When The Dark Knight began to unspool at the screening I attended, you could’ve heard a pin drop. Rarely have I ever heard a movie greeted with such a pregnant silence. The buzz on Christopher Nolan’s sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins has reached a feverish level, which in itself is kind of neat. Not just because it’s nice to see people getting excited about going to the movies at a time when there’s been loads of handwringing over the demise of the ritual, but because Nolan, who made his feature debut with a tricky little indie called Following, is a filmmaker worth paying attention to. The Dark Knight is worth paying attention to as well, and if you can get on Nolan’s savage wavelength, you won’t be disappointed in what he’s created here.
Among the details that have stuck with me from Batman Begins is the fact that Nolan’s is a Batman who wakes up bruised in the morning, and that sobering current of realism is expanded on in the director’s new feature, which has a palette that’s heavy on the black and blue. No other Batman film has felt so much like a gritty crime drama, albeit one with some memorably phantasmagoric flourishes. This is miles from the Adam West movie I remember waiting all day to watch on UHF television with my parents, but I’m of the opinion that there’s no one way to tell this story. And what a mad story it turns out to be when played out the way Nolan imagines it. One of the notorious elements of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman is how it occupies an uneasy place between art and commerce. (With that Prince soundtrack shoehorned in, you can almost hear Burton and the studio execs fighting.) But Nolan appears to have had close to free rein here, and the result has an edgy menace to it.
A major force that drives the film is Heath Ledger’s sick take on Batman’s nemesis the Joker. In the months since the young actor’s untimely passing, his personal tragedy has often overwhelmed discussion of Nolan’s film or else loomed unmentioned but not unthought of, the elephant in the room. Yet while real life occasionally intrudes on one’s thoughts unbidden, giving a few moments in the film a more macabre tinge than Nolan or Ledger could ever have intended, it speaks highly of Ledger’s talent that his ferocious take on the character overcomes even the tabloid headlines. (Nolan should be praised for his decision to cast Ledger, a not-at-all obvious choice that was met with initial distress by fans, until the release of the film’s trailer.) With his peeling pancake makeup, odd posture, and odder vocal inflections, the Joker is consistently frightening but also brutally funny. He’s a man who isn’t – devoid in this incarnation of any real name, prior identity, or origin story – and also a man without a plan, other than creating as much chaos as possible. It’s said in the film that the Joker is the kind of man who simply wants to watch the world burn, and his presence opens up the kind of nihilistic abyss that rarely worms its way into the popular consciousness outside of Sex Pistols records. Pretty subversive stuff for a summer blockbuster.
This is also one of the rare superhero films that can incorporate multiple villains into a single story. An impeccably-cast Aaron Eckhardt starts the film as the slightly snarky do-gooder D.A. Harvey Dent before morphing into a particularly gruesome version of the familiar villain Two-Face.(He looks less like Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever than he does Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London.) If Ledger’s Joker is terrifying because we don’t know his story, Eckhardt’s Two Face is terrifying because we do. It’s a nightmare vision of curdled idealism.
The good guys do all right for themselves too. Bale continues to be an ideal Batman, equally believable as a pretty boy millionaire and a haunted, good-hearted vigilante. (He still drops his voice an octave or so more than is entirely necessary when he dons the cape and cowl, but at least this time the decision has a creepy fringe benefit; Batman and the Joker share a similar throaty snarl, providing a troubling link between hero and villain.) Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine each get a few good moments in as Batman’s trusted associates, and Gary Oldman brings an appealing, melancholy warmth to his good guy copper Jim Gordon.
This is the most hardboiled Batman movie to date, and Nolan pulls off the near-impossible by preventing the triumph of good from feeling like a sure thing. (In this movie, it really isn’t.) But just when one begins to believe in the Joker’s words about a ravenous world forever at the edge of chaos, Nolan shows a little faith. In a story as tough as this one, that goes a long way.
by Victoria Large | Source: 35MM Print
14 Jul 2008 9:13 PM | Comments (9)
The best film of the year. When the film ended, I sat in stunned silence. I could not believe what I just witnessed. As a long time Batman fan, it is everything I wanted to see in a Batman film and more. I wouldnt even call it a “comic book” film. Its a dark, gritty crime drama on the level of Goodfellas and The Departed. Its a near-masterpiece.
