(Now there's a play-on-words you're not gonna see a lot of!)

WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.

The Dark Knight, I'm legitimately happy to say, is superior to Batman Begins in nearly every conceivable way, but the most important one is definitely the script. I'll tell you, watching this thing makes it even easier than it was before to blame superhero-hack David S. Goyer for the gaping plot holes, leaden dialogue, and wild internal inconsistencies that had me ready to storm out of the theater watching this film's predecessor. In fact, since the entire moral lynchpin of this film--whether or not Batman could or should kill the Joker, and what it means for him and for Gotham City if he won't--is completely invalidated by Batman's murder of Ra's al Ghul (and that's exactly what it was, folks) at the end of the first film, this makes ignoring Begins not just fun but practically necessary.

I feel like this movie got what Batman's about much better than Batman Begins, too. The first film portrayed him as a neurotic, driven to distraction by crime, obsessed with fear, and repeating those two words over and over again like Rain Man. This movie drops those leitmotifs almost entirely, giving us a character it makes sense for the public to refer to as the Caped Crusader--a guy who, when a Chinese mob financier skips town, flies to Hong Kong, cuts off the electricity to his goddamn skyscraper, glides in on his Bat-cape, beats the snot out of his guards, grabs him, leaps out of a building on a hot-air balloon that a jet then snags to whisk them away, and brings the dude back to Gotham, dropping him unconscious on the steps of police HQ with a note to deliver him to Jim Gordon. Gone are the days when his primary on-screen crimefighting sequence involved running over police cars for some reason. Even Christian Bale's growly Bat-voice seems to work better here, perhaps because his actions better match the superhuman conviction his monster voice implies. (And on a purely nerd level, they find an excuse to give him all-white eyes behind his mask, which pretty much made my evening.) Overall, I feel like I understand why he's doing what he's doing--that it's more than an anti-littering campaign on steroids, it's truly a drive to put a dent in crime in the city--and why people might choose to support him in this endeavor rather than run away screaming.

And the movie also gets the Joker. Now, I insist that Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson also got the Joker, mind you. All camp is not created equal, and too many people have this reactionary attitude to it (post-traumatic Adam West disorder) as though camp begins and ends with Schumacher rather than Sontag. But camp can be serious business in a world (even in a fandom, sadly) where rigidly patriarchal concepts of what constitutes seriousness hold sway, and Nicholson's larger than life gay-vaudeville-pimp-comedian-dandy-performance-artist was compelling in his refusal to be normal. This is by no means mutually exclusive with being frightening, by the way. "And now...comes the part...where I relieve you, the little people...of the burden...of your failed...and useless lives," says the Joker without blinking an eye just before gassing downtown Gotham City. He's killing the squares. That's subversive and that's horrifying.

Ledger's Joker is a creature in that vein, but instead of being larger than life, he's smaller than life. I know that seems counterintuitive given the for-the-ages performance he turned in--surely this will be the most-referenced portrayal of a Villain since Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter--but what the Joker is is a human being reduced to only cruelty and glee. Earlier in the day I watched a documentary about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who in the '80s terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco by breaking into people's houses at random and killing and raping with no pattern. Once Ramirez was caught, his affect throughout his trial was of someone having the time of his life--shouting "Hail Satan!" at the cameras, sneering at the victims' families, growing his hair long and wearing sunglasses and flirting with his groupies, proclaiming that he is beyond good and evil, reacting to his sentencing to death by saying "Big deal. Death always came with the territory. I'll see you at Disneyland!"

That, I think, is the Joker in this movie: A guy who loves hurting people the way you or I love our favorite meals or television shows, just loves it to pieces. The film's plot and set pieces make it quite explicit that his goal is to see our worst suspicions about human nature confirmed, and reinforce it with how it introduces him to us: No big entrance, no "origin," he's just standing there on the corner waiting for his ride. Just by existing he stands as a reproach to the trifecta of Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent: They believe in the better angels of our nature, and the Joker is just havin' a blast showing us that there's no such thing.

He's also got a great, great music cue, a neverending crescendo of discordant strings, which reminds me again how much better this movie was than the first one, which had no memorable music to speak of despite boasting two separate composers. In addition, The Dark Knight had better fight choreography that takes advantage of its environment and is easy to parse from beat to beat, making the consequences of each maneuver easy to grasp. It had a better car chase sequence, one with stakes and with genuine antagonists. It had better performances from all its recurring players, perhaps because they weren't hamstrung by one of the dumbest scripts of all time, but in general they all (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and especially Gary Oldman) seemed more comfortable in their skins and with their role in the story. It had a much better performance from the love interest, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who unlike Katie Holmes made the bold choice of imbuing Rachel Dawes with, get this, recognizable human emotions. It had genuine shocks--I was totally convinced that Gordon was dead, for example, and stunned that the news hadn't leaked. It was visually much more sophisticated--the staging of Batman and the Joker's final conversation, little touches like the Joker's Harvey Dent campaign sticker, the bravura opening sequence, the snuff-film hostage tapes, and on and on. There was no dopey doomsday device. The one time it danced up to the ridiculous moral inconsistencies of the first film, Lucius Fox's sudden objection to Batman's methods when he discovers he's spying on the entire city, it actually had Fox make his objection on specific grounds that made sense--too much power concentrated in the hands of one man--rather than asserting that a guy who spends his days helping a masked vigilante run around breaking people's legs to get them to talk is suddenly in high dudgeon over warrantless wiretapping.

It wasn't perfect, though. It felt long, it sagged when the Joker wasn't involved, and even though the film did yeoman's work in making us understand just why Batman and Gordon were so high on Harvey Dent's transformative potential for the city, it still overestimated the degree to which we (or at least I) were invested in his saga, so that when it saved the big ending for a resolution of his plotline rather than the Joker's, it felt miscalculated and anticlimactic. And perhaps ironically, leaving the Joker alive at film's end was more of a fourth-wall-breaking reminder of Heath Ledger's truly tragic death, though I don't know if there was any way around that. I also wish there were some way for Batman to talk about his crusade without sounding ridiculously overblown and pretentious, but there may not be any way around that either.

Overall, though, I feel like here's a movie that conveyed what the Joker and Batman mean to me: the most gleefully pessimistic take on human nature imaginable, and a rageful insistence that it need not be so. Good job!

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)