4.3.2006
Recently we have heard a lot of controversy about the casting of
Daniel Craig as James Bond in the new film, Casino Royale. Having read
the original novel (along with the rest of the series), the decision of the
producers and the director (Martin Campbell, who already did a great job
with Goldeneye, the movie that introduced Pierce Brosnan) seemed a
very good one to me. Casino Royale is my favourite among the Bond
novels. It really is a fantastic book, and it brings out a number of
facettes in the main character that have not been prominent in the films
until now. From what I have seen of Daniel Craig so far, he looks to me as
if he has the right mix to get them into pictures.
This is certainly a matter of taste, and perhaps also of different
backgrounds: someone who did not read the books may just have different
views. So may have some of the younger generation, who haven't eye-witnessed
a change of actors in the role yet (in real-time, not just in the form of a
DVD collection).
But the recent discussion was just plainly unfair. (Curiously, one should
have thought that Bond fans would have noticed that the films contain as
much class and flair as they contain action; ideally some of that should
have rubbed off on them.)
Especially telling is the argument that Craig supposedly 'doesn't have
the Bond look'. This boils down to the objection that he is not identical
with Pierce Brosnan. Disappointed as they may be that there will be no more
movie with Brosnan, this is no valid objection against Craig (it doesn't
even have anything to do with him). And it shows that the proponents of
that opinion did not understand one of the most distinctive facts about
the Bond tradition - which is that there is no such thing as the
Bond look. There are different ways of being Bond, and precisely to find
such a way was the particular contribution from each of the Bond actors.
In a sense, this is so with every part in acting. Every time a new
actor plays Hamlet (or Emilia Galotti, or Le misantrope, or Tosca,
or ... you name it) he, or she, has to re-invent that character to a
certain extent. With plays or operas, the situation is somewhat different
than with a series of films (or a TV series), because the plot and
indeed the text of the drama are mostly invariant from production to
production. But one of the special things about the Bond series is that
there are invariants between the films, too, and one of the merits
of the Bond actors was precisely to bring these out each time without
creating a boring pattern of always-the-same-old-story. A real Bond
connoisseur should appreciate that the producers did not try to find
an actor who would just copy Pierce Brosnan (arguably the most impressive
Bond so far), but someone with the promise of bringing a new dimension to
the role.
