The Dork Knight

In a black mood: Christian Bale as the Caped Crusader in Batman Begins. Courtesy Warner Bros.

“As a symbol, I can be incorruptible,” says Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, explaining why he enjoys busting baddies in a black Kevlar bat suit or grabbing downtime by perching on flagpoles that look a little rectally invasive. I’m not sure if symbols are incorruptible (Enron had a very nice logo), but being incorruptible isn’t insurance against being silly, and the very earnest new installment of the flagging Batman franchise is such a screaming, foot-stomping plea to be taken seriously that, like most toddlers, it’s silly anyway. Really, this film might as well be wearing a big Carmen Miranda pineapple hat.

Clearly, Christopher Nolan — director of the inverted thriller Memento — and co-screenwriter David S. Goyer wanted to scrub off the scent of the past few rancid installments of the Batman franchise. Employing Joel Schumacher’s bigger-is-better philosophy of film direction, the last two Batmans trampled Tim Burton’s legacy of dark wit, went straight past camp (remember Val Kilmer’s nipples?) and ended up as something grotesque: a bloated, pointless exercise in over-spending.

Nolan, who reinforced his credentials as a thinking director post-Memento with the underrated Insomnia, has distanced himself so much from Schumacher’s dubious inheritance that he’s done something just as dull as over-spending: over-explaining. Batman’s distinguishing feature in the superhero pantheon is that he’s a regular guy with an expensive hobby, rather than someone who was bitten by a radioactive spider or fell into a vat of gelatinous, superpower-inducing goo. Batman Begins goes back to the roots of his transformation, when young Bruce Wayne was the traumatized witness to his parents’ murder in Gotham, a crumbling, sleazy cartoon New York where the apocalypse is either en route or just finishing up.

The Waynes were virtuous billionaires; they took their son to the opera and built light rapid transit for the poor. After their deaths, Gotham goes Blade Runner, a city where only a few good men (Gary Oldman plays a virtuous cop) and one Bat dare face down an evil crime boss played by Tom Wilkinson (In the Bedroom), which gives you a sense of this chapter’s seriousness. Jim Carrey was not invited.

Nothing says "sinister" like a ridiculous 'stache: Liam Neeson as Henri Ducard, Batman's nefarious mentor. Photo David James. Courtesy Warner Bros.

Who could blame young Bruce for getting the hell out of Gotham? In the first act of Batman Begins — don’t believe the title; it takes an hour to begin and is really two movies — Wayne is living in the mountains of what appears to be Tibet. He falls in with a ring of vigilantes headed by a guru whose name is delightfully difficult for actors to pronounce: Ra’s al Ghul (played by Ken Watanabe, who doesn’t get to speak much, but looms well from a throne). Wayne is taken under the tutelage of Liam Neeson, as a tough-love father substitute called Ducard, whose Fu Manchu facial hair is the only feature that distinguishes this from Neeson’s recent spate of professional-teacher roles.

In the past few years, Neeson has offered paternal aphorisms and waved his swords and sabres literally in The Phantom Menace and Kingdom of Heaven and metaphorically in Kinsey. Here, he spouts lengthy monologues on psyching out the enemy — one odd tidbit that suggests Nathan Lane might have pulled off this role: “Be theatrical!” — as part of the Nolan agenda to explicate every minute detail of Batman’s life. Here’s how Batman learned to fight; here are the cables from which Batman “flies”; here’s Batman hanging out in the applied science wing of Wayne Enterprises designing his suit, weaponry and car. The famous Batmobile, never referred to by name because that would just be goofy, looks like a shellacked hunk of angular papier mâché on bus tires. In the land of the “realistic” Batman, even the car has been leeched of imagination; it can’t fly but it does — Holy lack of creativity, Batman! — break the speed limit.

If this were a date, one would feel like too much sharing was going on. The thing about Batman, and most superheroes, is that they’re inexplicable; that’s the fun part. But when his every wing flap is ascribed some motivation, and all secrecy is so coolly accounted for, the mystique is flattened. He’s too much like us.

