Saturday Night At The Movies

Knight and the city

By Dennis Hartley

I love this dirty town.

Psst…Have you heard? There’s this new Batman movie out this summer. Rumor has it that it might have legs. Personally, I think the whole thing sounds a little iffy. I hope that the film studio will be able to recoup its modest $100 million promotion expenditure. Furthermore, I…oops, hang on; someone is sending me a text message. Ah-it’s from one of my inside sources. It says: “$155,000,000 opening weekend.” What a relief (whew!).

(Disengage “irony mode”) I occasionally get chastised around this here series of tubes for having a propensity for reviewing films that “nobody has seen”. Well, we can all certainly rest assured that I’ve sent my sniveling inner film snob scurrying back to its special place under the bed for this week’s post (oops…now disengage “sarcasm mode”).

Some leading critics are hailing The Dark Knight as the best “superhero” movie of all time. I can’t weigh in on that angle, because it’s not one of my favorite genres (although I admit being pleasantly surprised by Iron Man, which I reviewed here). However, one thing I can tell you with assurance about Christopher Nolan’s sequel to Batman Begins is this: it is one of the best contemporary film noirs I’ve seen since Michael Mann’s Heat

Giving you a detailed synopsis would be a moot exercise; I think there is already enough media out there right now spouting the major plot points (not to mention the endless discourse bubbling in thousands of fan boy chat rooms, for those unafraid to slog through waist-deep in “spoiler alerts”). Suffice it to say that crime-ridden Gotham City still enjoys the nocturnal protection of the Batman (Christian Bale), the masked vigilante who is the alter-ego of wealthy industrialist playboy (corporate fascist?) Bruce Wayne. He continues his uneasy alliance with the stalwart Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman) an Elliot Ness-type lawman who has vowed to round up all the bad guys in Gotham and outfit them in striped PJs. In this outing, they are joined by “incorruptible” D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

A spanner in the works arrives in the person of The Joker (the late Heath Ledger) a vile criminal mastermind who has formed an uneasy alliance of his own with an assortment of Gotham’s most unsavory recidivists, like the city’s mob boss (Eric Roberts). However, the Joker’s increasingly twisted, nihilistic acts of mayhem even begin to repulse his underworld cohorts. He is the embodiment of purely soulless anarchy, which brings us to Ledger’s performance, which is what lies at the very (black) heart of this film.

This is one part of the considerable hype surrounding the film that doesn’t just blow smoke; Ledger is mesmerizing in every single frame that he inhabits. This definitely isn’t your father’s Joker (Cesar Romero’s vaudevillian cackler in Batman ’66) or even your Uncle Jack’s Joker (Nicholson’s hammy Kabuki in Batman ’89). Ledger plays his Joker like a psychotic mash-up of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, Tim Curry’s evil clown in Stephen King’s It (with maybe some occasional sampling from Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show ) and Gene Simmons on crack. He’s John Wayne Gacy, coming for your children with a paring knife, and in the clown costume. I don’t know what war-torn region of the human soul Ledger went to in order to find his character, but I don’t ever want to go there, even just to snap a few pictures. There’s nothing cartoonish or campy about this Joker; he scared the living crap out of me.

While there is no shortage of the requisite budget-busting action sequences that one expects in a summer crowd pleaser, it’s the surprisingly complex morality tale simmering just beneath the biff! pow! and bam! in Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay that I found to be unexpectedly engaging; it even verges on being (gulp!) thought-provoking.

Nolan is no stranger to the noir sensibility; previous films like Insomnia , Memento , and Following bear that out. His visual sense and gift for atmosphere tells me that he has closely studied some of the great genre stylists; in fact the bank robbery that opens The Dark Knight contains an obvious homage to the heist scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. There are a lot of classic noir themes at work here as well, in particular the hard-boiled notion that no one who lives and breathes is incorruptible; everyone has their price. This idea informs the nexus between the “heroes” and “villains” of the piece; nearly everyone eventually “crosses the line” to get what they want (even if it’s “justice”). That is what is most frightening about this particular incarnation of the Joker; his sole raison d’etre is to orchestrate a perpetual scenario of fear and anarchy so as to reduce all players to a base primal state of instinctual self-preservation-and then sit back and enjoy the show. “I am an agent of chaos,” he states at one point, and you believe him.

I wouldn’t recommend bringing the kids (or the squeamish) to this film, it’s hands down the most brutally violent of the Batman series. The violence feels very “real”; and I think that is what makes it disturbing. Despite the fact that it is, after all, a super hero fantasy, the film carries an overall tone of gritty realism that is unique for the genre. One scene in particular, set in an interrogation room of a police station and involving Batman and his nemesis, begins to reek uncomfortably of Eau de Jack Bauer (Holy Gitmo, Batman!).

I have a couple of other issues, but they are not enough to sink the movie. Superb actors like Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Cillian Murphy feel under-utilized in their relatively underwritten parts. I thought there were two or three too many false endings; as a consequence a few subplots, like the transition of a principal “good guy” into another signature Batman nemesis, seem to get short shrift. Undoubtedly, these loose ends were primarily tacked on as sequel bait, which I suppose is par for the course.

So should we have more installments of the franchise? Judging from the record breaking opening weekend take, it’s probably a purely academic question at this point. I’m happy to let the fan boys debate that issue until the bats fly home. Even if you’re not really Bat-crazy (like yours truly) you still might want to catch the The Dark Knight, if only for Heath Ledger’s singularly unique contribution to the cinema’s screen villain hall of fame.

Update from digby:

Oh no, he di-unt…

What Bush and Batman Have in Common

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”