10月 28 2008
英语阅读 Daniel Craig
David Thompson 为《卫报》写的专栏叫做”电影生平字典” (Biographical Dictionary of Film)，每次介绍一位电影人，不是介绍生平那么简单，而是分析其电影事业上的起伏，并加上分析见解。”字典”第50期说的是007新片男主角 Daniel Craig。
Daniel Craig
The pieces are in place for the unthinkable: a slump in the Bond market. Daniel Craig’s Bond is thinking too much and doing too little
David Thomson
The Guardian,
Friday October 17 2008
Everyone in the Bond franchise business seems happy with Daniel Craig – yet the thought lingers that he may be a mole. Is he secretly an actor instead of a brand image? The surest sign of confidence in him is that the upcoming Bond picture has been allowed to cost about $225m. What’s more, that picture is called Quantum of Solace, the kind of title that Andrei Tarkovsky’s best friends might have talked him out of. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, you say, it’s a Bond picture, and they work according to different rules. That’s true, but the old rules used to work like this: Dr No (made in 1962, when Daniel Craig was two years old), cost $1.1m and it had a worldwide gross of $59.6m. Thunderball (1965) cost $9m and it had a gross of $141m. You can do those numbers yourself and they don’t mesh with the figures on the remake of Casino Royale (2006), Craig’s debut as 007 – that cost $150m, and grossed $167m at the American box office.
I don’t mean to say that Craig disappointed as Bond, even if he has a faintly working-class aura and a bleak look that might have cast him as a secondary villain in the era of Robert Shaw and Donald Pleasence. Craig was – let us say – a good enough actor and an imposing enough man to get away with it. Moreover, he is signed on to make two more Bond pictures after Quantum of Solace. It’s not my business to worry over the Bond franchise, and prophets have learned that it is a fools’ business, but I believe the pieces are now in place for the unthinkable: a slump in the Bond market – or the plain and confounding conclusion that Craig’s Bond is thinking too much and doing too little.
Meanwhile, Craig himself looks as if he’s walking on his toes and getting ready to jump. He may join the pantheon of screen Bonds (membership one – you know who), but he’s not exactly giving up the day job, either. On stage, on TV and in the movies, for close to 20 years now, Craig has worked to be versatile, effective and anonymous. He was Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow’s distraught poet in Sylvia, and he was Werner Heisenberg in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. If that makes you think Craig is cut out to be an intellectual’s playboy, don’t forget that he was Guy Crouchback in the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and George Dyer, model and lover to Francis Bacon, in John Maybury’s Love Is the Devil.
Indeed, part of Craig’s charm in these years was the deftness with which he could alter his looks and his bearing. It was a skill that attracted attention and so he got a part in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and was cast by Sam Mendes as the real snake in Road to Perdition. He had an affair with a much older woman in Roger Michell’s The Mother, and he worked for Michell again in the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Darting back to television, his gaunt, near-Slavic look worked very well in the adaptation of Robert Harris’s Archangel, about a professor who discovers something dire in the death of Joseph Stalin.
Now, he was a made man. As he played one of the avenging gang in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and then dazzled everyone as one of the killers in Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, he got the prize role of Bond. Not that he has relaxed: he was the hero, with Nicole Kidman in The Invasion – though it’s an effort to recall either of them, and he was impressive as Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass. Those films flopped, along with Flashbacks of a Fool – no one can really claim that Craig has acquired the kind of following that gave Sean Connery such confidence that he nearly forgot the need to act. And Craig is soon to be seen as one of three Russian peasants resisting German invasion in Edward Zwick’s Defiance, and is about to play the Devil in the adaptation of Glen Duncan’s comic fantasy, I, Lucifer. It’s as if he neither trusts 007 nor believes in his own impersonation, and that leads one to wonder how far the franchise relied upon Connery’s daft conviction.
