The Dark Knight (2008)

Warning: major plot points are discussed.

There are certain pictures, Taxi Driver comes to mind, and The Conversation, and, more recently, There Will Be Blood, that present worlds so dire and helpless it tickles you. These films are ahead of you too - they flip your feeling of capture into an eventual skewed, bleak joke. Christopher Nolan’s first Batman picture, Batman Begins, with its sack-headed boogeyman and intimations of post-9/11 displacement and paranoia, was a frolic compared to his follow-up, The Dark Knight. It’s not hard to see why it’s been called a masterpiece - the picture has a seductively unpleasant charge - and the novelty lies in the fact that you don’t have to go to the art-houses this time to get it. Batman Begins couldn’t be accused of subtlety, but it most certainly is compared to its sequel - this picture is bigger, bigger, more and more-an explosion of the powder-keg our Batman (Christian Bale) waltzed over in the first picture. By going against his ideology and killing Ducard (Liam Neeson) in the first film (which, regardless of his rationale, he most certainly did do), Batman has now proverbially summoned a diseased, equal reaction to his hypocritical action - the ghoulish terrorist The Joker (Heath Ledger). The Dark Knight, regrettably however, largely lacks those other head-trips’ sense of play.

The Dark Knight is one of the most intense entertainments I can remember seeing - but it’s not a masterpiece - it’s rather mechanical - and it feels studied and self-conscious - too interested in “transcending” the pulp-superhero ghetto. Christopher Nolan has indeed made a genre masterpiece about the futility and self-absorption of revenge - it was called Memento - and it got into our blood through the lean, confident purity of its action - and without the largely banal Soc 101 lecturing that’s abundant here. It’s brave and ambitious of Nolan to allow such naked, earnest, social pleading to inform his Batman film - but it also verges on the absurd. The Dark Knight’s exploration of people in the midst of chaos, and of responsibility and hypocrisy, exists, despite some critics’ and fans’ assertions, on purely pop terms. (Nolan, and his brother Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay, clearly have a thesis, and the characters are never once allowed to counter it-to surprise us.) I don’t use the word “pop” contemptuously; I love pop films more than any other kind - which is why, while watching The Dark Knight, I sometimes wished the characters would just shush.

Batman Begins cleared the sound-bite hurdle by giving most of them to the least appealing character, the City Hall crusader Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes); so we could give the picture the benefit of the doubt and assume it knew she was a naïve ninny. Here, Holmes has been mercifully replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and she gives the character a spark of manipulative, knowing sexuality; this young woman, teamed with the new, idealistic, photogenic D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), has obviously become a player. In an interrogation room with a man who handles all of Gotham’s criminal masterminds’ millions, Gyllenhaal sash-shays and smiles and nearly slithers - she knows she’s got the guy just where she wants him - and we know she knows next to actually nothing that counts. Dawes’ misplaced confidence - and the knowledge that the Joker could pop up anywhere-imbue the scene with real dread.

I wanted more moments like that one, where we grasp the paradox of everyone’s misdeeds through action (or gesture) over dialogue. There’s too much gooey moralizing - and what should be most ironic - Harvey Dent’s fall from grace - lacks immediacy and clarity. Nolan is clearly stranded between fidelity to the comic books and his own private interests, and they chafe one another more than most have acknowledged. Harvey Dent’s fate doesn’t jive with the “realistic” world that Nolan has devised; and his eventual devolution into something called Two-Face plays like an EC comic - its ghastliness is too trumped up. As Dent, Eckhart gives one of his smoothest, most authoritative, movie-star performances; as Two-Face he has nothing to play - and is stuck trying to breathe emotional air into a rushed-thrown-in-for-the-fans development that we don’t believe at all. The idea of Dent as a hypocrite who immediately folds is a strong one, but the pulpiness eats it up - but even the pulp isn’t given its due-Dent has a disappointingly after-the-fact exit.

