Skyfall – Bitch Flicks

Why Isn’t Naomie Harris in All the Movies?

To say that Harris is a revelation in this film may be an understatement. It not only prepared her to tackle the complex layers of Winnie Madikizela a few years later, but it also proved yet again that she is able to take on a variety of different roles–from heroic to villainous. She solidified a sci-fi fan base with her totally badass performance in “28 Days Later” showed that she can steal scenes from 007 himself, and continues to surprise audiences in roles across all genres.

This guest post by Candice Frederick previously appeared at her blog Reel Talk and appears as part of our theme week on The Great Actresses.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Naomie Harris is an international treasure. But why do I feel like I’m the only one who knows this? Though she’s been acting for nearly two decades, delivering one great performance after another, she continues to fly under the radar. Even after her riveting portrayal of Winnie Madikizela in last year’s otherwise derivative Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, she’s still seriously slept on as one of our finest talents. I mean, the fact that she was shut out of every major award (not even as much as a nomination) for Mandela is a tragedy in and of itself.

Her IMDb page is shockingly bare in regard to future projects. Other than an as yet “rumored” role as Moneypenny in the 2015 Skyfall follow-up Bond 24, there’s nothing listed. Let’s hope this changes soon because Harris is the type of actress who deserves her own franchise. She is a talented force to be reckoned with and she she deserves far more attention than she gets.

I thought of this the other day while I was watching The First Grader (2010). In Harris’s previous performance under the direction of Justin Chadwick (Mandela), she plays Jane Obinchu, a Kenyan schoolteacher whose professional and personal lives come under conflict once she admits an 84-year-old first-time student and ex Mau Mau freedom fighter (Oliver Litondo) after the Kenyan government announced universal and free elementary education in 2003. To say that Harris is a revelation in this film may be an understatement. It not only prepared her to tackle the complex layers of Winnie Madikizela a few years later, but it also proved yet again that she is able to take on a variety of different roles–from heroic to villainous. She solidified a sci-fi fan base with her totally badass performance in 28 Days Later, showed that she can steal scenes from 007 himself, and continues to surprise audiences in roles across all genres. And on top of all that, she manages to somehow also be a red carpet fashion titan. Here’s some of her best looks:

Need I say more?

Candice Frederick is an NABJ award-winning print journalist, film critic, and blogger for Reel Talk.

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Guest Post: ‘Skyfall’: It’s M’s World, Bond Just Lives in It

M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

For fifty years, James Bond movies have varied wildly in quality, but not quantities. There’s always been plenty of punching, driving, drinking, smooth-talking, and seducing. This year’s release, Skyfall, features the fetching Bérénice Lim Marlohe and a blond-mopped Javier Bardem. But director Sam Mendes has done something different with his first punt at the series. While Bond still gets up to his usual japes, he’s not the centre of the film. Instead, Mendes has made a $150 million action blockbuster about a 77-year-old woman. It is her choices, not Bond’s, that shape the fates of those around her. Dame Judi Dench’s M is Skyfall’s steely heart.

You’d need a bulldozer to excavate the sexism generated by half a century’s worth of Bonds. But in his world, M is the single authority figure and the one woman who doesn’t start thinking with her knickers the moment he smirks at her. Not that their relationship is devoid of sexual undertones. Naomie Harris is capable as the lovely field agent Eve. But she and Daniel Craig don’t have any thing like the spark that he generates with M.

Allegedly inspired by Dame Stella Rimington, Director General of Britain’s MI5 in the mid-90s, Dench made her Bond debut in1995’s Goldeneye. Pierce Brosnan’s cocky Bond was properly introduced with her withering put-down, “I think you’re a sexist misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.” It became one of the movie’s signature lines, establishing the tone of M’s relationship with her most difficult employee.

M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall

Skyfall’s opening sequence shows us M in action. She’s directing a mission in Turkey where Bond gets shot, presumed killed, on a fluffed order from her command. He chooses to stay dead and takes off to a beach to drink and sulk. It’s only the sight of M’s office under siege that lures him back to London. MI6 has been bombed, and its director is clearly the target. M returns to her house late at night, to discover Bond has dropped in to announce his resurrection. She is grumpy, frustrated, and exhilarated by 007’s return. He’s taciturn and flippant, but it says it all that she is his first port of call. She concludes their first scene together by throwing him out, snapping “You’re not bloody sleeping here!”

Mendes has worked with Dench before, directing her onstage in The Cherry Orchard. His camera lovingly dwells on her magnificently non-Botoxed features and silver hair. Unlike most directors, he doesn’t try to hide her slight 5’1 stature. There are many shots of her framed by large empty rooms, looking like a small black-clad anchor.

M’s nemesis turns out to be Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a former agent of hers, presumed dead. His experience was markedly similar to Bond’s at the start of the film. Abandoned by MI6 to preserve an operation, Silva endured torture and re-emerged as the leader of a terrorist cartel. Along with Bond, he could see their sacrifice by M as testimony to her fierce loyalty to her country. Only one of them chooses to. It’s not the one with the stupid hair.

