WHY SO DELIRIOUS?

(Note to readers: with so many reviews already out there, I requested permission from WB to post mine without further delay. They agreed.)

It only took seven live action features – yes, I’m counting the Adam West one – but finally, finally there’s a Batman onscreen that’s recognizable to me as the real deal. And – Holy Brokeback Mountain, Batman! – an honest-to-goodness, 99% accurate Joker as well! (The final percentage point is, as you must know by now, due to this Joker’s use of face paint rather than chemically bleached white skin. I thought it would be a deal-breaker, but it isn’t.)

Longtime readers will remember that I nitpicked the previous Batman movies to death. BATMAN BEGINS was on the right track, but its overlong origin, murky cinematography, and ham-fisted David Goyer dialogue made it more of a slog than it needed to be. But this, oh yeah, has pretty much all I wanted in a cinematic Batman. Stuff that shouldn’t have been hard to do before, except Hollywood kept screwing things up needlessly.

For instance: This may be the first Batman since Adam West to actually use detective skills! Imagine that! I mean, the DC in “DC Comics” only stands for “Detective Comics” in the first place (making the word “comics” after it redundant, but whatevs). I think this is also the first cinematic Batman since Adam West to not reveal his secret identity to anyone new. Also: He uses his martial arts skills! And he has a flexible costume that isn’t bulletproof or indestructible! (Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox makes a joke about this being the first Batsuit to allow Bruce to actually turn his head) This Batman shows up to crime scenes without looking ridiculous, disappears whenever Jim Gordon’s head is turned, has an appropriate air of self-righteousness, and is committed to preserving life; none of that “I’m not gonna kill you, but I don’t have to save you” stuff from last time. True, at times Christian Bale overdoes the fake Clint Eastwood voice that Batman adopts so that no-one will know it’s Bruce, and the black paint on the eyes still strikes me as a bit goofy. But this is Batman, folks, and if, like me, you’ve always thought the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm animated version was tops, you should be pretty happy with what Christopher Nolan has done this time around. Even officers Bullock and Montoya are here, although for some reason they’re not named Bullock and Montoya. Same characters, though, regardless of moniker.

Nolan even manages to do something no live-action Batman has ever even tried, creating a sequence in which Batman’s eye-slits glow white in the darkness, as they often do in the cartoons and comics. And it’s not just stylistic, either; there’s a plot-driven reason that I was so focused on initially that it wasn’t until the second viewing that I realized what was actually being achieved.

And characters refer to “the Batman,” just like in the comics. Hooray!

GET SMART features competing organizations known as “Control” and “Kaos,” but in THE DARK KNIGHT, we have the real deal: extremely self-controlled and disciplined Bruce Wayne, versus the chaos that is the Joker (Heath Ledger). Now, cosmetically this Joker seems different – as I said, he wears face paint, and has that Ichi the Killer scar across his mouth (will the movies ever realize that Joker in the comics doesn’t have a cosmetically forced grin, and even changes expression sometimes?), but his psychology is dead on. Part Clockwork Orange, part V for Vendetta (Alan Moore’s original, not the movie version), part Al-Qaeda terrorist, a little bit Jigsaw Killer from SAW (there’s an interrogation scene which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Donnie Walhberg-Tobin Bell encounter in SAW II), and even maintaining a little bit of Jack Nicholson’s “homicidal artist” take, this is a Joker who can brainstorm elaborate schemes that ultimately have no point except to amuse himself. He’ll rob a bank just so he can burn the money afterwards, and kill people’s loved ones just to mess with their heads. Nolan and Ledger both understand that the reason Joker is Batman’s ultimate foe is that, unlike other criminals, Joker’s actions cannot be predicted, because he rarely acts rationally or even in his own self-interest. He’d be perfectly happy to have Batman kill him, because that, much like the prospect of Luke Skywalker murdering Darth Vader in RETURN OF THE JEDI, would represent victory for evil, ruining and corrupting the hero by putting blood on his hands.

Tim Burton, needless to say, didn’t get that at all, which has always bothered me. Batman should never, EVER utter the line, “I’m gonna kill you!” Unless you’re doing 1930s Bob Kane Batman, which could be fun.

In what may be another Nicholsonian touch, this Joker also asks the same question of all his prey, though it’s no non-sequitur about the devil; instead, he asks if they know how he got the scars in his face. Then he tells the backstory…but it’s different every time. They think they’re learning his motives when they hear it, but he’s just fucking with them for the sake of another joke that’s funny only to him. The dialogue is much improved from BATMAN BEGINS, which is probably due to the fact that David Goyer was kept on story duty only, with Nolan and his brother Jonathan writing the actual script. Goyer tends to have good ideas, but his dialogue usually sucks big-time, so this is exactly how he should be utilized.