The real problem with The Dark Knight’s thematic heavy–breathing is one that’s always inherent in the “paradox of the vigilante” movie - that we want to see the vigilante kick stuff up. The filmmakers want it too - and so the mourning over the violence that must occur is clearly fraudulent, and beating around the bush. We pretend that Batman’s fascism bothers us - but that’s exactly why we pay the ticket price - to see his fascism. Critics almost always go for this “have your cake and eat it too” approach - because most of them, if I was to bet, are too insecure to admit that they like action movies for the same reason we do; which is to satisfy the dirty urge to see asses get kicked. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven was applauded, but had the same issue - congratulating itself for deploring the violence it dealt out anyway. David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence was also applauded as a picture about this country’s obsession with violence, yet was, itself, probably the most cathartically satisfying violent movie that year.

You know your message has gone topsy-turvy when the vigilante up for examination barely registers, and the terrorist provoking his inner demons is far more impressive (though that’s partially intentional, I think, it’s sometimes tough here to tell the intentional from the unintentional). Christian Bale can be a very effective actor, and he’s particularly powerful in David Ayers’ underrated Harsh Times, and I love the principle of Bale’s style -which is that you’re supposed to come to him. But Bale has, for the moment, apparently exhausted his resources, or is stuck in characters too similar to one another. Bale’s Batman, or Bruce Wayne when he’s not battling madmen, is far too similar to his Patrick Bateman (a one letter difference is surprisingly apt). Batman is a non-entity, and Wayne comes off as so impersonal as to be faintly psychotic. We look at Wayne, and Dawes, and Dent, and we have no problem understanding why Dawes might favor Dent - as a human he’s touchingly capable of making square good faith hip again (which is why the bungling of his downfall is such a disappointment).

Watching The Dark Knight, I missed Michael Keaton - with his vulnerability, eccentricity and self-loathing - you understood why he put a bat-suit on, and why that would eventually unravel him; Tim Burton’s first Batman film doesn’t age well, but his unforced empathy with Wayne remains far more convincing than Nolan’s detached, observational strive for profundity. Keaton’s Wayne felt The Joker’s questioning (and mocking) of his authority - Bale just seems blindly self-entitled (again, partially intentional) and when Bale’s Wayne is meant to be conflicted, he voices it. Batman suffers quite a bit in this film, but you’d be hard pressed to know that judging by Bale’s performance. The Dark Knight is designed to challenge Batman, and to punish him for his ego - but Bale never gives us a sense of that happening in a primal way - we have to fall back on yet another soliloquy (delivered by either Bale or Morgan Freeman or Michael Caine, the latter two having become - regrettably - masters of the expositional bon mot.)

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I loved Unforgiven and A History of Violence anyway, despite the misdiagnosis of their power. We’ve been over this before; and you most likely know by now that rationalizing the enjoyment of a disreputable movie as something reputable irritates me. The Dark Knight is not really about us before or after 9/11, or before or after any other national catastrophe. The picture is about a very talented filmmaker trying to outdo Heat, and Dirty Harry, and The Killing, his own Batman Begins and many others. A major critic (Ansen?, Denby?) wrote that The Dark Knight is actually in love with chaos, and that couldn’t be more true. Nolan is trying to shake the summer movie out of its stasis and inform it with a sense of cleansing-for-keeps-full-blooded disaster.

Divorced of the gobblety-gook and seen in pure pop terms, The Dark Knight is a fascinating grab bag of the extraordinarily effective and the still sort of mixed up. There are moments in the film that deliver in ways rare to the contemporary mainstream film, and one of the best scenes is the blunt, jarringly immediate opening heist, which details the robbing of a major mob bank by a gang of clown-faced psychos who have been ordered to dispatch with one another as they complete their rounds. This robbery, which has a terrific punch-line, reminds us that Christopher Nolan excels in intimate, unfettered action sequences. I defended the somewhat maligned action of Batman Begins, because the disorientation was called for - we were supposed to witness Batman’s emergence through his victim’s eyes. Batman has already been established by The Dark Knight though, and the film is clearly meant as a wide-reaching epic, so the aims of the action have changed; and certain pivotal sequences (an attempted highway kidnapping, the convoluted climax) are nearly impossible to follow. Nolan, on the large scale, has not licked the action sequence - spatial information is garbled and, while the scenes still deliver in tense shards of information, we come away wishing we were privy to more.