Not remotely the best film of the year, but good for a popular action flick. Probably not better than Spiderman 3…Ledger really brought out a great character but seemed pretty wimpy to be honest, most of the film centered around him stubling around like a nut and Bale beating the heck out of him. What is the textbook definition of latent homosexuality? The interrogation scene where Bale pushes the Joker around in quiet desperation reeks of so much. What is Bale going to do when he can’t find more Batman-esque work? I admit he fits the role perfectly and fits the dark films he stars in but what else can he do? His lurking role in the film was the best part obviously, but where was the action? Is Ledger getting pinned as the darker character here in his death?
Probably not better than Spiderman 3
Ouch.
I haven’t seen Spiderman 3. But I am almost positive that statement is completely and objectively false.
No, not the best film of the year. but bloody light years ahead of Spiderman 3, ferchrissakes. It’s rare to see a mainstream movie with this many obvious flaws, so totally messy, uneven and often wildly confusing, but which still effortlessly succeeds as entertainment. If nothing else, you have to admire the ambition.
The best American film since Griffith’s Intolerance. Makes The French Connection look like Dead Heat. Heath Ledger’s performance is scarier and more electric that Hitler at Nuremberg. Christopher Nolan invented cinema. I’ve seen this movie 19 times in the last week and I still have only absorbed 5% of what this movie has to offer. My boss asked me when I was coming back to work and I told him that TDK makes the whole concept of work obsolete. My wife went with me the 8th time I saw TDK and she had multiple orgasms due to the mise en scene. TDK cured my daughter of Leukemia. Pedro Costa saw TDK and immediately announced his retirement, saying that TDK said everything he was trying to say in Colossal Youth, only with more depth and heart.
This is starting to sound like Landmark.
Finally got around to seeing this last night. Far from a masterpiece, but is the first “comic book” movie to make me forget I was watching a “comic book” movie.
Aside from Batman’s being an inherently fascist character, anyone else find this movie incredibly conservative? The film is in essence saying that while idealist liberals like Dent and Gordon can try as they might, society still needs someone to disregard laws and pull some terrorist activity of his own in order to defeat the terrorists. And that society’s resentment toward this figure is necessary but misplaced. I couldn’t help but think of Dubya as our very own Dark Knight, using brute force, secret wiretaps, rendition and other unsavory and extralegal methods to “protect” us. And we’re so ungrateful, choosing the idealize White Knights like Gore and Obama when the true hero is the one who bears the brunt of evil in order to fight it. Anyway, I’m curious to see what other people think of this film, viewed through a post-9/11 lens.
The only problem I have with that type of interpretation of Nolan’s version of Batman is that it assumes that Nolan always presents his protagonist as standing on the “correct” side of the morality within his narratives. If anything, throughout most of his (albeit limited) career, Nolan has constantly provided his audience with protagonists that find themselves crossing over the standard boundaries of accepted morality in order to overcome their circumstances and achieve something they originally felt was necessary. In fact, after the end of the events they have experienced, Nolan’s heroes are very rarely portrayed as being absolutely righteous, significantly virtuous, or morally superior in comparison to any other character (specifically the antagonist) or the viewer, and Nolan often makes it clear that they don’t really deserve our automatic sympathy. Nolan’s heroes are very much flawed and sometimes decidedly amoral despite their best efforts and usually bare some of the responsibility for the troubling circumstances that have suddenly surfaced within the worlds he creates. I seems as though viewers are having a great deal of trouble discerning this characteristic within Nolan’s latest film because we naturally presume that we must view a superhero as being a positive character at the conclusion of a the typical superhero film.
ANDREW ANDERSON
19 July 2008
6:01 PM