From the early clips and trailers, I was very nervous about Heath Ledger’s Wishmaster Djinn-meets-Mr. Moviefone voice (it’s no stretch to imagine hearing something like “To kill the Batman…PRESS ONE! To blow up a schoolbus…PRESS TWO!”). In small doses, it sounds like the overenunciation of a foreigner doing a fake American accent, which of course it is. And yet it works – the impression one gets is that Joker is barely holding it together enough to actually talk, and could descend into gibberish or hysterics at any second, so he is forcibly overenunciating to make sure that the correct words actually escape his lips. It’s an unusual take on the character, but definitely one with some thought behind it – it’s unlike any performance Ledger has given before (Oscar talk, however, is as premature as Ledger’s untimely death. Jeff Bridges in IRON MAN is a more nuanced villain.)

Gotham City itself is usually a major “character” in its own right, and I wasn’t a big fan of the BEGINS version, which placed Arkham Asylum in the middle of an island slum, and looked dirty brown (Anton Furst’s 1989 version still rules). Nolan seems determined not to have the city look gothic, but at least this time he gives it a blue tinge instead of brown, and shoots the action scenes at enough of a distance that you can see what’s going on. Batman also leaves the country at one point to go to Hong Kong, which is interesting, and stunning in IMAX. See it that way if you can – the screen opens up for most aerial cityscapes and major action sequences, and the clarity of detail is stunning. Not to mention the Batmobile will make your seats rumble.

There’s no Wayne Manor or Batcave here; we’re told that they’re still being rebuilt. Instead, Bruce has a penthouse apartment, and a mini-lair underneath the docks, accessible via a false storage container. I find it hard to believe that a man as rich as Bruce couldn’t rebuild his mansion immediately; but I suppose the point is to allow some creativity with the settings, as well as to portray Batman/Bruce as uprooted and off-balance. Laden with self-doubt this go-around, Bruce constantly wonders if Batman is actually doing more harm than good, and whether the city really needs a high-tech vigilante when it has a crusading do-gooder district attorney in Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), a man unafraid to make enemies on all sides in the service of putting away blatant crooks and corrupt cops, the latter group having given him the nickname of “Harvey Two-Face” (har, har). Upping Bruce’s angst factor vis-à-vis Harvey is the fact that the righteous D.A. is now banging Bruce’s one true love Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, a VAST improvement over Mrs. Cruise).

Comic fans, and anyone who saw BATMAN FOREVER, know what becomes of Dent that ultimately changes the dynamic. If you don’t know, there’s no need to spoil it, except perhaps to say that what ensues is one of many reasons to think twice about taking young children to this movie, no matter how much they love Batman. And I should add that Eckhart nails it in a way that Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t even approach, and Billy Dee Williams was never given the chance to. The Dent storyline also gives us the best explanation to date of what exactly the “Dark Knight” nickname means…but I certainly won’t spoil that. There are elements of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns comic, but I’ll leave them for eagle-eyed fans to spot.

The Batman-Joker battle, on the other hand, has strong echoes of the War on Terror, but unlike most Hollywood movies (the V FOR VENDETTA “adaptation,” say), this doesn’t result in a simple-minded “baddies = Bush, goodies = regular Muslims” analogy. The Joker is very much the terrorist, while Batman must consider to what degree he’s willing to go outside the law to stop someone so dangerous. If you know people are going to die if you don’t act, is anything justifiable in the service of catching the perp? At what point do you become as bad as what you’re fighting? And do we need a bad guy on our side who’s willing to do the things we aren’t?

Better to see it as fiction than fact. If you’re worried that Nolan is going too realistic, however, take heart – this is not HEAT or THE GODFATHER or whatever; it is still a big-budget action movie with slam-bang sequences, futuristic weapons, and larger than life characters. That’s just not ALL there is. Batman and the Joker are not averse to fisticuffs and vehicle crashes, but first and foremost they use their brains to do battle, and everything and everyone else are just so many chess pieces.

The Joker actually quotes JERRY MAGUIRE at one point, probably not as a dig at Katie Holmes’ hubby, but for both a cheap laugh and a reiteration of Nolan’s theme of mutual escalation. It’s apropos in a larger sense too – I say this as a Bat-fan, and as a summer moviegoer…DARK KNIGHT, you complete me.

And to Christopher Nolan — if you need a new Joker actor for the next one, here’s my “audition”…