Jimmy

(Spoilers for Quantum of Solace below.)

How do you define passion? I was thinking about this and I was thinking that maybe it’s close to being “highly energetic.” But then I realized that, despite my firm belief in the power of energy, energy is like a backyard pond to passion’s Pacific Ocean.

Wikipedia, that great giver of information that I passionately love, tells us that passion is, among other things, “an intense emotion compelling feeling, enthusiasm, or desire,” Wikipedia almost informs us that the word passion comes “from the Latin patior, meaning to suffer or to endure.”

I bring this up because the latest James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, seems to me to have the most passion of any Bond film I’ve seen, and certainly of any of the last 10-15 years. If you recall, at the end of Casino Royale Bond finds out that someone he trusts and loves is actually a double agent just before she dies to save him. It’s all very tragic and sad, but it leaves Bond with a dark passion for most of Quantum of Solace that gives the movie a feeling that no other Bond film has matched: Bond seems more human than ever before as we see him writhing in his passion (perhaps “writhing” is the wrong word as the passion is mostly crackling just below the surface and never really shows itself directly) for revenge mixed with his passion for his lost love and passionate hatred of her for betraying him. The man is conflicted and moody and more deadly than ever before.

This is no classic Bond movie. Much of the sexism of the past is gone as James is paired with a women (the “Bond girl,” Camille) similarly seeking revenge for the murder of her family and the two of them are involved in an incredible action scene in which they both “get their man” at the same time in the same place. This pairing, for the first time, puts the “Bond girl” on an equal level with Bond (and the fact that they never sleep together helps this, as well) and I think this adds an interesting symmetry between the two characters that helps to highlight what each of them is going through by pointing out the similarities and differences between their two situations.

Further, I think this is Bond for the 21st Century, and I’m not talking about the technology (although the most cutting edge stuff is on display throughout the entire film even as Q never makes any appearances), but more about the style and culture and whole tone. In the past Bond set out to find one villain, kill said villain and than return home after having sex with whatever “Bond girl” he’s picked up along the way. It was a formula that they tried to mix up as much as possible, but it always pretty much was always the same. Quantum, however, acknowledges that the world we live in today is far more complex than that. It probably always has been, but in the past we’ve been less honest with ourselves about it in our movies, preferring to show a simple story that could have resolution in the end rather than a more complex story that can’t be solved in 90 minutes, but in Quantum that’s all gone: while there’s a very present plot with a beginning, middle and end the end of the movie does not tie up all the loose ends, but it also doesn’t even make you wish it had. Throughout the entire movie the tone, perhaps not so overtly as much as very subtly, is that the world is fucked up and we’re just doing all we can to keep it from going to pot in the next 24 hours. In the beginning of the film Bond and M find out that there’s a huge criminal organization that they didn’t even know about operating right under their noses and in the end of the movie Bond has only dealt with one mid-level member of that organization. No going to the head of the sneak and chopping it off, in part because the organization has as members several high-ranking government officials in the British government. This is the type of complexity that faces any intelligence service in the world on a daily basis these days and it’s nice to see Bond reflecting that: it’s not so easy to fight evil when it signs your paycheck.

To return to passion, I think that the second quote from Wikipedia above pretty much says it all: passion comes from a Latin word meaning “to suffer or to endure.” That is what Bond and Camille are doing throughout this entire movie: they are suffering and enduring this world and all its problems, fucked up people and screwy governments, all without the people they loved by their sides because those people have been ripped from this world by people Bond and Camille have yet to find. In a lot of ways this is one of the darkest Bond films, although that does not detract from it one bit.

5 out of 5. If you even moderately enjoy action, see this movie.

Cheers.

-j

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 3:22 and is filed under Film Reviews, Media and Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.