REVIEW:
With
Batman Begins, his 2005 reboot of the Batman film franchise, hailed as bringing the Caped Crusader back to the screen better than ever, Christopher Nolan had the green light to proceed with the highly-anticipated sequel that came to be called The Dark Knight. For most fans, Nolan's return to Gotham City was worth the three year wait. Batman Begins returned Batman to respectability; The Dark Knight takes this capital and runs with it, crafting what is easily one of, if not the most ambitious and adult-oriented comic book superhero movies ever made.
Since defeating Ra's Al Ghul at the climax of Batman Begins, Batman (Christian Bale) is now an established figure in Gotham City. Criminals run and hide at the sight of the Batsignal, and once all-powerful mobsters are afraid to show their faces at night. Officially, he is still considered an outlaw by the Gotham authorities, but Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is working more and more closely with him, and the other cops largely turn a blind eye to his association with Batman. Gordon introduces Batman to a new ally, crusading new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who, aided and abetted by Batman and Gordon, launches a campaign to clean up Gotham, publicly going after the mob's money laundering operations, privately relying on Batman to bring in the "untouchable" criminals. Dent starts to make headway, so much so in fact that Bruce sees an opportunity emerging on the horizon to hang up the Batsuit, hand over the reins to someone who can achieve the same ends as himself without having to operate outside of the law or hide his face, and maybe still have a chance for a normal life with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), although she is now involved with Dent. But while Batman's presence has struck fear into the criminal underworld, he has also had effects he hadn't anticipated, not all of them positive. There are copycats who go out in makeshift Batsuits and try to take down criminals themselves, but without his skill or restraint. And as their hold over Gotham threatens to slip away, the mobs of Gotham, led by Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), who has replaced Carmine Falcone (played by Tom Wilkinson in Begins) turn to a man who presents himself as their savior- a bizarre, twisted criminal mastermind with a slashed smile and clownish facepaint known only as The Joker (Heath Ledger). The Joker offers to eliminate Batman- for a price- but soon proves to have an agenda all his own. He's not really interested in helping the mob, or in their money, he just wants to spread as much chaos and mayhem as possible, which puts him inexorably on a collision course with Batman and those close to him.
Perhaps the most key thing that The Dark Knight does right- which was also probably the biggest reason for the success of Batman Begins- is that Nolan and his cast and crew take the material seriously, without a whiff of camp or condescension. Nolan has mentioned not only the obvious sources of the Batman comics, but crime epics like Heat as influences. While Batman Begins revolved around Bruce Wayne, The Dark Knight is working on a broader scope, including enough supporting characters and subplots to rival a Batman graphic novel. The movie includes any number of nods to various Batman comics, such as a rooftop meeting between Batman, Dent, and Gordon inspired by and even using one line of dialogue from The Long Halloween, and The Joker making television broadcasts announching his upcoming crimes a la The Man Who Laughs. Unlike many of Nolan's films, which have reputations for toying with chronology (possibly his best-known film, Memento, goes backwards from the end to the beginning, and The Prestige and even Batman Begins feature numerous episodic flasbacks and jumps backward and forwards in time), The Dark Knight is straightforward and linear, but that doesn't mean Nolan has abandoned his fondness for convoluted plotlines. Unsurprisingly, considering his brother and The Prestige screenwriter Jonathan Nolan co-wrote the script with him, The Dark Knight has a relentlessly twisty-turny plot with some new diabolical scheme hatched around every corner. It's not so labrynthine that most viewers should get confused, but it's not a movie where a trip to the restroom is advisable. And what might be more impressive than how completely seriously Nolan takes the material might be how far he is willing to go to defy superhero movie expectations. In everything from Superman to all three Spider-Mans to even Batman Begins, we're used to seeing damsels in distress flung from high places and snatched from certain doom at the last minute, the villain hatching some climactic evil scheme but the innocents being rescued, good cleanly triumping over evil, and all being well. That doesn't always happen here. At the time, much was made of Batman Begins taking Batman back to its darker, more serious roots, but there is darkness aplenty in the aptly-named The Dark Knight that goes well above and beyond anything in Begins. Batman Begins had few "silly" moments. The Dark Knight has none, and warrants its PG-13 rating. The Joker is a far more frightening villain than Scarecrow, and parents considering taking small children to see Knight should do so with the knowledge that a major character suffers the inevitable fate of having one side of his face burned off, and that the movie only maintains its PG-13 rating by employing the time-honored "camera cut away a split second before most gruesome moment" trick; even so, the implication of what happens when The Joker sticks his knife in a victim's mouth and snarls "let's put a smile on that face" is plenty clear enough.
