Good and Dark: Reviewing The Dark Knight
By Matt Nathanson | July 21, 2008
Category: The Wasteland
Movie-events. You hear that a lot: The Movie-Event of the Summer—that type of thing. What does this mean? It means the experience of this film is more than the F train to union square, the eleven dollar Fandango, the splurge for cookie-dough bites or those inscrutable gummy bright crawlers. It means this film is more than two hours and twenty three minutes of dialogue and action, plus another eight minutes of credits to get to a tacked on secret scene already ruined by the phantasmagoric Internet.
Mr. Jock Trotter asked me to review The Dark Knight because it was a movie-event. He’s right, too, this is the kind of thing that may have caused me to bare my iconoclastic teeth—the few I have—and go two or three weeks hearing “buzz” and pondering the jarringly positive reviews and not seeing the movie because it’s not my thing and, anyway, I really didn’t like the first one (which is true, Batman Begins was artless and overlong, trippingly morose and overacted. Scarecrow was neat.) But I saw The Dark Knight on opening day, inside a packed theatre because the IMAX was sold out for four days, even here in Castle Rock, Colorado (my momentary home).
It could be the best comic book movie I have ever seen. Flare for hyperbole aside: it could be. Like Bruce Wayne himself, it isn’t flawless: there’s a tendency for flash and a certain amount of gallivanting when it should be committed. But The Dark Knight’s flaws are tinny echoes in the dark night: its virtues rise above like the Bat Signal burning over Gotham. With a script that makes sense, intelligent pacing, and believe it or not deservingly-hyped acting, we get a movie that not only understands what people want from a movie-event, but truly understands the material it’s squeezing into our brains.
Which is why X2, the X-Men sequel, a movie I love and always have a fantastic time watching, pales somewhat in comparison. (A statement that will probably come back to haunt me, because my roommates make fun of me for constantly tuning into X2 when it’s on TNT inevitably every Sunday, even though we have two copies of the DVD so we can watch without commercials and in bloody wide-screen, yes, yes, I know—I’m sorry, Josh). X2 is fun, a romp – whatever that means. It is a good translation of the comic, with all its sort of grotesque masquerades, its cartoony flourish, its for-lack-of-a-better-term “cheese.” The Dark Knight may be truthful to the Batman comics, specifically the Frank Miller incarnation, but it pulls the trick of being more than a comic movie, or perhaps less than – it is a movie, a film, a well-crafted one, before all.
The Dark Night “gets” Batman in a way Batman Begins didn’t, and even in a way the Tim Burton films never quite managed to pull off. (The egregious Schumacher installments not really even fit to appear in a review, for fear of them being taken seriously). The most compelling aspect of the Batman mythos is the idea that this man, Bruce Wayne, has made a choice to separate himself from society and, in unrewarded secrecy, defend it. What makes Bruce Wayne a superhero? What makes him Batman? Not cosmic rays from space, not mutant genes, not a bite from a radioactive spider: choice. Superman is an alien, the X-Men are mutants, Batman is human. In the logic of comics this means we are Batman, we are like him – we just have to choose it.
So thematically, The Dark Knight starts at this place: Batman has made a choice to be Batman. But while this is where the discourse in Batman Returns ends – the cowls back on, Batman again sweeping through the night after Danny Devito’s Penguin – The Dark Knight takes it a step further. This choice is not a heroic one. It is based on fear, it is based on vigilante justice, it is colored in the grisly tones of revenge. When commissioner Gordon in his final monologue comes to realize that Batman, for all his heroics, isn’t a hero at all, it is our realization. And that is a mature, deep, thorough understanding of Batman: he is a dark knight, one that will protect us not because we ask or because he’s such a swell guy but because we need him.
He’s the embodiment of a metanarrative, a very specific one: the silent protector. And the Joker is his antithesis, a sort of Devo untangling of meaning. His treatment is just so well handled here – he didn’t kill Bruce’s parents, he isn’t the mastermind behind all of Gotham’s crime, he isn’t linked to Batman in some convoluted and contrived history. He is free-radical entropy, chaos. And that’s why I think the film does a convincing job of showing how he can pass on his madness to Harvey Dent (to become Two-Face) so easily. The Joker stands for the meaningless dark matter that Batman, in all his purpose and intent, conjures into being. We believe it because it is so primal.
And, of course, because of Heath Ledger. The laudatory critics have sounded far and wide for this performance—the last “full” one of his career—but, again, my expectation was that this praise was overblown and sentimental. It isn’t. Ledger’s joker is spot-on: his bestial but not un-intelligent depiction takes the character places I personally believe Nicholson never did. I was worried that they were going to psychoanalyze away his madness, and they started to a bit in his monologues about his abusive childhood, but these monologues are so well-delivered, so infused with the characters essence far beyond the spoken lines themselves, that Ledger manages to keep it real, juggle all the balls in rhythm without dropping one. It is the stuff of a great film, of a movie-event.
The rest of the cast is great too. I thought Christian Bale was overwhelmingly fair as Batman in the last film, but here he lets his intensity simmer a little to a more palatable and mellow broth. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a far superior Katie Holmes, even if she looks a bit like a melted one. And though I realize now the only real purpose of her character is to die, she wears it well. Of course Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine don’t suck either: their characters are given little to work with but what they have is totally maximized. The best single aspect of this franchise for me is Gary Oldman as Lt. Gordon, the iconic good cop in a world gone mad. He is subtle, unhurried, and real: a noir rockstar. His moments shine. This is truly a film world packed with so many good characters there isn’t time to get as deeply into their stories as we’d like. But that’s how it should be.
Flawless? I wouldn’t go that far. The Final Crisis is a bit contrived, with the two boats and the secret ballet among the hostages to blow up the other one. And Morgan Freeman denouncing Batman’s “cell phone spying” was sort of unnaturally topical and rather annoying. But these things mean little in the context of the whole.
There is so much to say about this well-directed, well-written, and well-acted film, but after a while praise all sounds the same (in a way criticism doesn’t, which may be why it’s less fun to write). In Burton’s Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman echoes our need to find “the man behind the bat.” In some ways I feel this hasn’t been accomplished until now, but I’m glad we are at last here. Hopefully, the tedious origin story of Batman Begins behind us, each installment can give us something bigger and smarter. By the time Old Schumacher gets to this one, we’ll have hopefully moved on.
So as far as movie-events go, this one rocks in a way the new Star Wars or Indiana Jones didn’t – it’s actually good. It’s great. It’s the best movie I’ve seen this year.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:13 am
Spot on.
This is the best film I’ve seen this year and beyond that, is the best “superhero” film I’ve seen yet. While most movies of that type aim for some iteration of a slug-fest, Dark Knight pulls off being a crime drama, with intelligent characters weaving through an intelligent story. Anyone familiar with Batman Year One, The Long Halloween and Dark Victory (I find Dark Knight to be more in line with Jeph Loeb’s work than, Frank Miller’s) will have much to savor with Dark Knight
And then there is the Joker. One thing must be reiterated, something that can be read from any other reviewer out there, but is of such importance that I must restate it here–Heath Ledger does a wonderful, if not unsurpassable performance as the Joker. Not once during the film did I say to myself, “Wow, Ledger is doing a great job as the Joker.” Ledger wasn’t performing as the Joker. He actually IS the Joker. The last time I was this enamored by a character was Daniel Day Lewis’ “Butcher” from Gangs of New York. It’s that good.
Great review for a great movie.
July 21st, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Great review - So Maggie Gyllenhaal looks like that in real life? Gross.