novel turned into an adequate film.