Casino Royale really makes us do a lot of guess work

Reposted from the Bondathon musings thread to it's own CR specific thread.

Many of the Bond films are a tad difficult to follow, but IMO all can be figured out. Ultimately all of the "plot holes" can be explained. But it seems to me that CR, although quite fathomable in a broad sense, does require much reflection and thought to sort out, much like a mystery thriller, as opposed to other tough-to-follow Bond films, which might require instead, a supreme effort of concentration in order to follow a more linear story development. Eg in TLD or OP, the keeping track of where the bomb is at any given time.

But with CR, even if one can follow the action on the screen, in order to fully grasp the film, one has to indulge in a lot of educated guess work as to character's motivations, loyalties and unseen plotting.

Only us hard-core Bond fans, that were compelled to put the work in, have managed to figure out what's really going down. And as I will demonstrate, we still have to make a lot of best guesses, just like M and Bond have to do, to unravel the machinations of Vesper and the mysterious forces that were pulling her strings.

Meanwhile ask any casual movie-goer that has seen CR once, even twice, and ask them to explain what's going on. They will try. They might even think they have it figured out, but if you put the tough questions to them, they will wilt.

START of CR AS MASSIVE HEADSCRATCHER ESSAY

Here's what's going on as far as I can tell, after umpteen viewings and much meditation and reflection. And I am not even going to get into keeping track of how Bond unravels the Miami airport plot. That's more of a concentration exercise, not unlike what we have to do, to follow the narrative in other Bond films

No, CR is in its own special class of complicated when it comes to figuring out the motivations and actions of our girl Vesper and the shadowy forces that guide her.
I'll just drive right in. Vesper, we learn after-the-fact, has been blackmailed by White/Quantum into ensuring that Le Chiffre wins the poker match. We are not 100 hundred sure why White cares whether Le Chiffre wins Obanno's cash back. After-all, all White promised Obanno was that Le Chiffre was the guy to handle his money. But Quantum does presumably value its rep, so helping Obanno recover his cash might be good business. You figure Le Chiffre is on thin ice, win or lose at Royale, because he's making life difficult for Quantum, unless of course Quantum was also in on the stock-shorting scam, but this is never revealed one way or the other. It's not even clear whether Le Chiffre is a part of the mysterious Organization that White reprents. I'm guessing no. I'm guessing Le Chiffre is an independant dirt-bag who takes referrals from Quantum, but again its never really explained what the Le Chiffre-Quantum (Organization) relationship is. As we shall see, CR likes to leave us guessing.
So we eventually learn afer the fact that Bond thinks Mathis revealed Bond's knowledge of Le Chiffre's tell, after Bond and the audience had just shrugged off Le Chiffre's flipping on "the tell" as some crafty poker playing as opposed to a deliberate scheme to sucker Bond by showing the tell, with a strong hand.

In reality it was actually Vesper that tipped Le Chiffre, but we don't know this until the very end, after we have been led to believe two other red herring scenarios.

Meanwhile, after Bond bankrupts Le Chiffre and you figure Le Chiffre is about to co-operate with the CIA as Leiter had suggested, rather than face White and everyone else that wants a piece of him, Vesper gets a mystery phone-call while dining with Bond. You can watch the film a 100 times, and its still not clear who called her or whether her reaction was sincere or a facade for Bond's sake.

Anyway, she explains that Mathis needs her and off she goes, but only to be captured and herded into a car by Le Chiffre's men. My best guess here is that she knows at some point that she is going to have to report to her Quantum master (White), due to the plan to get Le Chiffre's money back, having gone south.

So this raises some questions. Did Quantum actually trick her with the phone call, because they weren't sure if she had maybe taken up with Bond at this point, or did she simply lie to Bond, to get away and see what the next step in the scheme was? Who knows?

And what made Quantum so sure Bond would follow Vesper? Truth is they couldn't know. It was just a fluke that Bond suddenly had the bright idea :idea: then and there, upon hearing that Mathis had supposedly summoned Vesper, that Mathis might have tipped off Le Chiffre about Bond's knowledge of the tell. See all the guess work and filling in the blanks we have to do.

So Bond gives chase. Bond and Vesper get captured by Le Chiffre and his goons. Le Chiffre tells Bond that Mathis is a traitor. We the audience roll with it, as Bond has already come to that conclusion, or is at least entertaining it. Meanwhile its all bs.

So why did Le Chiffre spin this yarn? We are left to ponder this later. Answer: presumably because they needed to use Vesper as leverage against Bond. Vesper will give them the account number but getting the password out of Bond will be nigh impossible, but they'll try anyway, so cue the rope and chair routine. And as a last resort, promise Bond that Vesper might be spared, but Bond's not that gullible. Situation is pretty much hopeless. Agents like Bond don't crack.

So then was Vesper in any real danger at the boat? Who knows. We lose sight of her and LeChiffre's goons. All we hear is a woman screaming, presumably Vesper. Was that real or for effect -- for Bond's benefit?

So White eventually appears on the scene. He blows away a groveling Le Chiffre, essentially explaining to Le Chiffre that's he's a screw-up and good riddance. We are left to presume that he also blew away Le Chiffre's posse.

However questions again abound. Was White on the scene all along, monitoring things until he had to take charge? Did he pull Vesper aside and hatch the plot to steal back the money, out of earshot of Le Chiffre's henchpersons?

