Allow me to briefly recommend the wonderful indie music-infused romance Once. Starring Glen Hansard, now of Irish band The Frames and previously the ginger-haired guitarist in Alan Parker's great The Commitments, and real-life musical collaborator Marketa Irglova, it's a simple film about a hoover repairman and part-time musician who meets a pretty Czech immigrant on the streets of an Irish city.
What happens next I won't spoil, but it's far better done than most of its genre, and while not a musical, key scenes and emotions are conveyed through song. The soundtrack is outstanding, and one of the tunes, Falling Slowly, amazingly won an Academy Award for Best Song. I say amazingly not because it doesn't deserve it (it does), but because it was astounding that anyone who voted in the Academy had even heard of this great little film. Once is an inspiring, feel-good film without an ounce of forced emotion or overwrought Hollywood-sized sentimentality, and is utterly convincing in the emotional detailing of its characters. It's available on DVD and I strongly suggest you seek it out and buy the soundtrack.
“You’re not married, but I think it’s the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people…Incurable disease, blindness, disaster—all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I’ve thought about this and I’ve invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace.”
--Ian Fleming, “Quantum of Solace” (in “For Your Eyes Only”)
The closing scenes of Quantum of Solace spell out the mission of the film – a complement to Casino Royale and the conclusion of the trial-by-fire origin of James Bond, agent 007 of MI6. The penultimate scene shows Bond sitting in a chair, dressed in a black coat, awaiting the arrival of his target, in a striking visual reference to the very beginning of Casino Royale where the agent earned his ‘00’ status with his second kill. The parallel is no accident; the epilogue of Quantum of Solace closes a two-film narrative of the forging of James Bond’s character through emotional disconnection, the salvaging of a soul, love, betrayal, and cathartic affirmation.
Through the chaos of action and fury, Bond’s true mission in this film is to find his ‘measure of comfort’, to confirm if what Vesper, who apparently betrayed Bond and committed suicide in the previous film, and Bond felt for each other was real. As in the books, if it is real, then Bond will truly understand the normal life that is cruelly denied him and will be fully equipped to protect it against the forces that conspire to destroy it.
At the start of Quantum of Solace Bond is filled with rage and pain as he coldly, methodically tracks down the organization represented by Mr. White (Jesper Christensen, also from Casino Royale), to find the answers behind the double cross of Vesper, the woman he loved. As the trail leads to Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), and the tenticular tips of a mysterious international criminal organization are revealed, Bond gradually begins to fight for something beyond the personal, while still on the track of his ‘measure of comfort’ and helping another damaged soul, Camille (Olga Kurylenko) find her own. By the end of the film, the personal mission is accomplished, but the bigger one of rooting out the Quantum organization has just begun.
This subtextual emotional throughline and how it deftly combines with a Bondian mission is by far the most intriguing and successful part of Quantum of Sloace, especially in how it dovetails with Casino Royale. A Bond film that could not exist without its predecessor is a first in the 007 series, and the iconoclasm is welcome, accompanied as it is by a comfortingly retro feel to the set decoration and photography.
Unfortunately the producers hired second unit director Dan Bradley to film most of the action sequences. Bradley is one of the foremost practitioners of the shaky cam/quick cut school of action, where disorienting chaotic dissonance substitutes for the geographical clarity and elegance of classic, old school action filmmaking. This technique has its place, I suppose, but its dominance in modern action films is disconcerting and its placement in a Bond film is decidedly unwelcome. The opening car chase, for instance, has a certain adrenaline kick, but it’s almost impossible to tell what vehicle is doing what to whom, which is exactly the point according to Bradley, whose philosophy is that the viewer should not get more than fast, fragmented views of the chaos onscreen. Bradley is welcome to his philosophy, but as far as I’m concerned the practitioners of the shaky cam/quick cut school can shove it. Bring back clarity to action cinema, I say.
