When I first saw Daniel Craig as James Bond, in Casino Royale, I was pleasantly surprised. He was good. He had a strong presence. And I wasn't expecting this – for me, every Bond since Sean Connery had seemed like a weak version of the original. Roger Moore's Bond was suave, but unreal and camp; Timothy Dalton's Bond was precious and actorly, and Pierce Brosnan's Bond, like other Brosnan characters, seemed uncomplicated and a bit shy, like a sportsman on a panel show.
Daniel Craig was refreshing – he's compelling. But when I started watching him, something nagged away at me. He was good – but was he Bond?
Let's see: for a start, he has blond hair. Not an important detail, but Bond is always described as dark. Craig's Bond is attractive, but not in the refined way suggested by Ian Fleming. One thing about Fleming's Bond was that he got into a lot of fights, but did not look like a bruiser, because he was so good at neutralising his opponent. Craig looks like a bruiser. But that's realism for you, isn't it?
And then, half-way through Casino Royale, I realised what it was that had been nagging away. In a way, I envied Connery's Bond. He was king of his world – not exactly happy, but always purring with self-satisfaction. He portrayed a man who came from an era, as the poet and Bond-fan Philip Larkin once pointed out, when England, in the popular imagination, was always right, and foreigners were always wrong. A time of great confidence. Of course, that confidence seeped away on Moore's watch, which is why the films became so 70s-camp. And by Brosnan's time, Bond almost seemed apologetic – the kind of guy who might worry about condoms and how many units of alcohol he was drinking.
Anyway, I didn't envy Craig's Bond. No, I felt sorry for him. There's a great scene in which Craig and Eva Green chat each other up on a train, and she tells him some home truths. She can see right through him. What she sees is a lonely outsider, an ordinary boy who didn't fit in with the other boys at his posh school, a man with a permanent chip on his shoulder.
Now, this – a chippy James Bond – is a departure.
As soon as Green says this, though, the scales fall from your eyes. It's obviously true. Just look into the face of Craig's Bond – he's an anxious man. All of his bravado is a carapace, just like his worked-out body. He's not scared of danger, of course – but he's very afraid of not knowing who he really is. When he looks in the mirror, a while after Eva Green's analysis, you can really see this anxiety working away at him. He's vulnerable, and it's a little bit sad.
And then, when he's on the beach, trying to relax, he tells Green he wants to get out of the service while the going's good. "You do what I do for long," he says, "and there won't be any soul left to salvage."
So Craig, I think, is a very good Bond. He's a Bond fit for a new era – a time when Britain is not always right – when the western world feels very shaky indeed. In the end, you can't really compare Craig with Connery – it's apples and bananas. But he's definitely a reversal of a downward curve - and then some. And which Bond has had better eyes?