This Batman does finally begin when Wayne gets back to Gotham and the crime boss undertakes a nefarious plan to infect the city’s water supply with a psychotic chemical agent. No crazy Joker masks here; instead, Cillian Murphy (28 Days Later) plays a bad doctor who sometimes puts a burlap bag over his head and does bad things, but from the neck down, he’s in a suit, presumably with a security pass dangling from his waist. It may be real, but what’s so good about real?

Christian Bale, a talented, Method-y young actor, probably signed on to play Batman because he felt he could get to the heart of the “real” Bruce Wayne. Bale likes to immerse himself: in the wonderful American Psycho, he got buff; in the stunt film The Machinist, he looked anorexic. It’s hard to imagine what he might have done to prepare for this, but pity the Los Angeles zookeeper trying to get the movie star out of the bat pavilion at 3 a.m.

Stuffed shirt: Bruce Wayne (Bale) with loyal manservant Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine). Photo David James. Courtesy Warner Bros.

And yet, for all Bale’s hard work, Michael Keaton remains the best Batman thus far; while Keaton’s a tortured A-list brooder, as Bruce must be, he can still toss one-liners at Alfred the loyal butler and take pleasure in Alfred’s befuddlement. (This time around, Alfred is played by an admirably game Michael Caine.) Keaton’s background in comedy actually served the story well, bringing a necessary lightness to the Dark Knight. Bale’s intensity — he badgers the corrupted with screams as piercing as a bat’s, only at a lower pitch — seems sweetly misplaced. Let’s not forget that what we’re talking about is a cartoon. Tim Burton won us with whimsy, but Nolan wants to stamp his Batman with intellectualism. He wants us to believe that this Batman is as tuned in to social fears as Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine, but Nolan’s insistence that what Batman does really matters is the funniest thing about the movie.

The joyless, prissy tone of this too-noble concept is embodied in Katie Holmes’s role as an assistant DA. She, surely standing in for Nolan, disapproves of Wayne’s go-go party boy lifestyle and wishes he would do something serious with his life. Oh, if she only knew. The rest of us are wishing he’d do something entertaining.

Batman Begins opens across Canada June 15.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

Letters:

After reading your article on the "Dork Knight" I couldn't disagree more. I thought Christopher Nolan's treatment of Batman was near-perfect in its creation of a real character that completely avoided the cartoonish caricatures that was the basis and shortcoming of the previous "Batman" films.

In the new Batman film, I think it is this focus on character that actually makes the story more intriguing, and to say that Batman's character was "too real" is ridiculous. The whole point of the film is to have a different telling of the franchise that, as you say, had gotten "bloated" and overdone. Wouldn't it seem logical to go a different route? I found the explanation of Batman's costume, his personal motivations, how the batcave came to be, the best part of the movie. Sure you can suit someone up and throw them off a building to beat the bad guys without question. But to know that the only reason Batman is able to fly through the air in order to beat the bad guys is because of a special kind of fabric gives the film a deeper mythology, and makes it a thousand times more interesting than a simple escapist film.

When you say, "The rest of us are wishing he'd do something entertaining", I guess you feel saving Gotham city from itself wasn't enough? Ouch. Maybe if Gotham was nation-sized, would it have more entertainment value?

Marc Voyer
Ottawa, Ontario

Wow, your review was rather harsh. From your comments you really expected another comic-like movie. Seeing as the last ones were less than adequate, I don't think you expected to like this movie from the time you stepped into the theatre...perhaps dreading the fact that you even had to watch it. This was the Batman as he was meant to be...dark and tortured...it's the way the series started...why not go back to what was good? If you prefer the comicy sequels, I suggest you are in the minority.

Jason
British Columbia

I just read Katrina Onstad's review of the new Batman movie and then scanned the rest of her reviews. I guess I will have to stop my short experience of her criticism here. I think she really needs to relax and enjoy the movies more. It seems that her experiences have been either boring or tedious or in some other way unpleasant. The movies she attended were actually not all that bad. I would be the first to agree that Batman is not high art nor is Cinderella Man but they are entertaining and that is all they pretend to be.

Paul Rainsberry
Toronto, Ontario

Thanks for the chuckles this morning... Sounds like what I just read was more entertaining than the movie!

Christel
Ottawa, Ontario