As thrilled as I am about the opening of the new James Bond picture, Casino Royale, today, I'm somewhat baffled by the reviews. Critics are effusive in their praise, but make clear that they think this Bond picture is so much better than its predecesors by clicking off a list of ways in which this one differs from the earlier Bonds.
Most often, this occurs in the praise of new series star Daniel Craig, who, unlike previous Bonds, is vulnerable, capable of being hurt both physically and emotionally. This is nonsense, of course--take a look at On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the high-water mark of the entire series, in which Bond completely loses his heart, and has it broken in a devastating final scene. Or see License To Kill--Bond resigns from MI6 in order to follow his own private vengeance trail. Or hell, take pretty much anything from the Pierce Brosnan era, when he was constantly confronted by demons from his past. (As Sean Bean's superbly played villain in Goldeneye put it, "I might as well ask if all those vodka martinis silence the screams of all the men you've killed, or if you've found forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women from the dead ones you failed to protect.")
The producers of the Bond series have always been willing to tinker with the formula, a fact that the reviews of Casino Royale don't acknowledge, as they praise its lack of gimmicks or a villain who wants to take over the world. For lack of gimmicks and human-scaled action, again see On Her Majesty's Secret Service (which, okay, does feature a villain who wants to take over the world), or For Your Eyes Only or either of Timothy Dalton's underrated efforts. Other reviews of Casino Royale praise Eva Green's performance, citing her as a Bond girl who's not an airhead. Not to sound like a broken record, but what about Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service? Or Famke Janssen in Goldeneye? Or Sophie Marceau in The World Is Not Enough? (That last picture, incidentally, gets my vote as Brosnan's best Bond and as one of the best in the whole series. The critical praise for Daniel Craig has also included a lot of bashing of Brosnan's entire run, which admittedly closed on a dreadful note with Die Another Day, but which on the whole was quite good.)
I'm mentioning all this not to show off my knowledge of James Bond arcana, but to decry the current state of film criticism. While writing about the arts has become an increasingly lonely pursuit, it is generally expected that if you are writing about music, say, or literature or painting that you have some sort of knowledge of the subject. No critic would write about one of Philip Roth's Zuckerman novels without having read the previous books, or at the very least without acknowledging having not read the books. No critic would write about Edvard Munch without some knowledge of the artist's life and influences. What would be the point? The critic's job is to illuminate, to introduce the reader to a pont of view he or she may never have considered.
But film criticism--feh. Who cares? If most of the critics writing about Casino Royale had done a half hour's worth of research on the internet (or even--gasp--watched the previous Bonds on DVD), they would have discovered many of the things they're writing are flat-out factually inaccurate. (Don't even get me started on some of the reviews of Happy Feet, which show an appalling lack of familiarity with animation history and basic techniques.) I realize this isn't on a level with, say, The New York Times reporting as fact that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but it is still a case of people who are paid to do a job, and yet are unable to fulfill what would seem to be one of the basic demands of that job. If you're paid for having an opinion, shouldn't that opinion at least be well-informed?
