Spectre

For all of the things that it did well, 'Skyfall' remains, for me, an awkward movie. Certainly an awkward Bond movie. On the one hand, it strives to be resolutely unBondian, documenting its protagonist's psychological depletion and building towards a low-key finale (by the standards of the franchise, anyway) in which 007's past is effectively obliterated; yet on the other, it shamelessly panders to the fan-boys (the Aston Martin with modifications; M's old office). 'Skyfall' stretches an act of transition across two plus hours, maneouvring Daniel Craig's Bond from the origin story and flawed coda of 'Casino Royale' and 'Quantum of Solace' respectively to a point of reference recognisable from the early Connery to mid-period Moore years.
 
'Spectre' was mouth-watering in its potential: a cold, ruthless Bond going head to head with a re-imagined Blofeld, the antagonist back after a decades-long rights wrangle.

Then the reviews started coming in and they were lukewarm; some outright hostile. With expectations at rock-bottom, I hauled myself off to my local multiplex and caught a screening the day before its run ended. Maybe it was the low expectations that did it, maybe it's because I never quite embraced 'Skyfall' the way everybody else seemed to, but I enjoyed 'Spectre' a lot.

There are, I should add with some degree of haste, caveats. First and foremost, 'Spectre' suffers from a two-and-a-half hour running time not remotely bolstered by anything resembling a plot. "Bond looks into some things that pissed him off from the earlier movies" is about as sophisticated as things get narratively. Basically, Bond receives a posthumously instruction from Judi Dench's M to take out an entirely disposable bad guy, after which he joins a series of heavily telegraphed dots, finally ending up at a secret base owned and operated by our old mate Ernst Stavro. Said dots serve as a tying up of loose ends from the preceding three movies (Quantum, in turns out, is little more than a sub-contractor to Spectre), but whereas those movies each have something at stake, the only thing 007 seems to be racing against the clock to prevent is the new M (Ralph Fiennes) being made redundant.

In a subplot that has more nuance and credibility than the main action, an MI5/MI6 merger is on the cards and politically-savvy hatchet man Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott) is hellbent on shutting down the Double-O programme while brokering an information-sharing agreement between security services on a global level. There was a moment in the film where I really hoped that Christoph-Waltz-as-villain was merely a feint and Scott would be revealed as Blofeld, nicely exploiting his already iconic turn as Moriarty in 'Sherlock'. But no. Waltz plays Hans Oberhauser, a figure from Bond's past who fakes his own death and re-invents himself. Blofeld's his mother's name. Yes, the revelation really is that ho-hum.

On the plus side, however, the pre-credits sequence is Craig's best yet (which is saying something after the fantastic set piece that kicked off 'Skyfall'). Even its immediate supplanting by Sam Smith's truly fucking horrible theme song and a title design that is bizarre to the point of hallucinatory can't detract from how good it is. Even if it does homage 'For Your Eyes Only' a little too slavishly. The rest of the action more or less maintains the quality: a car chase, a plane/jeep chase (one of the film's best self-contained sequences), a speedboat/helicopter chase, a shedload of explosions and an extended bout of hand-to-hand combat in the narrow confines of a train. Even if it does homage 'From Russia With Love' a little too slavishly.

In fact, let's just call it: 'Spectre' is the most self-reflexive Bond movie since 'Die Another Day' wallowed in the non-hilarity of its parade of in-jokes. Granted, director Sam Mendes and scripters John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth attempt to work them cohesively into the narrative, but it doesn't take long for deja vu to set in. In addition to the above cited examples, we have the mountaintop clinic from 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service', lifestyle porn hospitality as a prelude to torture from 'Dr No', and the collapsing building/trapped heroine finale from 'Casino Royale'.

Speaking of the heroine, let's drag this review back on course and notch up another high point for 'Spectre'. All hail Lea Seydoux, the most capable Bond girl and character-in-her-own-right since Diana Rigg provided the franchise’s apex in this regard in 'OHMSS'. And also the most unlikely. Seydoux plays Madeleine Swann (a clunky but more-or-less thematically valid nod to Proust) – Mr White (Jesper Christensen)'s daughter. Not much further down the cast list, but with criminally less screen time, Monica Bellucci provides Bond with the frisson of a dalliance with a woman who isn't young enough to be his daughter; although she's little more than a plot device to take Bond one step closer to Spectre and Blofeld, she achieves an edgy chemistry with Craig that works to the film's benefit.

There's also a nice vibe going on between M, Q (Ben Wishaw), and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). Mendes has great fun throwing them together for a little fieldwork during the extended (perhaps overly extended) finale.

