Javier Bardem – Psychotic, Sensitive Villain Oscar Worthy

Director Sam Mendes and the screenwriting team of Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan have revived the Bond genre with an acute and unabashedly obvious sense of its now 50-year lexicon. That tradition boasts some of the screen’s most memorable ‘evil doers’. Skyfall does not disappoint.

Bond’s villainous counterpart Silva, deliciously played by Javier Bardem, is as well groomed and quick with the quip as Goldfinger and as cruel and vengeful as Blofeld. Mendes and the scriptwriters give this Bond turn a fresh and richly torturous threesome of Freudian proportion: M is much more than just the term of endearment ‘Mum’ to both hero and villain. Bardem’s Silva, once MI 6 himself and a favorite of M, just like Bond, is some decade or so later out for revenge:  first, by destroying M’s reputation and then attempting to kill her. Like Bond, Silva as MI 6 looked to “Mum” with trust and reluctant affection.

Betrayed he believes by M many years before and abandoned by her to enemy hands, Silva has survived his captors and joined the ‘dark’ side to devastating effect. Suddenly Bond also finds himself questioning loyalties and his own devotion to M. Only the inimitable Judi Dench as M, with her detached yet caring and matronly understanding of Bond, can rally our hero, and it seems excite our villain to psychotic deviance. Her faith in Bond is rather ‘stirred’ not ‘shaken’ despite Bond’s gloomy self-doubt and waning trust. Entering the fray yet again at M’s urging, Bond is ‘resurrected’ and delivers in the great tradition with swagger and typical Bond ingenuity, and just a little help from the past in the retro and now infamous Aston Martin DB 5 from Goldfinger. This despite a new and gadget averse Q (Ben Whisaw), a barely shaving computer geek who Bond adroitly scrubs as “spotted”.

Skyfall is not just a tribute to the Bond tradition of lush locations (Macau, Istanbul); beautiful Bond women; Bérénice Marlohe (Sévérine) and Naomie Harris (Moneypenny) willingly bedded by 007; and thrilling car/motorcycle chases. In Mendes’ hands the Bond story is a skillful meditation on what character traits make espionage and ruthless defense of the realm plausible and necessary. Turns out that these traits are the slimly disguised same ones that make a deviant criminal with ambition to profit from terror.

M it turns out will also sacrifice anything and anyone, including herself for Queen and country. Is our world as dangerous as Bond’s so as to incite this level of obsessive devotion at any personal cost? So it seems, and this is part of the thrilling popularity of the franchise: evil is only a few degrees set apart from the good and we recognize it. Mendes gives Daniel Craig’s Bond the best of foils to date in Javier’s Bardem’s jaded and cynical Silva.  M reminds us that MI 6 must battle “in the shadows” and against the anonymity and stealth of our enemies. As she crows defiantly to her ministerial superiors, “we don’t know who the enemy is anymore” and it could easily be someone close to you.

For the first time in the franchise, with Skyfall there is some meaningful apocryphal background on Bond: orphaned in the highlands of Scotland as a boy, we get a glimpse of what makes him tick and why M becomes effectively his surrogate and only family. No other Bond film has given us the depth of character we see in Skyfall without sacrificing any of the core Bond elements that continue to fascinate 50 years on.

Alfredo Romano