My first encounter with spy stories on screen was, like many of us, with – Bond, James Bond. I liked Pierce Brosnan as Bond. He was charming, funny and had all the right ingredients to make a very impressive James Bond. I am aware that this is a very subjective. All Bond fans have their own favourite Bonds. Bond movies reflect the suaveness of the times they were made in and this is enhanced by the state of the art technology at the time. If you watch old Bond movies, they may seem outdated for a number of reasons, one of them being the breathtaking pace of advancing technology.
James Bond was the ultimate spy before the more realistic versions took over. He never had to worry about budget. He was always equipped with ultra-modern toys ranging from pen bombs to wallets that moonlight as X-ray scanners. Bond was perhaps what spies dreamed of before they joined the spy service. He was the demo version that the recruiters showed to the aspiring applicants. I have not read Ian Fleming’s novels but the movies were full of peppy dialogues – “shaken, not stirred” – and two Bond girls per movie, one of whom has to die. It was a very formulaic setting and yet quite entertaining.
Brosnan’s Die Another Day was grittier compared to the earlier Bond movies. Daniel Craig continued this trend in Casino Royale, which is one of the most unconventional Bond movies. James Bond is less a superhero and more human in this movie and effort has been made to break the mould. No Q for instance and hence no magical gadgets, though he returns in later movies. Daniel Craig brought a different energy to James Bond, made him more serious and less playful.
Mission Impossible was an amazing mix of brilliant direction of Brian De Palma, great theme music by Lalo Schifrin and the magnetic personality of Tom Cruise. I am in awe of Tom Cruise ever since I saw Top Gun for the first time. Tom in Top Gun was like the cool older brother that every guy wants to have. Mission Impossible was crafted with minute details. And the special effects – remember CGI was just a few years old at the time – were simply breathtaking. There was a lot of opposition to the climax scene where the helicopter chases the train in a tunnel. The alternative was to end the movie at the box car scene. “You can’t end Mission Impossible with people pulling masks off in a box car”, said De Palma and Tom agreed with him. Mission Impossible was a step closer to a more realistic spy. Ethan Hunt has to meticulously plan hacking into the CIA. James Bond would have just blasted through the roof or basement.
A watershed in spy movies was Jason Bourne, based on the novels of Robert Ludlum and played impeccably by the immensely talented Matt Daemon. I am forever fascinated by The Bourne Trilogy. Jason Bourne was unlike any other spy that came before him. Consider the first movie – The Bourne Identity. Here is a spy who has amnesia, who does not know who he is but all the skills that he has learned as a second nature are still with him. He can answer in languages that he does not know he can speak. When in a fight, his reflexes take over before he can even comprehend what has happened. I find this neurological paradox very intriguing. This is portrayed with such brilliance by Matt Daemon.
Okay, time to praise Matt Daemon. How often have you seen him with lots of prosthetic makeup? In most of his roles, his face is still the same. And yet, he manages to portray a totally different character every time. Consider for instance, Invictus where Matt plays the Rugby captain Francois Pienaar. He changed his hair and became stout and stocky like the Wall of China. He changed his accent to Afrikaans English. And he walked like a solid Rugby player. Contrast his walk in Invictus with that in The Bourne Trilogy.
I keep on – and will keep on – asking on this blog, ‘what is acting?’
Those two walks is acting.
In The Bourne Trilogy, Matt is agile and quick on his feet. He slips in and out like a ghost. You can always see his bran ticking – thinking, finding solutions. Bond rarely speaks anything other than English. Bourne speaks fluent Spanish, French, German and Russian. (How does he do it??) Jason Bourne brought spy craft to a more down-to-earth level. He does not work on unlimited budget like Bond. In fact, he does not even have a budget so he has to improvise. He uses everything in his surroundings either as a resource or as a weapon. On a high speed chase on rooftops in Tangerine, he quickly grabs two pieces of clothes that are hung to dry and wraps them on his hands as a protection from the glass pieces on the roof top borders. In The Bourne Identity, when he tries to escape from the US consulate, he snatches a map of the building from the wall – something which every action movie hero in an unknown building should do but rarely does. These are just two examples. Count the number of small things Jason Bourne does in a chase, the number of small details that he notices. You will be astounded. The aim of Jason Bourne is not saving the world but rather finding out who he really is. This is where he differs from all other spies. Left to himself, he would vanish in some remote corner of the world, never to surface again.
George Smiley, the celebrated British spy fathered by John le Carré, first appeared in literature in 1961. He has been portrayed on screen by many talented actors, including Sir Alec Guinness. My favourite performance is from 2011, where Gary Oldman played Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Gary is one of the most underrated actors of the present era. When I saw JFK for the first time, I was so impressed by Kevin Costner that I hardly paid any attention to Lee Harvey Oswald. It took me a long time to realize that Lee Harvey Oswald was played by the same actor who later played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. That was when I discovered Gary Oldman. I find it unbelievable that he has been ignored by both The Academy and The Golden Globes. The range of characters that he has portrayed over the years is breathtaking.
During WWII, the choice to remain on the correct side of history was pretty clear cut. The lines became blurred in the cold war era. It was no longer possible for a spy to work with a clear conscience. In his early novels, John le Carré paints a grim picture of declining moral values in post-war Britain.
The world le Carré portrays in his novels is very much different from other fictional spies. Most of the spy work involves tailing people, checking receipts, hotel ledgers, old newspaper clips and waiting. Waiting for a long, long time till the time is right. In a novel like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there are so many threads, so many connections that you have to re-read in order to understand what really happened. le Carré only gives you clues and hints. There is no last minute reveal and there are no clear cut answers. le Carré’s spies worry about their pensions and always work under intense international political pressures. Often, you are left with more questions and dilemmas after reading the last page of a John le Carré novel.
George Smiley is middle aged and quite high up in the British intelligence. His main weapon is his brain which he uses very effectively to outsmart the opposition. He is almost never involved in any high speed chases or breathtaking action scenes. In Smiley’s People for instance, the whole story revolves around efforts to defect a major KGB spymaster, Karla. When this does happen in the final pages, it happens in the most simple and straightforward manner. Karla, dressed as a labourer simply walks across a bridge that connects East and West Berlin. He drops a lighter that originally belonged to Smiley and carries on. To anyone watching this scene from a distance, it’s just a group of people walking – no action, no violence.
John le Carré describes life of a spy in the most realistic manner imaginable. He himself was a spy for MI5/MI6 – often called as The Circus in Smiley novels – before he left the service and started working full time as a writer. For every novel, his field work is so impeccable that it reads almost like a reportage. But then he goes a step further. There is a lyrical quality to his descriptions that elevates the narrative to something much more. le Carré’s literary heroes include Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad and it shows.
Here’s an excerpt from Smiley’s People :
The fog outside the window made a grey wall…The streets were cobbled; the freezing air smelt of roast chestnuts and cigar..At the Nydegg Bridge he came to a halt, and stared into the river. So many nights, he thought. So many streets till here. He thought of Hesse: strange to wander in the fog . . . no tree knows another. The frozen mist curled low over the racing water; the weir burned creamy yellow.
I love the way le Carré adds just enough details to depict a mesmerizing scene and ends with a melancholy Hesse quote. What is Hermann Hesse doing in a spy novel? It is precisely references like these that put le Carré in a class of his own. He goes beyond the usual spy narrative and hints at much bigger and often unanswerable questions about the human condition.
