Rarely has such attention been paid to female roles in Bond movies before (Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is one), and certainly nothing like it since (Judi Dench is yet another under-written example, only Dench is so good with duff lines you may not realise it).
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In the first Craig movie, Casino Royale, a very fine movie indeed, signs were good Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd was a strong and interesting character, one that drew the eye not just because of physical beauty and glamour, but because as a character she had depth, she had good lines, she had been written with care and craft, and ultimately, when Bond lost her, the audience felt the loss.
It’s not you, it’s me.” Bad timing? Well, you know what silly women are like. Later on we are expected to believe that Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swan, a therapist so talented and qualified she has managed to get a job in a clinic at which appointments are kept most easily by helicopter or ski-lift, decides to break off her romance with Bond just as he is heading out the door to save the world. Sam Mendes: Sorry, what? I was eating a cake. She says he has a secret and then defines what a secret is. What, for the love of, are the conversations like in script meetings when Moneypenny’s lines are discussed?
No, the issue is in the utter contempt for the female actors, as exemplified in the lack of attention paid to their characters. You may not like him, but you’ll be glad he’s on your side when a massive Ukrainian hitman comes to smash your head through a wall. It used to be about dated sexual politics, but now it’s about the complexities of the type of person who might take on such responsibilities as Bond does. Change that and you might as well have Hamlet say, “To be or not to be I think I have it sorted, actually.” And the problem is not Bond’s character – the fact he is a hero who treats women appallingly is frankly the most interesting aspect of his character. Three women characters, two portrayed by a couple of European cinema’s most brilliant actresses in Lea Seydoux and Monica Bellucci, utterly wasted, worshiping at the temple of James, talking like teenagers. This is not simply the Bechdel Test roundly failed, it is a movie where women with excellent careers and positions of authority talk like morons. For all that was poured into SPECTRE not once was a single female character given a single decent line of dialogue, and not once was a single line of that dialogue given over to anything other than reiterating something about Bond’s rather dull character.
So you might be forgiven for thinking that something so enormous might carry with it a sense of responsibility when it comes to social equality, or at the very least, not handing over the job of writing the female dialogue to a magic 8 ball. In every way SPECTRE is so huge it would seem the only appropriate way to continue writing this article would be to bump up the font size to 72.
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SPECTRE is soon to be referred to as a ‘phenomenon’ well-respected movie critics are showering it with five star reviews well-respected broadcasters have been seen jumping from office windows at the suggestion Daniel Craig may decide to return to the RSC rather than carry on in the title role – at least one Dimbleby has already joined a Buddhist monastery in southern California. And yet it is willfully deficient in the most crucial of areas. Bond has more capital pumped into it, is more a part of the economy of the global elite, than any other movie could hope for. On top of that, the Bond films are now 2 hour-plus adverts for uber-status symbols the movies are dripping with gold. The James Bond movie franchise is the most successful cinematic endeavour in the history of the world, and the new instalment, SPECTRE, continues to break all sorts of records at the box office, including the eclipse of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for opening weekend returns. Gary Raymond asks is the lack of attention to the female roles in the new James Bond movie the most important statement made by cinema this year?
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