Most of the cast and crew from Batman Begins returns here (the most prominent exception being Katie Holmes, who is replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal). Christian Bale continues to be the perfect Bruce Wayne/Batman; he's great fun in the all-too-few moments where he plays up Bruce's vacuous playboy facade, and as his true self, his steely-eyed stoicism gives him an imposing presence that none of his predecessors in the role was able to match (it doesn't hurt anything that Bale is by far the most buff and believably physical of the Batman actors). The only relatively minor complaint about Bale's Batman portrayal is that his voice, which didn't bother me in Begins despite being a source of criticism at the time, seems about three times as gruff and growling here, occasionally to an unintentionally borderline comical extent. Obviously Bruce has to disguise his voice, and it mostly worked in the first film, but there are times here when it seems like he's forcing it too much. Of the other veterans, Gary Oldman has by far the most expanded role, and no silly "comic relief" moments (he doesn't drive the Tumbler, and he doesn't say lines like "I gotta get me one of those"). It's far from one of Oldman's showiest performances- in fact, he is exceptionally subdued, although he's allowed to show more life than in Begins- but he invests Gordon with a quiet, dutiful dignity and a sense of simple decency and integrity. In fact, it could be argued that Gordon is the character who by movie's end remains the most stalwartly morally uncompromised. Michael Caine has slightly less to do this time around, and Morgan Freeman has slightly more, but both veteran thespians are welcome in any capacity, and supply their effortless humor and dignity (Freeman gets one of the best lines in the movie). Begins left it a safe assumption that Lucius Fox knows Bruce is Batman; here it's overtly obvious, and we get a few more scenes of Fox supplying Wayne with nifty gadgets that would feel right at home in a James Bond movie (not for the first time, it occurs to me that Bale would probably make a pretty good Bond).
Of course, the most attention-grabbing newcomer is The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, whose accidental death of a prescription drug overdose dominated talk of the movie leading up to its release along with sky-high hype and talk of a posthumous Oscar nomination. The Joker is probably the best-known comic book villain ever created, and no fictional hero and villain are as inextricably linked as Batman and The Joker. They are flip sides of the coin, order vs. chaos, and fortunately the boundless praise heaped on Ledger's performance is not merely out of sympathy for his untimely death. Ledger is terrific, not only doing justice to the character from the comics, but providing one of the most memorable and endlessly watchable movie villains since we came face to face with Anthony Hopkins' indelible Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Ledger is sometimes weirdly hilarious (of course he gets the most one-liners, and the sight of him in a female nurse's outfit prancing blissfully away as the hospital explodes in the background might be the kind of "thing you won't see anywhere else" that's almost worth the price of admission alone) but he's no goofy caricature. He's flippant and sardonic, but where Ledger succeeds where Jack Nicholson's much-overrated version failed is that he also makes The Joker genuinely frightening. He is at once a playful clown and a diabolical fiend. Nicholson's Joker overdid the former at the expense of the latter, inviting us to laugh along with and to some extent almost root for him. Ledger has moments where he makes us laugh, but his Joker is a vile, sadistic creature who acts without any clear reason and is utterly devoid of compunction. Ledger does for The Joker much the same as Bale did for Bruce/Batman; he brings the character to life from the comics with a faithulness and justice that no predecessor achieved. My own prediction is that Ledger will get nominated (partly because he's very good, partly because it will be seen as slighting a late actor if he isn't), but actually winning is a long shot.
