James Bond pursues personal demons as well as evil conspiracy

Rating: 8/10 (11 November 2015)

The estimable British director Sam Mendes stands Spectre on two narrative frames. In the first and last battle two huge old edifices are spectacularly blown up. The image evokes the recent destructions ISIS has wrought on ancient emblems of civilization, the destruction of the past.
But the second frame rejects the political reading of the film in favour of the psychological. In the pre-title sequence James Bond (Daniel Craig) steps out of a Day of the Dead skeleton suit, then even more surprisingly steps out of a seduction, to pursue his license to kill. The last scene plays out another return from the dead when Bond drives off in the resurrected Aston Martin that Q had rebuilt from from its last surviving gene, the steering wheel. In another resurrection dear old M (Judi Dench) on a tape from beyond the grave despatches Bond to kill her killer. Though the new British intelligence head is bent upon ending the license to kill, temporarily abetted by the current M (Ralph Fiennes), Bond pursues his mission to the end.
No, almost to the end. On the last bridge Bond stops short of killing his arch-enemy Blovelt (meister creep Christoph Walz). In order to start a new life with Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), whose father Bond promised to protect her, Bond holds his fire, tosses his gun into the Thames and walks away from his role as legitimate angel of death. He steps away from death in favour of love and life.
The plot centers on Bond's psyche more than on global politics. In fact, the dangers of corrupt surveillance also have a psychological dimension, the assault on the private self. The villain Blovelt, who has caused all Bond's pain, is the son of the man who saved young orphan James. Out of jealousy Blovelt killed his father and devoted his life to building a global evil to thwart his heroic step-brother.
As the film probes Bond's subconscious, in two dramatic sequences Bond plunges into dark depths to save himself. The plunge is an emblem of introspection. In the spirit of openness and exposure, here the lovers' first sex scene cuts to a long train on an open desert,in contrast to the famous tunnel cut in Hitchcock's North by Northwest.
So the film is a valedictory to the old James Bond. This Bond saves civilization from an international conspiracy that reaches into the highest office in British intelligence. But his key victory is over his personal demons. He uncovers his supposedly dead Shadow, Blovelt, and abandons his liberty to cause death, however righteous his cause.
What saves Bond is — spoiler alert — the love of a good woman. She's not the first, but she is the first he saves from Blovelt, which suggests she embodies a romantic future quite different from his past. Her name is a live giveaway: Madeleine Swann alludes to the madeleines that trigger Proust's memories in his classic Swann's Way. Here she triggers the release of the hardened, suppressed killer into a man of love. There may be more James Bond films ahead, but this psychodrama articulates Daniel Craig's departure.