The dark knight deflates

Noel Vera

Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" is a lot like the car featured
so prominently in the trailers: muscular, oversized, not
particularly eloquent or imaginatively realized (it's been called "a
Humvee on steroids"--how excited can you be about souped-up version
of an existing vehicle?).

The movie borrows heavily from Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One," so
heavily it's possible to call this an adaptation of Miller's graphic
novel; I'd say it's the best to date, Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City"
notwithstanding, adding that is at best faint praise. Judging from
his work (the abovementioned plus his best-known book, "The Dark
Knight Returns") Miller's is a rather narrowly focused sensibility,
bleak romanticism surrounded by stripped-down, exaggerated elements
of the "noir" landscape. If I somewhat prefer Nolan's picture over
Rodriguez, it's because Nolan isn't as faithful; as an onscreen
approximation of what Miller's work is like, "Sin City" is about
perfect--black and white, bigger than life, and dreary as hell.

Christian Bale is a perfect choice for Batman--if anything, too
perfect. I remember the uproar when Warner Brothers announced
Michael Keaton as their choice to play the title role; you could
hear the batgeeks scream "how dare a stand-up comedian play our
hero?!" Part of the pleasure of watching Keaton put on cowl and cape
(silencing the batgeeks once and for all) was the surprise you felt,
watching this 'stand-up' grow into the Caped Crusader (not as
surprised were those who've seen Keaton in earlier movies and sensed
his volatile intensity in films like Burton's "Beetlejuice," even in
dumb comedies like "Mr. Mom" and "Nightshift"). One of the prime
considerations for casting Batman (other than that he had to have a
strong mouth and jaw sticking out from under the cowl) was that the
actor had to radiate danger, had to give you the sense that at any
moment he could pull a mask over his face and fight crime or grab a
kitchen knife and start stabbing wildly. Bale's previous lead role
was as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron's fairly witty "American
Psycho"--how big a surprise can he be?

Bale does have one thing in his favor--he plays Bruce Wayne as an
upper-class bastard, a real piece of work, and does it with an élan
that suggests that he was born to the role (he brought the same
sense of arrogant entitlement to his Patrick Bateman). That said,
Goyer fails to give him a scene where the sense of danger really
breaks out, a scene like Keaton at the fireplace with a raised poker
in hand--that came out of nowhere, and was all the more frightening
because no one bothered to explain afterwards.

Surrounding Bale are an overqualified cast of supporting players--
Linus Roache as a benign (and rather bland) Thomas Wayne; Tom
Wilkinson as Carmine Falcone (the unlikeliest looking 'Carmine' I've
ever seen); Ken Watanabe as a criminally underused Ra's Al Ghul.
Morgan Freeman dryly makes use of his few lines as Lucius Fox,
Wayne's armorer; Gary Oldman is uncharacteristically decent and
stolid as Sgt. James Gordon--perversely so, you might say, which is
good (the picture needs all the perversity it can muster). Liam
Neeson's large, physical presence as Henri Ducard, Ghul's second in
command, reminds you that he used to play rugged-hero roles in
movies like "Darkman" and "Rob Roy" (he could be our generation's
Burt Lancaster). Michael Caine, the biggest star in the cast, has
all the best lines as Wayne's faithful servant and surrogate father
figure, Alfred; he even manages to fool you into thinking they wrote
a character for him to play.

Katie Holmes as Atty. Rachel Dawes is the single worst case of
miscasting in the movie. Mr. Tom Cruise's latest beard (he
auditioned several before settling on wholesome Holmes) seems too
young and dewy to play upright moral touchstone to Bale's dissipated
Bruce; her scenes with him are clearly unenthusiastic attempts to
develop a love interest (they may have to bring in a Robin to keep
him company). By picture's end, where she has an endless scene
opposite Bale where they discuss their future (or lack of) together,
you can't help but wish that Bale would just push her into yon
nearby Batwell, and have done with her.