L-R: James Bond (Daniel Craig), M (Judi Dench) and Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) in Skyfall

Silva placed his trust in M, and she – according to his warped understanding of the game – betrayed him as a protector. You’d think building yourself up as a globe trotting mercenary would satisfy his wounded pride. But he nurses a vendetta against “the old woman”. Bardem doesn’t leave much to linger in the subtext with his predatory gasps of “Mother!” He is obsessive, inescapable, and possessed of the seemingly unlimited resources available to a Bond villain. When his six foot bulk looms over her it is as grotesque and terrifying as the Queen Alien going after Newt.

It is Silva’s similarities with Bond that makes him such an effective bad guy, crowned by his fixation on M. Together they make a combative threesome that would thrill Hitchcock or Buñuel. Silva attempts to pit the two of them against each other, revealing to Bond that M lied to him about his fitness for fieldwork. It’s a critically flawed tactic. Silva assumes that because many of their strengths and weaknesses run parallel, Bond will read M’s deceit as another symbolic death blow. Bond, of course,has never been averse to telling lies to get his way.

Perhaps that’s why M’s order to shoot in Turkey ultimately brought them closer. M’s failing made her more relatable to Bond, a master of duplicity, and someone who has spent significant amounts of celluloid treating people as if they’re disposable. Skyfall shamelessly draws on the Oedipus myth. Silva and Bond are wayward sons killed by and drawn back to the maternal figure. No wonder Q always hides in the agency

basement.

As Silva closes in to MI6, there are several forces working against its leader. One of them is Gareth Mallory, Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee. After the disaster in Turkey where Bond gets shot, he summons M to gently broach the subject of dignified retirement. She tells him in so many words to suck it and promptly exits. Mallory’s left hind wearing an expression of resigned affection. It’s not so different to how M has sometimes looked at Bond.

M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall

Mallory turns out to be more chivalrous than could be expected from a policy wonk. When M’s being raked over the coals by a stroppy MP (Helen McCrory in full Medusa mode), he reclaims the floor for her rebuttal. She rewards this with a floor-clearing defence rich in Tennyson and sass. We don’t get to see the pupils of his

eyes form into little love hearts before they get rudely interrupted by Silva’s gunfire. Mallory plights his troth to M by diving in front of a bullet. He goes on to support the comprehensively unofficial plan Bond hatches with Q (Ben Whishaw) and Tanner (Rory Kinnear) to smuggle her away from London.

Bond takes M to his childhood home in Scotland, and in case anyone missed the portentous meaning, we get a short speech about orphans en route. The Skyfall of the title turns out to be the unloved manor home of his youth. There she meets Kincade (Albert Finney). He is the gameskeeper and the man who taught a young James how to shoot. Within minutes of meeting M he’s macking on her, which makes us wonder what else Bond picked up from him.

L-R: James Bond (Daniel Craig) and M (Judi Dench) in Skyfall

Finney is comparable to Rory Kinnear’s Tanner, M’s right hand in MI6. In their scenes with her they demonstrate loyalty to M – or as Kincade calls her, Emily – without question. It’s different from the give-and-take between Bond and M.

Skyfall shows us M in the field, deftly assembling DIY cluster bombs and wielding a gun. But it is only to Bond that she shows vulnerability, and vice versa. Whatever the filmmakers try to make her stand in for – Queen, Country, Mother, Lover, Rosebud – the best part of M and Bond’s relationship is what exists just beyond their mutual snarking. By the end of the film, Dench can sag into an old chair and look tired and worn, admitting to her agent that she’s made big mistakes. Together, they have half a minute of screen time to be more mortal than James Bond usually is allowed to be.

By the end of the movie, she dies in his arms. They had shared something notably missing from their interactions with the other characters: a deep abiding respect and trust. Her legacy lives on, in the form of a ceramic bulldog and another totem of loyalty – Mallory, newly installed as M’s heir.

——

Margaret Howie cheerfully lives with her love of Robert Mitchum and her feminist sensibility in South London. Her favourite Bond is Roger Moore, because he’s the only movie star with a name that is also a bad pick-up line.

The Sun (Never) Sets on the British Empire: The Neocolonialism of ‘Skyfall’

Growing up, my little brother was an enormous James Bond fan. He rewatched the films repeatedly on video; he developed an encyclopedic knowledge of all the villains, plots, and gadgets from reading his glossy making-of books; and, in an anecdote our mother never tires of retelling, he wanted to be Bond “without the kissing.”

Thanks to his enthusiasm, and everyone else’s moderate enjoyment, each new Brosnan Bond film was cause for a Family Outing to the cinema (and we have never been big on Family Cinema Outings; our taste in films is too disparate). For me, this meant a couple hours’ quality nap time. I snoozed happily through Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, and Die Another Day.

