My Life Is A Nightmare
I’m still not convinced that the world needs Batman. Batman is, at his core, the superhero world’s finest fascist, a dark-clouded cowboy riding through the hills of urban America with a might-makes-right moral imperium that makes him, part and parcel, almost as dangerous as the villains he hunts. The “almost” gets thrown in because the villains really are worse, and the world that Batman lives in really is insane, and in an insane world where the psychiatrists are out to poison whole cities with toxins made of nothing more elaborate than human fear, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the balance restored by a crazy billionaire stalking the night in a couple hundred pounds of black kevlar.
Superheroes should never be a true model of their time, though, lest they make their escapist-leaning audience uncomfortable. This real world that we live in does not want this Batman. Out here, with America doing its Batmanly best to smack down the planet’s Jokers with the same single-minded belief that there really is one right way to solve crime, Batman Begins is doomed to be one thing that no comic book fan with his wishes most fervent could ever have dreamed it would be: way too damn good for the audience it is entertaining. These people want the witless, day-glo antics of the Spider to assure them that bubble-gum heroism makes you look cool and gets you the girl; they don’t want brooding heroes who must contend with the razor-thin line between true justice and moral totalitarianism. They want Tom and Katie’s perverse, staged love affair a whole lot more than they want Rachel Dawes walking away from Bruce Wayne in the smoking ruins of his father’s house.
There, I said it: Gotham City is beyond saving.
Ra’s Al-Ghul (Liam Neeson, in a deliciously executed bait-and-switch dual role) and his Deadly Viper Assasination Squad feel the same way, and as world-policing fascist armies go, these guys have the ability to make Batman seem positively Canadian. They don’t go in for that namby-pamby, beat-the-bad-guys-into-bloody-submission approach favoured by our Dark Knight; they’re more of the bomb-them-out-of-existence-altogether frame of mind, which also seems to include erradicating anyone and everyone who has even heard of the bad guys — innocents, civilians, people who read newspapers. They’re preaching a clean slate, and they’ve got a surprisingly well-architectured plan to pull it off. It involves a crazy psychiatrist (Cillian Murphy, proving that the Scarecrow is indeed a third-tier Bat-villain who nevertheless carries a hell of a lot of thematic weight, if used correctly), a fatuous mob boss (Tom Wilkinson, doing his Soprano best), the aforementioned fear toxin, and the willingness of a whole lot of Gothamites to just look the other way.
So, thankfully, Batman Begins isn’t just about a fascist nut in a black cape: it genuinely, thoughtfully considers constant interplay between justice and vigilanteism, morality and supermorality, doing what’s right and doing what’s crazy. It’s a surprisingly layered film, willing to preach the wages of fear with all the thematic dexterity of any number of smaller, independent thrillers… which, to his credit, is exactly why Christopher Nolan was the guy for this job. He has made a Batman movie that is flawlessly, fundamentally anti-commercial – no Burger King tie-ins or Prince pop songs to be found. He has made a comic book movie that is gigantic in its scope, yet authoritatively faithful in its thematic diversity. And for a big movie, it really does feel like a little movie.
And therein lies the problem. The Silver City goons won’t want it, because it’s a horrible date movie; they want Batman to be cool, not frigid. The kids won’t get it, won’t find the Spider-Man rush they’re expecting; in fact, they’ll be freaked out of their fucking nuts. That is Nolan’s other great triumph here: he has made a truly scary Batman movie. Not only are the villains, Ra’s Al Ghul and the Scarecrow, actually frightening screen portrayals with a wealth of freaky visual backup (hallucinogenic fire-horses, creepy mental asylums, faceless ninja legions), but Batman himself – for the first time ever on the big screen! – is legitimately someone you don’t want to meet in a dark alley. Watching him beat down Gotham’s various undesirables is actually a bit panic-inducing (the sequences are shot in a fashion reminiscent of Alien, with Batman as the alien), and goes hand in hand with the ongoing thematic possibility that as a force against evil, ol’ Bats is as much a part of the problem as he is a solution.
Unfortunately, for all his skill in setting mood and layering the dramatic sequences, Nolan’s failure in Batman Begins is as an action director. He favours a violently over-edited, over-close-upped approach to action sequences which create blurs of motion and a great deal of visual confusion. This works brilliantly in some cases, such as Batman’s first assault on Falcone’s goons (where he should legitimately be moving faster than his foes can fully digest), but becomes tiresome in the more stylized sequences that positively beg for the director to pull back and let us see more of the continuity of action. (I doubt that there’s a single shot of the Batmobile longer than 35 frames in this entire film.)
What Nolan has nevertheless achieved is to truly turn the franchise into a character study, and a pretty dandy one at that. In the lead role, Christian Bale proves that he really is the guy for the job – he invests Bruce with levels of darkness and doubt that we simply haven’t seen from the character in any place but the pages of a comic before. As Batman, he’s fine; again, Nolan rarely shows us very much Batman at all, favouring the he’s-gone-before-you-know-it gag a few too many times. Bale’s gravelly Bat-voice is a bit misappropriated and unnecessary, and the costume design still doesn’t capture the iconic potential of the character’s silhouette, but on the whole, this is probably the Bat-performance against which all others will now be considered, setting a new 21st century water mark just as Keaton’s turn set the level for the 20th.
Atmosphere is everything in these pictures, and the art direction in Batman Begins is vivid and enthusiastic, recalling the best of Anton Furst’s work while grounding the reality of the film in a modern-day metropolis that actually makes sense. The digital effects make the city tangible yet awe-inspiring, without tipping over into playland (à la Gotham in Batman & Robin). Tasked with energizing the operatic emotion to go with the visuals, the musical score is a surprising success, given that it is a strange, ongoing mishmash between moody James Newton Howard’s propulsive foundation and over-produced Hans Zimmer’s manic bombast. Howard seems to cover the basic thematic drive of the music, while Zimmer takes over in the action sequences, re-orchestrating Howard with Pirates of the Caribbean in mind. To my very great delight, it actually works perfectly. In spite of the lack of a single, driving motif à la Danny Elfman’s classic Batman theme, the score is one of the best parts of the film, a chilling blend of nervous strings and roaring synths.
It is the script, however, that is the greatest success here. The writing — particularly in the second and third acts — keeps an amazing number of plates spinning, not unlike a large, 24-issue arc of the comic book to which it aspires. That it does so with clarity and grace is in itself something to marvel at. David Goyer’s writing is a model of seeming simplicity, while still hitting the varied and often surprising beats like a well-refined jazz drummer. There’s a lot more going on in this film than there probably needs to be, but this ends up working delightfully in the film’s favour: each sub-plot builds upon the last, until you are genuinely impressed with just how much finely calibrated story you have been treated to. After four films of “the bad guys are gonna take over the city,” it’s refreshing to see a film where the Dark Knight Detective (and the audience) actually need to figure out how they’re going to do it.
The result is, measure for measure, one of the most viscerally satisfying films of the year. You really feel like you’ve been somewhere and done something when Batman Begins has unspooled its last frame. No longer merely content to exist within the milieu of the “comic book movie,” this Batman film is legitimately trying to set the bar for all entries to come. That it may ultimately fall largely on deaf ears is, perhaps, yet another thematic point scored: for Gotham City to be worth saving, you only need one person to believe.