GOLDENEYE
Bond-age and Discipline
A film review by Greta Christina
Copyright 1995 Greta Christina
United Artists. Starring Pierce Brosnan, Izabella Scorupco, Famke Janssen, Judi Dench, Sean Bean and Joe Don Baker. Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein, story by Michael France. Directed by Martin Campbell. Rated PG-13.
Life is getting a bit too surreal for me, folks. I just saw a movie that had some of the best, most interesting, most varied female characters that I've seen all year. And it was a James Bond movie. No shit. I kid you not; they made a James Bond movie with really spectacularly cool women.
I don't know what this world is coming to. There's probably not much point in summarizing the plot of GOLDENEYE; it's a James Bond movie, and that's all you really need to know. But I suppose a plot summary is traditional in a movie review, so here goes. James Bond (Pierce Brosnan this time) runs around saving the world from a brilliant but psychotic arch villain. He drives fast cars, shoots big guns, blows a lot of stuff up, sneaks around doing spy stuff, and horses around with pretty women. GOLDENEYE is a pretty good example of the genre; the production values are high, the stunts and explosions are bitching, and Brosnan does a more-than-adequate job as Bond.
And the women are fucking amazing. All of them (well, most of them, anyway). The women in GOLDENEYE are tough and strong and competent. No matter what field they're in, whether they're running an intelligence agency or plotting to destroy the world, they know what the hell they're doing, and they do it with gusto. They don't wait around passively for men to do all the fun important stuff; they're active participants in the action, doing fun important stuff their very own selves.
Anyone who is familiar with the Bond ouvre will recognize immediately that this is a radical departure. Most 007 movies have very specific, very standardized types of women. There's the fashionably beautiful airhead, generally in a bikini or an evening gown, whose sole purpose in the movie is to fuck James Bond. There's the good-girl, also fashionably beautiful, marginally less airheaded than the fuckbunny but with a pronounced tendency to cringe and cower in a crisis, whose sole purpose in the movie is to get saved by James Bond. There's the villainess, often competent in some traditionally male field but ruthless, unprincipled and indifferent to human life, who acts as a foil to James Bond (although never as his primary antagonist-- she always works for the arch-villain) and is killed or destroyed in the end. And there's the misguided bad-girl, who is both beautiful and competent but has somehow been misled into working for the bad guys, who is converted to Truth, Justice and the British Way of Life by getting fucked by James Bond. None of them ever instigate any of the action, and their lives are entirely focused in one way or another on Bond. (In the interests of fairness, I should point out that I haven't seen every single 007 movie every made; this analysis is based on the six or seven that I have seen.)
But GOLDENEYE departs from this formula in some very drastic ways. I'd like to start with the secondary characters; since one of the more fabulous things about GOLDENEYE's women is their variety, the minor characters wind up contributing a great deal to the surprisingly feminist flavor of the movie. Take the character of M, head of British intelligence and Bond's superior officer. "Now, wait a minute," I hear you cry. "M's not a woman. M changes from movie to movie, but M has never been a woman. No woman has ever given James Bond his working orders." Well, she is and she does in this one, played with a delightful hardassed professional edge by Judi Dench. Bond doesn't much like her; but although he gives her shit, he doesn't question her authority. Interestingly, her management style is presented as less intuitive and impetuous, more analytical and responsible, than the spy-boys are really happy with; the exact opposite of the criticism usually levelled at women in power. And in her confrontation with 007, she reads him the riot act with the best of them, calling him a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms are wasted on me." Quite a departure from the female fawning and groveling that characterizes most Bond movies.
And look at Moneypenny (Samantha Bond), Bond's devoted assistant. In previous 007 movies, Moneypenny is an aging, unattractive spinster with a schoolgirl crush on 007 and no life outside her job, who lives for the approval and bantering flirtation that James occasionally deigns to bestow upon her. In GOLDENEYE, however, Moneypenny is none of the above. She's attractive--not as a bimbo, but as a striking and stylish adult woman--and she has a life as well as a career. She flirts with Bond, but the flirtation is anything but servile. In fact, when he makes some suggestive comment to her, she points out that what he's doing could be considered sexual harassment--and then challenges him to come through on all the innuendos he's aimed at her for so long. Again, I've never seen anything like it in any 007 movie.
