The last time James Bond dusted off his license to kill, I lamented the franchise’s reluctance to simply go out and make a good spy movie. Skyfall had a glum Bond, too much psychology, and a tired revival of 007’s signature traits. Then it went and raked in a billion dollars, so it comes as no surprise that the long-running series brought back the Skyfall creative team for the new outing. But Spectre is, at least, a little more of a Bond picture — there’s less fretting about the hero’s state of mind, for starters.
Bond (Daniel Craig, returning for his fourth go at the role) has bounced back from his Skyfall adventure, but has one bit of business left to settle. It leads to the unlikely revelation that a mysterious super-villain (Christoph Waltz) might somehow be connected to all the nefarious action of the three previous 007 films.
That’s a reach, but it provides the excuse for the usual hair-raising stunts and globe-trotting espionage.
Tis the season. Oscar bait season, that is, when the studios line up the major releases jockeying for spots on Top Ten lists and critics groups awards on the way to the Oscar nominations in January. Unlike the superhero movies and fantasy blockbusters and comedy vehicles that are crammed into thousands of theaters in a blanket release covering the entire country, these are often launched in a couple of theaters in New York and Los Angeles and slowly expanded into more theaters and more cities over the next couple of months (the way most movies were released, back before the era of the blockbuster changed releasing patterns forever). But to get on those lists, they are press screened to critics in major cities. Two of those films, Revolutionary Road and The Reader, have just gotten their Oscar-consideration releases (to the best of my understanding, they need to have at least a week-long theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles in the 2008 calendar to qualify for an Academy Award). These films have all the hallmarks for Oscar-bait: literary sources, “serious” themes, credentialed casts and the kinds of directors that value words over cinematic expression. While they have been racked up Golden Globe nominations, they have been conspicuously absent from major critics lists and critics groups’ awards. At their best, they are thoughtful and engaging. At their worst, they are self-important, self-conscious and stupefying.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in "Revolutionary Road"
Revolutionary Road is at the top (or, more accurately, the bottom) of the list of offenders. Sam Mendes (American Beauty) directs the adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel with such exacting (and unimaginative) control that he sucks the air from the world, like vacuum sealing it in plastic and putting it on display. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet play Frank and April Wheeler, a middle class couple in the late fifties, with a carefulness that nudges out all possibility of the unexpected. These are performances – and lives – lived in quotation marks. Roger Deakins (arguably the most talented cinematographer working in American cinema today) shoots the film with a perfection that is, like the performances, too well groomed. And that I lay at the feet of Mendes, whose control smothers the film in weighty importance and foreshadows every narrative development with the cinematic equivalent of a brick through a window.