The other main new character is Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent, a crusading idealistic politician of good intentions who any Batfan can tell you is fated to become the villainous, disfigured Two-Face. There's always something a little too slick and cocky about Eckhart (unsurprisingly, he seems most at home playing lawyers), and Harvey initially seems a little superficial, but as the movie goes on Eckhart brings across that trying to clean up Gotham means more to him than just lip service and popularity points, as well as the chinks in his armor. Eckhart plays Dent with growing intensity and conviction as he reaches his inevitable downward spiral, but since he's still playing, at least for the majority of the movie, a relatively normal, restrained individual, his fine performance exists unavoidably in the shadow of Ledger's. Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces Katie Holmes, who declined to return, in the role of Rachel Dawes, but while Gyllenhaal is a more credible Assistant DA, Rachel never completely escapes feeling like a superfluous character who doesn't give anyone who plays her much to grab onto. In relatively small roles, we have Eric Roberts doing his smug gangster bit as Maroni, Anthony Michael Hall popping up periodically as a reporter out for Batman scoops, Michael Jai White as another of Gotham's gang lords, Monique Curnen as a subordinate of Gordon's, and in a bit of ironic casting, Nestor Carbonell, who played Batman parody Batmanuel on the action sitcom The Tick, is Gotham's Mayor. Cillian Murphy has a fleeting cameo almost at the beginning of the movie; Murphy and/or Scarecrow fans who hoped he'd have something substantial to do in the second installment will be disappointed.
I'm not sure whether I like Batman Begins or The Dark Knight best, partly because the two films, despite done by the same cast, crew, and director, are markedly different. Begins was an origin story that devoted much of its time to developing the character of Bruce Wayne and detailing the creation of his Batman persona. Here, Batman is an established character, and the filmmakers were free to launch headfirst into the story. It opens with a bang- literally- in a fast-paced bank heist staged by The Joker that might remind some viewers of Heat (Heat cast member William Fichtner has a cameo as a tough guy bank manager in a probably deliberate node), and rarely pauses for breath from then on. Oddly, The Dark Knight feels both long (it clocks in at a hefty 2 1/2 hours) and rushed, especially early on. Scenes go by at a rapid-fire clip, few lasting more than a few minutes. The storyline, which juggles all kinds of subplots and side characters, is complex and ambitious. Some of it- including the imposter Batmen, a Wayne Enterprises accountant (Joshua Harto) who asks too many questions, and a tangent in Hong Kong- is a little extraneous, and could have been eliminated for more attention on more important plotlines. The plot bubbles and churns, and goes in unpredictable directions. While we know Harvey Dent is doomed to become Two-Face, the Nolans put their own spin on the particulars, and we're not certain how everything is going to wrap up. In Batman Begins Bruce spent the first half of the movie developing his Batman persona, and the second half uncovering and thwarting the expected “climactic evil master plan”. Here, it’s not that simple. The Dark Knight is very much to Nolan's Batman series as The Empire Strikes Back was to Star Wars. In Batman Begins and A New Hope, the fight was not over, but good had clearly come out on top. The Joker rampages through Gotham like a force of destruction, seemingly desiring nothing more than to spread chaos and mayhem for his own murky motives. Money holds no meaning for him except as a means to an end, and he’s not intimidated by a sound Batman thrashing. He doesn't have any master plan as such, just a relentless series of devious plots aimed at "upsetting the established order". But while The Joker doesn’t have any grand overall scheme like Ra’s Al Ghul, there is method to his madness. While Batman comes to loathe The Joker with a passion, The Joker does not hate Batman, nor does he want him dead. “I don’t want to kill you,” he tells the Caped Crusader at one point, “you complete me”. In fact, The Joker is intrigued and fascinated by Batman, seeing him as a kind of kindred spirit- “you’re just a freak…like me”- and themselves as two sides of the same coin, and in his own warped way, trying to “help” him see that his dedication to rules and law and order are ridiculous and pointless in an inherently insane world, and that the only answer to the world’s madness is not to fight against it, but to embrace it. “When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other”, he tells Batman, and to prove his point, he continually stages scenarios he calls “social experiments” aimed at forcing Gothamites, individually, in pairs, or in bunches into impossible moral dilemmas. By his very nature, The Joker is not the most three-dimensional of characters, but here, as in his best portrayals in the comics, he is a walking representation of a larger theme, a fiendish trickster-god of chaos and anarchy aimed at testing humanity's true nature when pushed to the brink. The Nolans obviously intended to make their story topical- The Joker is twice explicitly referred to as a "terrorist"- but just when it seems things can't spin any more out of control, they show a glimmer of faith in humanity. Law and order prevails, at least to a point, but the good guys pay terrible prices for their victories.
