I assumed the movie theater would be crowded. High noon on Thanksgiving Day–wouldn’t there be people of all ages and genders told to get out of someone’s hair and go see a movie for heaven’s sake? But the multiplex was deserted. We found seats in the middle of the middle, with an older couple above and a motley group of three below, we could hear each other breathing. I sat there with a weird feeling, what I call my “apocalyptic-zombies-have-eaten-every-one-on-earth-but-us” feeling that I get sometimes in department stores and Nevada. The feeling that we should be somewhere else with people we know eating goat cheese appetizers and not with the dregs of the suburbs eating sour gummies.

This melancholy was exacerbated by the trailers. Will Smith and his son are homeless.  I choked up. A football team got killed in a plane. I choked up. The Whale Rider girl is Mary the Mother of God. Big sob choke. Sylvester Stallone really needs to find gainful employment other than Rocky movies. Not so choked. Spiderman goes bad and may alienate Mary Jane. Sniff.

We should be setting the table. We should be watching my husband cook things we don’t understand. We should be chatting. I should be lighting pillar candles. Double choke sniff.

I have only been exiled from Thanksgiving once before. I was about fifteen and having snapped at my mother at the dinner table, was sent to my room without dinner. It was atypically harsh to banish one of six from the holiday nuclear family tableau; clearly I was misunderstood and wrote dark poetry all day and into the night. After the rest went to sleep, I snuck out of my room, ate a left over half of pecan pie and watched “Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang” on the basement television. I sat hunched and tense, eating furtively, waiting for the footfalls upstairs that would disrupt my clandestine defiance. None came. They were either too tired or too tired of me to fight.

I was comforted by Ian Fleming’s attempt at a children’s story. I believed in that crazy car and those sweets with the holes in them. I wanted Dick Van Dyke to get a clue about the pretty woman with the hat. I was chilled to the bone by the creepy child catcher guy, relieved when the kids were rescued and ultimately in love with the possibility of love. I was there, transported over land, sea and air. The next day I hummed, “chitty, chitty, bang, bang, I love you,” and acted solemn and noble towards my parents. They never asked about the pie.

This Thanksgiving, my doctor sister is on call and unable to leave home. Friends who have joined us on and off for years, all had other commitments. We were unable to travel to them because of work. Too late we had realized that for the first time in our grown-up lives, we were without guests or invites. So of course, we went to the movies. 

As the lights finally dimmed, I thought of Ian Fleming. Hoping he could save the day again, this time not with a car that comes alive, but a hero reinvented, Bond, James Bond.

Relationships with James Bond vary in our home. I did not see a Bond movie until my 30’s, my husband dabbled in his youth, my younger son has no interest and my older son is obsessed. Through him, we own and have watched, at least in passing, all “official” twenty movies in the series, can probably recite all the Bond actors and recognize most Bond women if not name them (with grins).  My son has posters and books and lists of trivia (like the actor who played Goldfinger was completely dubbed, he only speaks German) and has been anticipating this movie for months. The rest of us were along for the ride and between “Happy Feet” and “Casino Royale”, the latter won the coin toss.

The first scene is in grainy black and white and very violent. I thought: “what am I doing here? I should have gone to the penguin show, if nothing else to see the Harry Potter trailer.” Then the movie leaves Kansas for Technicolor anime opening credits. The camera shines for the first time on Daniel Craig’s blue eyes. I perked up.

I expected the action scenes, a little rougher than usual, more hand to hand, but requisitely exciting. I expected the evil, ugly bad guys killing and dying in evil, ugly ways. I expected stunning women dressed in revealing and intricate gowns. I expected expensive cars getting smashed, exotic postcard settings and Judy Dench as the most magnificent “M.” I even expected the overlong and murky plot.

What I did not expect was to like it so much.

This Bond movie has close-up exchanges of witty, sexy repartee. There is a love story with an actual progression of dreamy intimacy. Bond gets hurt, is comforted and at one point even comforts another. Craig brings an underlying complexity—his Bond seems at once charismatic and emotionally stunted, distant and vulnerable, dashing in one shot, haggard and broken in the next. Bond is played as a human being, still primitive, not fully evolved, but recognizable reactions flicker across an intelligent face. I have read that this was how Fleming originally imagined his agent, a “cold hearted bastard” to be sure, but certainly more than the cardboard cutouts of past film incarnations.

And those blue eyes—bright with jest, grief rimmed red, lit at night from the dashboard of a car, puzzling out a solution—the gaze alone is worth the price of the ticket. 

I felt less sorry for myself by the end. I was transported again over land, sea, and air, back to an almost empty theater. I marked the strange symmetry, two lonely Thanksgivings linked by Ian Fleming’s dual visions of  isolated people—one in which a sad, distracted man finds a magical car and love and lives happily ever after; the other in which a sad, distracted man finds a magical cell phone and love and does not live happily at all. The first time I was lost in froth and music. This time I related to the pain and paradox. Years may change the cast and the perspective, but the movies are constant. We sit back or huddle forward and feel ourselves reassured, surprised and dazzled by an extended community that is always waiting for us, winking at us, with impossible blue eyes.