Me, watching a James Bond movie, 1997-2002.

Casino Royale, of course, famously upset some Bond fans who felt it was too serious, too Bourne-y, and unfaithful to the sense of fun that had always previously characterized the series. And maybe it is indeed a complete break with the rest of the franchise, because it’s the first Bond film that kept me awake for its entire (bladder-busting, 145-minute) runtime.

Bond is a British institution, and every new film is quite the cultural event back in Blighty. It’s a slightly different perspective from this side of the Atlantic, but in some ways the US is an appropriate place to be for the release of Skyfall: director Sam Mendes is a Brit, but he’s most famous for a film with “American” in the title. This latest offering turns out to be not only self-reflexive on the half-century-old Bond film franchise itself, but also a somewhat disturbing meditation on Britain’s role in the modern world.

Before I get into a geopolitical reading of the film, let’s talk feminism: this is NOT a good film for its women characters. The Craig Bond films have been weird about women in general. They don’t seem to be quite sure whether or not they want to get away from the traditional Bond treatment of women as interchangeable totty for 007’s shagging pleasure. On the one hand, Casino Royale won feminist plaudits for recapitulating Dr No‘s famous Ursula-Andress-rising-from-the-sea moment with a ripped Daniel Craig in the role of Anadyomeneeye-candy. On the other hand, Skyfall features Bond walking in on a former child sex slave in her shower, and that is objectively more squicktastic than most Bond seductions.

Even the one where he shags Honor Blackman straight.

Plus, without getting too far into spoiler territory, by the end of the film the role of women in the MI6 workplace is not exactly inspiring for one’s feminist sensibilities.

SPOILER: this is the final shot of MI6 at the end of Skyfall.

Having said all of which, the film does focus significantly on one female character. Dame Judi is of course a British icon, and – particularly in the wake of the Olympics opening ceremony stunt – it’s not a huge leap to see her M as representative of the queen (and, by extension, the UK as a whole): she’s talked about obsessively as a “little old woman” who holds people inexplicably in her thrall and power, and unfailing loyalty to her is presented as an irrational but ultimately very British characteristic.

I should make it clear that I am not a fan of monarchies, empires, or jingoism, and that my own British nationality is so compromised by my third-culture childhood that it doesn’t really have abstract, personal, emotional, or ontological relevance for me. As such, I don’t care much for the endless, usually racist and Islamophobic debates over what British identity IS or whether the Royal Family is relevant(IMO: this, and no).

However, I do think that there is a very good reason for the continuance of these discussions, and it is this: Britain has never really bothered to process the loss of its empire.

By this I mean both that Britain has failed to properly grapple with or repent for its imperial sins, and that it has not yet seriously reconsidered its place in the current global milieu. The former is the more difficult task, and I still don’t see anyone trying to do anything about it; on the contrary, imperialism, via western neoliberalism, looks to be reinscribed through the very public conversation on modern Britain’s role that has arisen in the past few years. Between the Royal wedding, the Jubilee, and the London Olympics, Britain has begun to gain something of a sense of itself in the 21^stcentury, and I don’t know if that’s entirely a good thing.

The British brain. See, it does too exist.

21st-century Britishness is precarious and conflicted, but still deeply troublesome (and still, I think, built on a feeling of entitlement to control others). Skyfall beats you over the head with its theme of whether the Good Old Ways are useful in the modern world, but that’s because this is a question that has plagued Britain since at least WWII. Bond first meets young tech-savvy Q in front of Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, and the obsessive harping on the motif of Old vs. New doesn’t get any subtler, between the callbacks to Bond movies past and the, well, explicit conversations about whether the old ways are useful in the modern world.

And yet the film has a striking caginess about the real world. The London Underground hijinks almost entirely avoid evoking 7/7. The villain of the piece is a former British intelligence agent with a grievance about his mistreatment at British hands, but he’s played by Javier Bardem; and, while many of the world’s countries have legitimate grievances about their mistreatment at British hands, Spain is waaaaay down the list. Giving the villain a purely personal grievance against M allows for a paralleled symbolism: as M represents imperial Britain, so Bardem’s character represents any or all of the formerly colonized territories of the world.

The film chooses not to engage with the perspective of the colonized. Bardem’s desire for revenge on M is a Very Bad Thing, and Bond takes M “back in time” to defend her. Bear in mind that I’ve been reading M as a symbol of the British Empire, and you’ll realize that I do not love where this is going.

***Spoiler ho***

Bond loses M, but another M arises to take her place. The Union Jack still flies over London. MI6 still operates. The new M still has missions for Bond, offered in front of another painting, this time of an intact fleet of ships. The Good Old Way of territorial imperialism may be gone, but the same colonizing work can still be done – in newer, slicker, more insidious ways.

The top-hatted octopus-man is James Bond. Okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.