Moving on to the major characters, we have the villainess, Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen). That's right: Onatopp. Even the name is a departure form previous Bond temptresses such as, say, Pussy Galore. Onatopp is a ravenous, sadistic beauty, a former Soviet fighter pilot who smokes cigars and drives Ferraris and gets sexually aroused by machine-gun fire and kills men by crushing them to death between her thighs. She takes her martinis "straight--with a twist," and she looks hot as hell in a uniform. I, for one, have fallen in love. (Side note for Star Trek TNG fans: Janssen, the woman who plays Onatopp, also played Kamala, the metamorph babe who falls for Picard in "The Perfect Mate." Yum.) In many ways she's quite similar to previous Bond villainesses; beautiful but ruthless, sexy but dangerous, plays second fiddle to the real (male) villain, dies a horrible death. But her appropriation of traditionally male attributes into a distinctly female persona, as well as her aggressive, audacious, wildly kinky sexuality, make for a significant deviation (if you'll pardon the pun) from the 007 standard.
Finally, we come to the heroine, Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco), a cute but sort of geeky computer programmer. Yes, folks, blasphemy of blasphemies; Bond's girl is a smart, competent techno-geek, a serious professional in her own right, who can do something difficult and important that he can't do.
Like the other women in GOLDENEYE, Natalya is utterly lacking in the passivity and the cringing subservience that most Bond babes have had in the past. When her world comes (literally) crashing down around her head, she uses her head to keep herself safe and then crawls out of the wreckage with her bare hands. She doesn't hesitate to mouth off to Bond; in fact, she gives him a piece of her mind about his testosterone-addled lifestyle on more than one occasion. And when they're sneaking around in the bad guy's hideout and Bond tells her to stay put, she totally ignores him and runs to the computer room to jam the bad guys' program.
What's more, she dresses like a regular schmoe; during most of the movie, she's in a cardigan and a plain skirt and thick black tights, and for much of the rest of it she's in combat trousers and what looks an awful lot like a long thermal undershirt. They do get her into a bikini at one point--it must be in the contract somewhere that Bond's girlfriend has to wear a bikini for at least one scene--but for the most part, she dresses like any sane human being would if they lived in freezing Russia or were running around trying to defeat bad guys. She's definitely a babe; the outfits suit her, and she does have the standard Hollywood female body of the 90s. But she comes across as a sexy and attractive real-life non-plastic human being. Once again, quite unlike any Bond women I've ever seen.
But what makes Natalya such a radical and delightful departure from the usual good-girl Bond-meat isn't her skilled professionalism, or her charming geekdom, or her feisty spirit. It's not even her intelligence or courage or physical strength. What makes her so great is her participation in the action of the movie. She doesn't just run around after 007, squealing and cowering and waiting to be rescued (well, not much, anyway). She gets in there and gets her hands dirty; she can shoot guns and fly helicopters (no, I don't know why a computer programmer would know how to fly a helicopter); she comes up with ideas and whacks bad guys in the head. And her computer skills are central to the plot, indispensable to solving the puzzle and thwarting the bad guys' evil scheme.
Granted, it's still Bond's game; it's his puzzle that she's solving, it's his arch-enemy that she's battling, and of course it's his pants that she wants to get into. But she's still one of the coolest women I've seen on the screen all year. She reminds me a lot of the Sandra Bullock character in Speed; she's basically a regular schmoe in a bad situation, and she does freak out about it on occasion, but overall she handles the crisis with grace and courage and style.
I'm impressed. It's not just that I've never seen women like this in any 007 movie; I've seen damn few women like this in amy movie. The filmmakers didn't just manage to come up with a decent female character; they came up with several, all strong and competent and nervy, and all in their own unique way. It's almost as if Hollywood finally figured out that lots of women enjoy action movies, and will pay to see ones that don't insult us. I applaud their efforts, and hope they keep it up.
-- (Written for the Spectator; posted with permission. Responses to this review may be printed in the Spectator Express Mail section. Please indicate if your response is not for publication.) Our WWW home page is located at http://www.blowfish.com/
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