Cillian Murphy, who was shortlisted to play Batman, so impressed
Nolan that he cast him as his opposite number, The Scarecrow; this
should have lead to more interesting doubling/doppelganger imagery
than actually happens, which is unfortunate. Actually, Murphy's
entire onscreen performance is something of a disappointment, not
the least because Murphy himself seems so promising: he has the
bright, glittering eyes to play a near-psychopath, and a mouth
presentable enough to stick out from under a cowl. He has nicely
menacing bedside manners as psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane, but
when he puts on the burlap to become The Scarecrow, Nolan makes the
hilarious mistake of shooting him through throbbing lenses, like
they used in cheap '50s monster movies (to suggest the waves of
terror he radiates, I suppose; all I got was a serious migraine).
Murphy does have one good line, just before he flicks a flame
towards a gasoline-doused Batman: "Lighten up!" But too much of the
movie is focused on Bateman's transformation from Bruce Wayne to
Batman, so there's not much time to develop Murphy's character; he's
left inhabiting the margins of the movie, a promising but never
fully realized supervillain.

The absence of a memorable villain is perhaps the chief flaw in this
incarnation of Batman: I understand this is suppose to be an origins
story, which reminds me of an old complaint about superhero movies:
how boring origins stories (which fans would already know about and
non-fans would hardly care to learn) can be. For much of the film
Nolan and Goyer put Bale's Bruce Wayne on an inward-looking quest,
dealing mainly with his own fitness to become Batman; he has no real
equal to dispute his claim, much less match wits with him. In all
this grim grittiness, one longs for the irreverent antics of a Jack
Nicholson, the vicious misanthropy of a Danny Devito, the
spectacularly sexy antagonism of a Michelle Pfeiffer. Batman is a
dark enough figure all by himself; without a contrasting villain to
run circles around him and light fires under him and make subversive
commentary about him, he's unrelieved darkness. I've mentioned
Murphy as The Scarecrow, confined to the margins; Liam Neeson as
Ducard is no help either--he tries to explain Batman to himself in a
manner as solemnly earnest as Alfred Kinsey channeling Yoda explains
sex to a middle-class virgin. Seriousness talking to seriousness in
all seriousness isn't necessarily profound; in this case, it's
deadly dull.

Batgeeks complain: "what naysayers want is a return to Adam West's
campy TV series, or Joel Schumacher's screechfests, complete with
bat-nipples!" Not really--comedy is one of many emotional colors in
a filmmakers' palette; Burton's isn't necessarily campy, or even
lighthearted. He finds the horror in the humor, like Mark Twain does
in "Huckleberry Finn" (ostensibly a comic novel); in fact, I find
Burton's work more unsettling than Nolan's (who seems consistently
humor-impaired--I'm thinking of "Memento," where the only cheerful
element is Joe Pantoliano's line readings; and "Insomnia," where the
only wit seems to emanate from Robin Williams' presence) since
Burton's jokes throw you off-guard, unprepared for the hidden
vicious barb.

I miss Burton's films--there, I've said it. I miss his irreverence,
the way he'd have all the batgeeks jumping with their collective
underwear bunched between their cheeks (an antagonistic relationship
between a filmmaker and fans is, I suppose, ideal). I miss the way
he'd strand a perfectly serious Batman in the center of his
unsettlingly perverse world, where not just the supervillains but
the director himself is an enemy, constantly cutting out the ground
from under him (all this, and a PG rating!). I miss the grandeur of
his vision, the way he'd take Danny Elfman's doomed-hero music score
and Anton Furst's magnificently corrupt sets and fuse them into a
cinematic whole ("Batman Begins'" music and production design are
about as memorable as junk mail); however flawed it was, it was a
genuine vision, where the best that Nolan can do is show flashes of
cleverness here and there (in his previous films--
"Following;" "Memento;" "Insomnia"--you saw a fondness for gimmicks
masking the lack of a genuine sensibility). "Batman Begins" is
faithful, all right, and successful in what it sets out to do:
reduce Burton's larger-than-life Batman into just another action
hero.

(First published in Businessworld, 6/17/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)