Shortly after earning his double-0 status by registering two kills, Bond (Daniel Craig) is engaged in a surveillance mission in Madagascar, the subject of which is a bomb maker Mollaka. This leads to a chase across a building site with both men leaping off cranes and free running around scaffolding and half finished structures. In Casino Royale, Bond’s origins are explored and this landscape is symbolic of the monolithic hero’s deconstruction that will happen during this film. A blunt instrument, Bond is – like the buildings under construction – a work in progress and far from the polished and debonair figure we the audience are familiar with.
Later, in the film’s second act if you like, Bond meets and kills another foe Dimitrios in a BodyWorld exhibition whereby there are lots of skeletons or models with layers of ectodermal tissue on show. In this film we will get under the skin of not only the chief protagonist but also the viewer. He will feel more, he will bleed and this is the film that will peel back the layers to reveal his vulnerability. Similarly the audience will feel his pain.
The film is concerned with not only the corporeal condition of the human experience: mortality, flesh, physicality, carnal desires, but also how it can be complicit in deception or misrepresentation. In many previous Bond films there are characters who have physical traits which encompass them: Jaws, Dr No and Tee-Hee to name a few. Here however, these are not indicative of the character they belong to but mere facets that show human vulnerabilities or create perceptions that are misled. Le Chiffre is reliant on an inhaler while Bond’s strong man appearance obfuscates the more complex and fragile aspects of his psyche.
In the final act, Bond fights with some Quantum agents while trying to save the doomed love of his life Vesper. This takes place in a multi storey house in Venice. Like Bond’s trust and faith in Vesper, the house is built on shaky foundations and will come crashing down. Everything Bond has been through, his emotional development, his growth; in this one moment it all comes crashing down. This new persona has been trashed. Casino Royale constantly constructs, deconstructs and demolishes the sense of who Bond is, what a hero is or the notions of right and wrong or good and evil.
Following this sequence, Bond remarks of the double agent Vesper to M that “the bitch is dead”. Yet he might not only be referring to Vesper. He might be alluding to an aspect of himself. That person who emerged with feelings, stripped of his “armour” and able to trust and love. Following Vesper’s betrayal, Bond rues ever being that way, believing it to have compromised his job and his mission. To be professional, he cannot entertain “the bitch” being present for that makes him lose sight of his commitments as a double-0 agent.
From the very moment Vesper enters the frame on the train to Montenegro, Bond is drawn to her like a moth to a flame as are we the audience to their relationship and chemistry. Many have praised the high quality of Casino Royale yet, after a fairly conventional and underwhelming few scenes following the free running sequence, the film really catches fire from here on in.
Vesper and Bond make guesses about one another, their origins and their approach to life, using first impressions. Vesper’s about Bond are unnervingly accurate which not only hammers home his shortcomings but also illustrates how much character development is needed for him to resemble the 007 we know.
Just as Bond is on a journey, so is Vesper. She is dragged into his brutal and barbaric fight in the hotel stairwell with Ugandan terrorists and struggles to contemplate the traumatic experience. Bond finds her soaking in the shower, fully dressed and bleeding as she cut her hand on a broken wine glass. She grieves for her former self realizing she can never go back to who she was before this horrific scene. Bond, already used to this harrowing bloodshed, takes pity on her and gently sucks the blood from her fingers.
This is not just him caring for her in a practical manner; Vesper’s very DNA is seeping into Bond. Her softer, feminine more nuanced personality is having a positive effect on Bond, gradually softening the edges of this blunt instrument.
At the point that Bond is poisoned by Le Chiffre at the card table, he tries saving himself using a defibrillator in his car. Losing consciousness, it is Vesper who arrives and applies it to him. It is she that gives him heart and pierces his cold veneer. Her value to him emotionally is demonstrated by the look of panic on his face as he pursues her kidnappers after he defeats Le Chiffre and she is tied up and left in the road for Bond to potentially drive into. Narrowly missing her, his car is thrown into a spin, risking his own life. Once again, he shows greater fear for her than himself when he hears her apparently being tortured on Le Chiffre’s boat. Bond is himself being tortured, naked and tied to a chair with the wicker seat ripped out. Le Chiffre uses the basic method of beating a rope against his testicles to try getting a password to access the poker winnings. A sweating Bond roars in pain but then this turns to defiant laughing and goading of his torturer. Bond apparently had the heart for this mission and now the balls too.
Le Chiffre mentions that, once he has finished with Bond, there will be nothing to identify him as a man. Before he met Vesper, Bond was a testosterone fueled alpha male who would walk through walls to prove it. But now, as the symbol of his masculinity is being attacked and he has been stripped of his clothes and his dignity, he cares not for himself or his ego. It is the idea that Vesper might be in peril that concerns him most.
You see Vesper and Bond unite because they are apposite in their own dramas. Vesper is being held to account by her blackmailers while Bond feels on a leash from M to succeed.
When Bond awakes in the MI6 hospital, he finds a besotted Vesper doting on him. He confesses that she has changed him and alongside his own physical rehabilitation is an emotional rebirth. The girders and plinths have been joined with bricks, mortar and plaster. The skeleton has been covered with all seven layers of skin. Bond has learned a valuable thing: self-awareness.
