56 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
THE CRITICS
THE CURRENTCINEMA
ONE FOR THE ROAD
“No Time to Die.”BY ANTHONYLANEA
big welcome back to 007. The
news is that nothing much has
changed, and all the fixtures
and fittings are in place. The license to
kill, and the supple deployment of
weaponry. The occasional whip of a
wisecrack. The prime spot in the cock
pit of an aircraft. The Aston Martin.
The dress sense. The knockout shades.
No question about it: she’s the right
woman for the job.
As we are reminded by the latest
chapter in the franchise, “No Time
to Die,” 007 is not a person so much
as a designated slot. Once vacated, it
fills up like a parking space. Thus,
when James Bond (Daniel Craig)—
male, pale, and staled by years of
trouncing megalomaniacs—goes off
the grid, his prized 00 number is taken
by Nomi (Lashana Lynch), who is
proud, Black, younger than spring
time, and much amused by the au
tumnal state of her predecessor. “You
get in my way, I will put a bullet in
your knee,” she says to him, adding,
“The one that works.” Harsh.
They meet in Jamaica, whither
Bond has retired. (Lord knows what
he does all day. Maybe he sets off with
a pair of binoculars, a packed lunch,
and a copy of “Birds of the West In
dies,” by James Bond, the American
ornithologist from whom Ian Flem
ing, another Jamaica resident, pinched
the name.) Nomi is on the trail of vil
lainy, and Bond has been asked to fol
low the same scent—not by the Brit
ish government but by the C.I.A., in
the person of Felix Leiter ( Jeffrey
Wright). Who’d have guessed that the
cream of Her Majesty’s spies would
end up being milked by Uncle Sam?
Is that why the opening credits show
the symbolic figure of Britannia, with
her trusty shield, falling into a giant
hourglass and slipping away into the
sands of time?
The film, directed by Cary Joji Fuku
naga, runs almost two and threequar
ter hours. That’s a lot of movie, longer
than some recordings of the St. Mat
thew Passion, but Fukunaga has a lot
of ground to cover. He begins, if you
please, with a flashback to the child
hood of a secondary character—not,
alas, the infant Q, solemnly building
particle accelerators out of Lego bricks,
but a young French girl who will grow
up to be Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa
Seydoux), the heroine of the previous
Bond adventure, “Spectre” (2015).
We now learn that Madeleine, as
befits her doubly Proustian name, was
marked for life by a potent early expe
rience: the slaying of her mother by
Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who has
a scratchy voice and an unfortunate
skin condition. Later, fulfilling the stan
dard brief of a Bond baddie, Safin will
occupy an island lair and hatch plans
to dominate the planet. Needless to
say, if only our leading nations had
clubbed together to buy him a pot of
moisturizer, the whole crisis could have
been avoided.
At the conclusion of “Spectre,” Bond
beetled off toward Big Ben in his Aston
Martin DB5, with the adult Madeleine
at his side. The new film finds him in
the same car, with the same passenger,
in a slightly trickier environment: a
hilltop town in Italy, with his enemies
circling and his bulletproof windowsstarred but not yet broken by incom
ing fire. It’s the perfect moment not
just for Bond to ask Madeleine, whom
he suspects of betraying him, what the
hell’s going on but also for Craig, in
his last bow as Bond, to demonstrate
what he has brought to the role. Re
laxed under pressure, and pressurized
by the need to relax, he has the action
man’s dread of inactivity. Suits and
tuxedos don’t really become him, even
if they fit him, until they are blood
ied and torn. Craig has been the right
Bond for our times, grudging with his
charm—barely a virtue nowadays—
and nourished by a steady supply of
traumas. He has a sense of humor, yet
oneliners embarrass him, for the world
is too laughably treacherous to be
fobbed off with a joke. Even love seems
to toughen him up.
To whom or what, then, can Bond
be true? To his country? Returning to
M.I.6, he is obliged to give his name
at security and is handed a plastic
nametag. On the way out, in the of
fice of Moneypenny (Naomie Harris),
he tosses the tag into the trash: a bit
ter coda to the memory of Sean Con
nery, deftly lobbing his hat onto the
hat stand. Worse still, Bond learns
that M (Ralph Fiennes), usually the
solid soul of wisdom, has overseen a
secret project called Heracles, which
will allow Britain’s foes (unspecified,
but possibly the European Union, in
a war over sausage exports) to be tar
geted with nasty nanobots. Safin, nat
urally, gets hold of Heracles, and pre
pares to unleash it everywhere. It’s up
to Bond—with a little help from Q
(Ben Whishaw), the Royal Navy, the ABOVE: LEWIS SCOTT