Luckily Nolan has built more intimacy into this picture than he did in Batman Begins, so the filmmaker of Memento and Insomnia and the opening of this picture is allowed more room to play. There’s a terrifying moment between Rachel and The Joker at a fundraiser - where he taunts her with the sort of pop-psychology that the film otherwise regrettably buys into. The Joker turns “Why So Serious?” into a scathing, seething, sexually potent rebel yell, and I thought of a similar, more pornographic encounter between Laura Dern and Willem Dafoe in Wild at Heart. And there’s an image, with the Joker walking away (dressed as a nurse) from a hospital as it explodes, that has the sickening pull of a nightmare. And there’s one action scene, a stand-off between Batman on the Bat-pod (which has a great entrance) and The Joker in a tractor-trailer that authentically thrills because, the passions of the characters (well, The Joker) are allowed to trump the pyrotechnics.

Heath Ledger, as Batman’s phantom id and avenging angel, is an element of The Dark Knight that comes together just as you hope. Ledger gives a brilliant meta-performance, the sort that actually seems to be satirizing the pomposity of other portions of the movie. Did Nolan know that? I’m sure he did, and he probably knew that Ledger was also going to walk away with the picture. Ledger, in his best performances, had a trick - he goes way, way out (over the top doesn’t suffice), and gives you plenty of bits that define most audiences’ idea of what acting is (and is tailor made for Oscars) but, he enriches it by going way, way in at the same time and in equal measure. Ledger, in his more famous roles, essentially gives two performances at once - and that wobbly shifting between inner and outer, maximum and minimum, packs a major wallop; his performances have something more minimal and fragile, something that lingers once the more obvious fireworks fade.

As The Joker, Ledger shambles and adopts this hurly-burly walk that’s ridiculous and eerie; and he chews his cheeks and hunches over, and Ledger, as both actor and character, dares you to call him on his hyperbole. The Joker sucks on his words, and speaks in a rasp that could be taken as a little fey, if you could ever forget the boiling rage that fuels it. The Joker embodies the idea of being too mad to speak - he’s so bowled over by inner dementia, and disappointment and restless intelligence that his voice is numbed, inverted; with the exception of the laugh, which explodes unpredictably, and temporarily lances his chattering tension. This Ledger performance has some Brando and some Paul Muni of Scarface in it; but it’s also entirely its own thing - deranged, lost-boy vaudeville that lends Nolan’s platitudes sting. Ledger’s Joker is obviously psychopathic, and the film doesn’t sentimentalize that (though the violence is too muted), but the Joker is also the one character in the picture who’s undeniably, unapologetically, in touch with his inner song. Ledger even, occasionally, brings something out in Bale, most notably in an interrogation scene (that’s probably meant to play as a more vicious version of the Pacino-DeNiro café scene in Heat) of surprising helter-skelter insanity. And there’s The Joker’s haunting exit - dangling upside down - twirling-twirling-twirling into nothingness.

People call The Dark Knight a masterpiece because they love its conviction in itself, its intensity, its all-over-the-placeness, and because Ledger’s performance is so flamboyant and mesmerizing, and because they need a word to pinpoint how much fun they had being so spooked in the theatre. There is a word for that sort of movie: cool. The Dark Knight is a very cool movie, a movie that, despite its unevenness, I enjoyed quite a bit. I look forward to returning to it, just as I look forward to the few summer movies each year that really scratch my genre-movie-nerd itch. But we need to stop calling a spade a shovel-WALL-E is not a profound exploration of Earth’s impending ecological problems, it’s a simple love story that delivers beautifully - with the Earth stuff as a McGuffin. The Dark Knight only superficially explores our current anxiety (though there are plenty of doubles and symbols and opportunities for people to make a mountain out of a molehill)-it’s fun, occasionally exhilarating, nonsense by a gifted director who has, and this important, produced stronger work. Why do we always have to rationalize our pleasures?

★★★½

Posted on July 21st, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 2008 |

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