And here I find myself unable to escape the defining tone of this review: everything I liked about 'Spectre', every aspect of it I thoroughly enjoyed, triggers a caveat. Believe me, I'd love to have pounded out 1,000 breathless words, adjectives cascading like spent cartridges from a semi-automatic weapon*, and sung its praises. But there's no avoiding the fact that 'Spectre' is flawed; not tonally as 'Skyfall' was, but structurally and narratively. Simply introducing Blofeld as a fully formed supervillain and giving him some kind of doomsday device would have helped matters no end. After pursuing the Bond origin story and its psychological fallout over three consecutive films, staging 'Spectre' as the Blofeld origin story seems equally transitional. Maybe next time we'll get a straight-down-the-line Bond movie.



*Yeah: I’m classy, me.

Pride (in the name of mediocrity)

During 1984 and 1985, the LGBT community – marginalised, ill-represented by the media, and denied their basic human rights by the Thatcher regime – demonstrated a remarkable socio-political stance and display of solidarity with the striking miners. They marched, they raised funds, and they battled a two-pronged assault by middle England: against homophobia, and against the anti-strike, anti-union fervour drummed up by the government and perpetuated by a media in the government’s pocket.

 Plus ça motherfucking change, huh?

Early in Matthew Warchus’s film, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) points up the parallels as he rallies a group of militant protestors who centre around a gay and lesbian bookshop in London: both groups are hated by the Tory party, the police and a brainwashed society who belief what a biased media tell them. “The only problem we’ve got that they don’t is Mary Whitehouse,” he concludes. It’s a decent line and it got a good laugh at the screening I attended this afternoon. And that’s one of the problems. Stephen Beresford’s script is full of moments like this. Yeah, he makes a point. But in a throwaway manner. Too much of ‘Pride’ is reductive: a jokey line here, a cutesy moment there, a snippet of archive footage to remind us that all of this really happened.

IMDb bills ‘Pride’ as “comedy / drama / history”. The drama takes a back seat to the fuzzy feelgood moments and the zippy lines. History doesn’t seem to feature at all. ‘Pride’ reminded me a lot of ‘Made in Dagenham’: both are based on true stories, both are set in a very specific period of the recent past, and neither convinced, aesthetically, as period pieces. Whereas, say, ‘The Damned United’ utilizes cinematography and production design that conjures a convincing and evocation recreation of the 70s, ‘Made in Dagenham’ and ‘Pride’ just look like a bunch of people wearing more or less the fashions of the day filmed in bland BBC ‘Play for Today’ style against locations that haven’t even been set-dressed.

The bits of archive material that ‘Pride’ drops in – most notably the shocking image of Lesley Boulton in the split-second before she was clubbed by a mounted police officer at Orgreave – only serve to point up what the film is missing. There is no real sense of oppression by government; or of divided communities; or of hunger, deprivation and desperation; or of police brutality; or of … well … striking. In a film that clocks in at damn near two hours, there’s but one scene of picketing and it’s over in seconds.

The importance of the story told by ‘Pride’ is impossible to overestimate. Even after the strike ended, a massive contingent of Welsh miners arrived at the 1985 gay pride event, NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) banners aloft, and led the march in a show of solidarity. Subsequently, the Labour party moved to enshrined LGBT rights in its constitution, the motion powered through by block vote from the NUM. Additionally, women who had previously experienced little outside of their traditional roles as wives and mothers suddenly found themselves organising, fundraising, protesting, forming support groups, speaking to the media, addressing rallies, finding their voices and speaking out against Thatcher’s government. It’s a tragedy that Thatcher essentially betrayed her gender politically, but the immediate and damning response by a generation of working class women spoke for itself.

The miners’ strike remains a reactionary, searing and viscerally dramatic moment in British social, economic and politic history. And yet the great British movie on the strike still hasn’t been made. American cinema has given us the hammerblow of John Sayles’s ‘Matewan’; French cinema has given us both Yves Allégret and Claude Berri’s adaptations of Zola’s ‘Germinal’. Thirty years down the line, British cinema is still treating the miners’ strike as some sort of colourful backdrop to feelgood stories of self-expression, be it a brass band contest in ‘Brassed Off’ or no-son-of-mine-sensitive-lad-who-just-wants-to-dance in ‘Billy Elliott’. It’s as if no-one has had the balls to tell the real, gritty, gruelling story.

Fuck’s sake, British cinema, grow a pair, take a side, step up. Where the biopic of Arthur Scargill (imagine Andrew Scott, wasted in a nothing role in ‘Pride’, juggling with cinematic dynamite in the lead role)? Where the conspiracy thriller movie about the government’s machinations against the NUM, drawn from Seamus Milne’s ‘The Enemy Within’ (the creative team behind ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ would ace this)? Where the underdog drama of the Nottinghamshire striking miners or the “dirty thiry” in Leicestershire holding the line against overwhelming numbers of scabs and media muck-racking (a Meadows-Consodine re-teaming waiting to happen)? Where the fearless, visceral, fuelled by white-hot righteous anger account of the events at Orgreave (Ben Wheatley: your cue, sir)?

Fuck’s sake, we have the talent, we have the passion, we have truth on our side. Please, British cinema, please: the hour is still to come.