GoldenEye, the first James Bond movie in six years, is a terrific surprise — not only because it’s the first entertaining American movie in months but because it does not defang, bowdlerize, or sanitize its lead character. Quite the opposite, in fact; Golden-Eye is energized by its decision to embrace the original James Bond in all his old glory-the dangerous, cold-eyed Bond of the Sean Connery days. Those days ended, it is almost shocking to note, fully 25 years ago when Connery (with one aberrant exception in 1983) decided never again to assay the part that made him a star.
When Roger Moore assumed the role in 1973’s Live and Let Die, the Bond movies quickly descended into knowing camp — one-times enjoyable (The Spy Who Loved Me), usually painful (Octopussy). There was no charge, no energy, to Moore’s phlegmatic performance. Even the infamous “Bond girls” could barely arouse his interest. The lack of sexual energy, the overdeliberate double entendres, the preponderance ofphallic imagery-one can make a case that the oversize Bond movies of the late 1970s and 1980s were actually works of gay deconstruction.
The Bond movies became self-conscious camp because the people mho make them no longer in their hero anti his cause — they no longer enjoyed this unrepentant Warrior for Democracy and his happily promiscuous sex life with willing, faceless, pre-Catherine MacKinnon honeys named Kissy Suzuki and Pussy Galore. Ian Fieming’s Bond books first became famous when President John Kennedy professed his addiction to them, as well he should have: Killing Communists and bedding women were Kennedy’s fantasy image of himself, although he did far more of the latter than the former.
But in the detente 1970s, Bond teamed up with Soviet agents to fight evil capitalists and their silly henchman, the 7-ft.-tall guy with steel teeth named Jaws, (in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). Agent 007 stood around tossing off witless one-liners like an Oscar Wilde character with a very low IQ. He was, like the West, dispirited.
After a pathetic interregnum with the sullen Timothy Dalton, who played Bond in two dreadful movies, the part has gone to the television actor Pierce Brosna n. Brosnan, who was way too cute in the title role of the long-running series $ IRemington Steele, is a revelation-steely, sleek, violent, tough. He kills wi th impunity. He never comes up with an answer to his girlfriend’s question abou t whether he would have intervened to save her from one of the villains. A friend he was forced to leave behind the Iron Curtain accuses him of putting Queen and country before everything else, and he does not disagree.
Of course, he doesn’t say much at all. This comes as a special shock because director Martin Campbell promised a “Bond for the 1990s.” That thought was enough to make anyone’s heart sink — why would anyone want an updated version of James Bond? An updated version of James Bond would be in 12-step programs for his drinking and his gambling. A James Bond of the 1990s would be a savior of the environment, a respecter of women, a wearer of condoms. A James Bond for the 1990s would have been, well, pretty similar to the James Bond of the 1970s.
Instead, Brosnan’s Bond is the male action hero in the most distilled form possible, indifferent to love and death and therefore capable of triumphing over both without batting an eye. True, he must cope with 90s problems. Longtime secretary Miss Moneypenny threatens him with a sexual harassment suit — but only because he won’t make good on his innuendoes. His new boss, in the *[ormidable person of the great Shakespearean actress Dame ]udi Dench, denounces Bond for his sexism and misogyny — but she is a wrong-headed bean counter who knows nothing about the spy game. And he beats up the sexy villainess (a devastatingly attractive actress with the absurd name of Famke Janssen) because she repeatedly tries to kill him with a foreplay move that canonly be called the “thighs of death.”
It’s all in good fun, and utterlypointless, but it’s a relief to see a Bond movie in which the very qualities that made the character an icon are not obscured by the demands of Hollywood politics. Which makes GoldenEye the first big-budget action movie in years that isn’t hypocritical. In the three $ ILethal Action films, director Richard Donner tempered the extremes of violence with scenes in which bumper stickers and posters reading “Free South Africa” were clearly visible. They were, he said, his chance to get across an important political message — even as Danny Glover was ditting on a tiolet about to explode. In Terminator 2, perhaps the most glaring example, women give pompous speeches about men and violence while writer-director James Cameron takes great glee in having his title character shoot hundreds of people in the kneecaps, elbows, and groins.
How GoldenEye escaped the Hollywood mixed message is a mystery; maybe Campbell, the director, and his writers don’t really know that’s what they’ve done. That wouldn’t be surprising. When the alchemists of Hollywood turn theusual dross into gold, they never know how they did it — which is why it is so rare for them to duplicate their successes.
By John Podhoretz