How would all of this have played out if Bond hadn't followed, which was a real possibility. I guess we are to believe that White would have used Vesper as leverage to win over Bond. Who knows what they were scheming. All we know is that Bond followed and Quantum played that hand out, but it does seem that Vesper was safe all along, and that Le Chiffre and his gang were all dead meat, unless Le Chiffre was successful in "tickling" the password out of Bond.

The rest is somewhat fuzzy clear. As we learn later. (We learn most things later btw) Vesper probably negotiated Bond's life in exchange for the cash. Presumably this deal was hatched at the boat while Bond was having his balls massaged by Le Chiffre. Was that the intent all along then? To play Vesper? Had White calculated that there wasn't a chance in hell that Bond would yield the password, no matter how much ball-bashing he was subjected to? I'd say yes. This is a plausible scenario, but its not explained by the film. You have to suss it out on your own. Brilliant scheming on the part of White though, if he was indeed masterminding events all along, and I do think he was!

So off go Bond and Vesper to the convalesence home where they banter pithy Haggis dialogue, plot to quit work, and be goof-offs for the next little while. Bond has also thankfully ditched the blue-snuggers in favour of black-snuggers, but sans the Adonis-rising-from-the-surf routine. Small mercies. But why the switch in bathing trunks? Who cares. Some CR mysteries don't matter.

So based on what we learn later, what the hell is going on with Vesper now? Nothing of course, is what it seems in this film. Most of the exposition, such as there is, comes after the fact.

Well, I guess, Vesper was just milking the moment. Bond was fully duped. White eventually got around to dispatching Gettler to collect the cash. Mathis was hauled off to prison. We never know whether Mathis is actually guilty of anything. We have to wait until the next film to learn that he was innocent all along and that Bond's trust instincts were sorely lacking.

So Vesper trots off in her bright red dress to collect the cash and payoff Gettler. If Bond hadn't caught on though, what sore of exchange was she expecting. M figures she knew she was probably going to her death. But was she? Based on what White tells us in the next film, he figures that if Vesper had lived, he could have strung along both Bond and Vesper as Quantum puppets. But we know that Bond would have figured out Vesper's duplicity after the fact, even if he hadn't given chase. Bond wasn't that whipped. And White is wrong about Bond. Bond would not have become a Quantum double-agent just because he had the hots for Vesper. But White didn't know Bond as well as we did.

So again we are left to guess. I figure Vesper was just hoping for the best. That Quantum would take the money and let her live whilst continuing to string her along, now promising also to not kill Bond in return for her duplicity. And presumably she still cared about protecting mystery French boyfriend, even if she had tossed his love-knot and probably had no further interest in boinking him.

What the hell was Vesper planning? If she goes back to Bond, after the money handoff, she's only postponing the inevitable showdown over what happened to the money.

Was she planning on committing suicide anyway because of the fine mess she had made. We won't know because M fortuitously phoned Bond, just after Vesper had strolled out the door for the bank. Meanwhile Vesper had left Bond the tip to White's identity on her cell-phone, just in case, I guess.

Are we to assume Vesper was planning on being executed or doing the deed herself? This does seem the most likely possibility considering she left her cellphone behind containing the handy info about the Gettler meeting and White's identity.

Considering all the deception, duplicity and mis-direction that abounds throughout the film, the theme of trust really does resonate. ie Who can you trust? Bond had both Mathis and Vesper all wrong. Tedious as it may be, the trust theme, which permeates both CR and its sequel, really does ring true. CR I think, drives home the message, that the secret-agent must have almost a 6th sense as to who they can trust -- an ability to sniff out duplicity. Otherwise as M might say, they aren't much use to anyone.

It's not a very well-written film.

Not exactly.

Control wrote:

It's not a very well-written film.

I feel this is the most likely explanation......or indeed imo it's actually two poorly written films, a character study and a generic actioner, ineptly fused together.

I'm not really trying to say that CR is a bad film, although its not what I want from a Bond film. I think it holds up as a stand-alone film. It's got its own vibe, but I don't think it quite works.

In a way, it is interesting that it forces you to try and piece things together. That's a different approach and not necessarily bad.The film did attract critical praise, although maybe that was from people who didn't want to admit that they had no idea what was going on.Best to be safe, nod knowingly and give it two thumbs up.

It feels as if it were re-written numerous times over the period between 2002 and 2006, and being polished originally for Brosnan, then for a possible new Bond, then for a new harder Bond, then again for a new rebooted Bond, and then finally the input from Paul Haggis.

Then this is compounded by the desire to make a more Jason Bourne-like movie. This furthers the confusion because in these types of films it is reasoned that always confusing the audience creates a more successful narrative. It doesn't.

CR is messy, silly, frustrating, meandering, far too long and drawn out and never once is anything like film or literary 007.

I'd compare it to DAD in a way. Both films have some good parts but their sums are very lacking. Neither film, really adds up.

I really do like the way the poker scenes were mapped out and shot in CR. That's tough to do, shoot an extended poker drama like that and pull it off.

If Haggis wrote all that poker stuff, I'll give him props, but I think it was probably the other two, who conceived the poker game. Haggis I think is more responsible for the ...."but then you'd be naked" drivel, etc. :pale:

Its really only the Vesper stuff that gets confusing in this movie. The rest of the movie is pretty straightforward. Le Chiffre takes money from criminals and invests it in the bombing plan, Bond foils that plan and causes Le Chiffre to lose a lot of money, Le Chiffre organizes a high stakes tournament to win the money back, Le Chiffre loses, Le Chiffre gets killed because of his mistake.