Casino Royale is a film about high stakes. Not in a geopolitical sense but literally in a game of poker. Bond fixates on working out what Le Chiffre’s ‘tell’ is during the game. The ‘tell’ being an indication in his demeanour that his hand isn’t what he would have wished for. From a wider perspective, the movie has several characters not willing to reveal their hands so it is left to the audience to work out who represents what. Vesper conceals her secret from Bond right until Venice, a vague sense of anxiety that she keeps obscured by her initial disdain for Bond and then her devotion to him.
Mathis has no ‘tell’ but his calm demeanour is misinterpreted by Bond who is convinced he is a traitor. Bond’s ‘tell’ becomes his infatuation with Vesper. The ‘tell’ is a vulnerability to all involved.
When Bond tells M that “the bitch is dead” he is in a boat just off Venice, still on that most shaky surface where one might be unsteady and drown. It’s a sign that he’s perhaps registering external factors better than he was earlier on but there is a lot more for him to encounter and learn. The rocking vessel betrays his assertion and renewed confidence. With Venice apparently sinking as the years go by, the future of the iconic city is uncertain as is that of our iconic hero.
Onto the concept of heroism. Bond in the books was presented as a hero with several human flaws and anxieties. Author Ian Fleming sadistically subjected him to torture in Casino Royale, being repeatedly stamped on in Diamonds Are Forever, poisoned in From Russia With Love and being a widower in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This was a man on the edge of a breakdown in books like You Only Live Twice and The Man With The Golden Gun. Fleming’s Bond was not your clean cut knight in shining armour type of hero, more a professional performing heroic deeds while self-medicating on forty cigarettes a day and pints of bourbon.
In which category would we put the cinematic Bond? Well looking at the eras with Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan in the role (seventeen films in total) he was a classic hero with few scars mentally or physically on show. A womanizer, his reliance on nicotine and alcohol was played down to simply being a jet setting playboy type who was discerning and enjoyed a fancy cocktail in the appropriate circumstances.
The Bond in Casino Royale is a hard drinking man. He devises his own very strong cocktail which he christens ‘Vesper’. He lives on the edge in a way many other iterations of this character didn’t for he gulps down the booze as if it will calm or anaesthetize him before his next tussle with death occurs.
He’s not a hero. More an anti-hero. Or a man, a professional, doing the grisly deeds in the shadows that someone has to do and most of us would never want to do or even hear about. Unlike Lady Macbeth, his status as a double-0 and how he qualified for the role beckons no moral naval gazing or sleepwalking in a cycle of guilt racked trauma. His hands are so bathed in blood that he has normalized it. When he sucks the blood from Vesper’s fingers, he takes the burden from her and washes the blood from her. Like another famous literary creation who literally feasted on blood, there’s a tragic inevitability that many who come into contact with this figure in the shadows will perish.
The Bond in films like Octopussy, Goldfinger and Die Another Day is a chancer. A high class confidence trickster who blags, boasts and bluffs his way to evade the suspicions of the villain. He bases his bluster not on what he actually knows but on what he may get his opponent to betray. While the poker match might symbolize this form of brinkmanship, Bond learns this has limitations in the final two acts of the film.
After considering heroism in the movie, one naturally puts the side of evil under the spotlight. In the classic films, the villains were often grotesques with motivations that were obtuse or completely absent. Why did Blofeld feel inclined to put together the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE)? Did he really feel passionate about issuing ransom deadlines and blackmailing people or did he have a talent for creating memorable acronyms?
Some of them do have a motivation or a reason. Goldfinger was driven by pure greed. Drax by a sinister obsession with culling mankind and eugenics. Silva wanted revenge. Yet their schemes are often disproportionately elaborate. They create maximum chaos and put themselves at much greater risk of being caught and killed when a more streamlined plan might have brought them a better outcome. Beyond that, it is fair to say that the side of evil isn’t scrutinized closely in the series. In Casino Royale, Le Chiffre is forced into a range of nefarious activities out of financial necessity because the organization he is aligned to – Quantum – won’t punish his losses with a formal warning but with execution. He is the stockbroker gambling with other people’s money and losing it so that each bet he then makes becomes more and more desperate. In that way, the audience can identify with him better than most Bond villains.
But it is the role of the compromised Vesper which is where the lines are blurred. The trope of a turncoat in the series has been exhausted. Die Another Day, GoldenEye and The World Is Not Enough all had figures who betrayed the protagonists and the Craig era was replete with such characters. However, often their defection is not dwelt upon nor are the reasons. When they are, they don’t really explain the volte-face. With Vesper we understand she has turned not because of an ideological stance, out of resentment or greed. She didn’t do it voluntarily like the vast amount of these turncoats do. She was recruited by Quantum because they threatened to kill her partner otherwise.
Vesper is no femme fatale but a human being in love who has been harassed into poor judgement. A woman terrified that her role in matters might be complicit in harming others beyond her lover. What we don’t know when Bond washes the blood from her hands is that there is guilt on her conscience.
In these terms, here is a complicated character that cannot be, as with Bond, pigeon holed conventionally. An anti-villain if you like.
For, much like the poker in Casino Royale, the Vesper cocktail consisting of multiple ingredients of gin, vodka, Lillet blanc aperitif and a twist of lemon zest and the host of Mathematical computations going on in Le Chiffre’s brain, nothing is binary. It’s not a case of red or black. The characters are in the moral shadows, in grey areas both professionally and personally.
Athon 