That quibble aside (plus a minor plea to bring back title designer Daniel Kleinman for the next one), Quantum of Solace is a fast, stylish, engrossing, superbly-acted bookend to Casino Royale and a tantalizing look forward to the future of the Bond series. Daniel Craig once again owns this role, and he’s matched by the brilliant Judi Dench as M, and a strong ensemble supporting cast.
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“…I should say you’re absolutely right. Quantum of Solace—the amount of comfort. Yes, I suppose you could say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that. Human beings are very insecure. When the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you, it’s obviously the end. The Quantum of Solace stands at zero.”
--Ian Fleming, “Quantum of Solace” (in “For Your Eyes Only”)
Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy Starring: Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Woody Harrelson, Kelly Macdonald, Tess Harper Even the low-key opening shots of a desolate Texas landscape, shot with cinematographer Roger Deakins' pellucid camera, announce that No Country for Old Men is a startling return to form for the brothers Coen. Working this time from the stark, weary poetry of the Cormac McCarthy novel, the Coens have constructed a near-perfect meditation on the violence of our times and the inability of 'good' people to ride out to meet it.
The core narrative tells the story of Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin, in his second great performance from 2007 after his supporting role in American Gangster), who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad, the only thing remaining being corpses, one lone survivor barely alive, enough shell casings to be melted down into a stealth bomber, a shitload of drugs, and a breathtaking wad of cash. Moss, of course, takes the dough, which unleashes a fan-hitting storm of Babylonian proportions and triggers a relentless pursuit of Moss by humanoid psycho-killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Meanwhile, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) follows the trail of clues and corpses to try and find Moss before Chigurh gets a chance to do what he does best.
Though the film would appear to be about Moss, the twin poles of this story are Bell and Chigurh. In an Oscar-winning performance, Javier Bardem portrays Chigurh as an almost extraterrestrial, uncontrollable, incomprehensible and unstoppable force of bloodshed and evil. The character's odd hairstyle, unplaceable accent, unfamiliar destructive weapons (a cattle killing device powered by compressed air and a shotgun outfitted with a cylindrical metal silencer), and automaton-like persistence build a presence that is like an alien inhabiting human skin. Chigurh is almost reminiscent of Jeff Bridges alien-in-a-cloned-body in John Carpenter's Starman, not quite at home in his bones, unfamiliar with social rituals, and uncomfortable with the phraseology of language ("Call it, friend-o."). He is a chilling representation of mindless, omnipresent, relentless evil.
In opposition is Sheriff Bell, played with weather-rasped aplomb by Tommy Lee Jones. Bell is an honest lawman, eroded by years of confronting the worst in human nature, who now ponders the fruitlessness of thinking we can ever defeat it. His reflections on the rising incidence of extreme, senseless violence and the efforts to combat it like trying to shout back the coming tide, form the reflective core of the film: “…I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. You can say it's my job to fight it, but I don't know what it is anymore. More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, ‘O.K., I'll be part of this world.’”
While the film is contemplative, the Coens deliver several astonishingly constructed set pieces. One sequence, involving Moss and Chigurh at a motel, waiting patiently for each to make his move, trying to outwit the other, is so brilliant in its clear construction and ability to wring gut-punching suspense out of simple image, editing, and sound, that it makes me weep for all the over-edited mash-ups of pixels and noise that I've had to endure at the cinema in the past few years. Another similarly impressive confrontation at a hotel that ends in a street chase and shoot-out is one of the most bravura slices of pure cinematic genius of any film in the past several years. The Coens take Hitchcock's ability to build unbearable suspense with rudimentary tools and apply their own darkly comic spin to amazing effect.
No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for the Best Picture of 2007 and, amazingly enough, could actually be plausibly called the best film of 2007. It's a timeless film and a must-see.
I'm a film fanatic who professes absurd love for movies of all kinds. Also an avid devourer of music and books, and a lover of history, travel, and discovery.