All this darkness and complexity doesn't mean The Dark Knight skimps on one basic ingredient for any summer blockbuster comic book superhero movie- action. The most ambitious and extended action sequence in the film is a car chase between a SWAT van, a semi hijacked by The Joker, and the Tumbler, and there are a number of sure-fire crowd-pleasing moments, including the debut of the Batpod, a suped-up motorcycle sporting cannons and monster tires. When it comes to the hand-to-hand fight scenes, Nolan shows improvement from Batman Begins, allowing us to actually see the fighting, although a darkly-lit and somewhat disorganized climactic fight through multiple levels of a building gets a little confusing. There are three sequences, one as the police scramble to protect three officials simultaneously targeted by The Joker, another as Bruce races to find The Joker before he can assassinate the Mayor, and a third, as Batman faces a race against time in which the outcome is almost as terrible if he loses as if he wins, that generate pulse-pounding suspense. But the standout sequence of the movie isn't any of the action bits, it's a confrontation between Batman and The Joker across a table in which The Joker lays out his worldview. Ledger is never better, he and Bale are explosive playing against each other, and The Joker's dialogue to Batman has some of the same depth and twisted intelligence of the conversations between Hannibal and Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs (which almost anyone will agree are the parts everyone remembers).
As relentlessly fast-paced and twisty-turny as it is, The Dark Knight's length eventually catches up with it. In the final twenty to thirty minutes, there's no deterioration in quality, but there's a sense that the movie is continuing on beyond a reasonable climax point, as though the filmmakers insisted on including material that could have been saved for a third installment. I would have preferred Two-Face, one of the most complex Batman villains and one of his more prominent adversaries after The Joker, was created in one movie and been a full-fledged villain in another, or at least had his fate left with more ambiguity than the seeming finality with which the Nolans end things. Nolan has said repeatedly that he concentrates only on making the best movie possible while making it, without thought of sequels or follow-ups, and the way he handles Two-Face bears this out. However, it's worth noting that half an hour of Two-Face in Nolan's hands is better and vastly more faithful and respectful to the character than a full movie's worth of the Joel Schumacher-Tommy Lee Jones bastardization in Batman Forever. In fact, as with Batman and The Joker, Two-Face is nailed so well that we wish we could have more of him.
Will Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale return for a third visit to Gotham City? Despite its apparent wrap up of Two-Face, The Dark Knight ends with enough ambiguity and loose ends to warrant a follow-up, but it's up in the air at this point. At this point, whether this cast and crew ever gives us another Batman film, Batfans owe them, and Christopher Nolan above all, a debt of gratitude for giving us two Batman films that have a right to be called by that name, and in The Dark Knight, one of the most ambitious and mature "comic book movies" ever made.
***1/2
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What did you think of Two-Face?
