A Knight to Remember

A punchier, more thoughtful Batman takes to the streets.  (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Everything you loved from Batman Begins.

The Downside: It gets lost in itself sometimes.

    If Hancock started down the track of thinking about what kind of strange and ungrateful little worlds superheroes must inhabit, then The Dark Knight is its somber, sobering end of the line.  It isn't the world of splashy ink and dialogue bubbles where the hero's fearless deeds put evil to rest with nary an unexpected consequence.  Hancock was about a superhero whose ruff-n-tumble ways garnered him the disdain of the citizens he (occasionally) tried to defend.  The Dark Knight is a bit more cynical because not only is its hero an outcast, there's even the suggestion that Batman's presence in Gotham City may be the cause of as much crime as he's stopping.  Armed and caped hero wanna-bes take to the streets; the mob, now decimated and desperate, has stepped up violence in a struggle to survive, and a force emerges as an insinuation that no one can exist to bring order without someone as singularly minded on the other side, out to stir up entropy.

    This certainly isn't the Batman many remember from watching TV in the 60's or the increasingly schlocky movies of the 90's, when the idea of being Batman seemed both fun and cool.  As part of his "reboot" with Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan (working with a fine script by sci-fi vet David Goyer) broke the mythology down into its most basic themes of justice, symbology, and inspiration, and rebuilt it in a grounded, real-world scenario dressed in the neon-and-night otherworldlyness of Blade Runner.  He's back at it again, with his Bruce Wayne a wealthy idealist equipped with the kind of army of gadgets and weaponry that only a vast family fortune can buy.

    The starkest detail, though, about The Dark Knight is how Nolan has shifted palettes.  It lives less in the dark than Begins and eschews much of the motiff of the crumbling urban hell, taking the crisp, gritty look of an urban crime drama.  No surprise- if Blade Runner served as Nolan's inspiration for Begins, Michael Mann's 1995 epic of cops and criminals Heat provides the template here, with even the opening sequence, a fabulously-staged bank heist done to music that is very reminiscent of Elliot Goldenthal, paying homage. 

    It's a year since Begins, and the mob, its back now broken is taking to finding foreign sources to launder its money.  Drug dealers scurry from the streets when the bat signal is present, and the citizens of the Gotham are good at playing two-face: lauding the accomplishments of "the Batman" while engaging in self-righteous banter about the evils of vigilantism.  Even Bruce Wayne aka Batman (pitch-perfect Christian Bale) is thinking of giving up the cape.  He originally created Batman as an incorruptible symbol of good, but how long can people put their faith in an enigma?  As a crusading district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), steps to the plate to combat the villains of Gotham, Wayne sees in him the flesh-and-blood champion he could never be- someone who can give righteousness both a face and a name.  The only hitch- Dent's squeeze is Rachel Dawes another Gotham idealist and Wayne's lost childhood love.

    Enter the Joker, and what an entrance he makes.  First thing's first- ever since Heath Ledger's death in January, his performance here in what will, unfortunately, be his final film has been on the minds and lips of millions, leading one to wonder if the early praise was for real, or a sympathetic overreaction.  The surprise here is that in a role just built for canned ham and inhaling scenery (see Caesar Romero and Jack Nicholson, respectively), Ledger plays it close to the vest, neither making the Joker a comic arch-villain or a raging hambone.  With makeup that looks applied via paint gun and a developed twitch that gives hints of a nest of misfires blasting off in his brain, Ledger paints his Joker as a small time nut job, the kind of crank who stands on a street corner screaming about invisible transmitters and death rays, but one who has a meteor-sized grudge against the world.  Joker plays himself off to the mob, perhaps as the one man crazeee... enough to take on the Bat, but he's less interested in cashing in than proving a point.  Through a serious of increasingly demented plans he puts Gotham through a marathon of Pavlovian terror designed less to destroy buildings than the hope of the citizenry who have finally come to believe that some form of pure good can exist.  The Joker's deal is one of Darwinian survival- that morality and decency are as false and fallible as the mask a superhero might wear and that, when put to it, people will turn to their most primal instincts to survive, such as a harrowing climax in which he pits one set of hostages to determine the fate of another. 

    There's a lot to chew on here because Nolan and Goyer have set The Dark Knight up less to be a summer blockbuster than a rumination on the duality of good and evil, and a pondering on whether people are inherently one or the other.  This is all fantastic, with one slight glitch: Dark Knight is so rolled up in its morality epic, it slowly loses hold of its center.  It's a Batman movie that, once and a while, forgets that its supposed to be about Batman as it plows deeper into its tribulations of honest cops like Jim Gordon (brilliant Gary Oldman), the DA's, and the mobsters they are hunting.

    It's hard to compare The Dark Knight on this level with Batman Begins- both are by the same filmmaker, both approach the material with a strict camp-free policy, but the tones are very different and if Knight reaches for the moon to hand us a weightier, more thematic storyline, it also buckles more under the weight it carries.  It certainly looks a lot better, with a number of oh-sh*t-yeah sequences shot in blistering IMAX, including a prisoner convoy chase through the heart of Gotham that's my vote for the best action sequence of the year.  Nolan, who only recently was making heady, actor-friendly drama/thrillers like Memento and Insomnia (another crime story about a clash between flawed good and evil), seemed like he was dropped into a cold bath for Batman Begins and some of his action set pieces came off a bit "rough."  Still, he's no John Woo or Michael Bay (thank goodness), but he's cleaned up his act some.

    Ledger is the stand-out on the marquee, and for good reason, but another gift of Nolan's has been his flawless casting, although from Michael Caine as Bruce Wayne's confidant and butler Alfred to Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking of the Rachel Dawes reigns from Katie Holmes.  The one person not to be forgotten, though, is Eckhart, who has perhaps the most heart-breaking role as the never-say-die dreamer who watches everything around him get burned down in the cruelest fate imaginable.

    Is The Dark Knight flawed?  Yes it is, and it's a big enough gap to keep it shy of reaching brilliance, but it's also flawed in the best ways imaginable.  It's hard to guess how long Nolan will be able to keep Batman going before the inevitable creep of campiness starts to invade, but The Dark Knight betrays the intentions of an artisan bringing his craft of stripping human beings bare and tossing them into the mix to the flashy world of high concept and high budget, and as such he may be the Joker's ultimate scorn, because if this doesn't speak well of human intentions, what does?  A-