MOVIE REVIEW
Caped Crusader epic tries to breach a new frontier for the lucrative genre
KONG RITHDEE
Uneasy rider: The Dark Knight is both secular and spiritual, eloquent and chaotic, fantastic and depressing. |
The Dark Knight, Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Directed by Christopher Nolan. : In Christopher Nolan's pop-opera The Dark Knight, the nasty duel between Batman and the Joker is nothing personal; they do not hate each other as a person, but what each of them represents.
Mr Nolan mounts the project with the vision of giving us the definitive philosophising of - what else - good and evil, order and chaos, hope and hatred, terrorism and (anti-) heroism.
As intense and visceral as their tussle is, this is a metaphorical engagement, with the future of humanity at stake. The zeal with which each opponent throws himself at the other, the ardour to prove the truism of his belief or anti-belief, is almost religious, though that passion is still framed in the obligatory dependence on sci-fi gadgetry and scary firearms.
In the gallery of modern entertainment, this makes The Dark Knight both secular and spiritual, eloquent and chaotic, fantastic and depressing, a pagan crucifixion ritual intruded on by an earnest SWAT team.
Perhaps realising that the superhero narrative has exhausted its angles - a variation on the theme of a traumatic misfit up against an assortment of diabolical villains - Mr Nolan is trying to breach a new frontier for Hollywood's lucrative genre. Is it possible that the next Batman movie will be a serious, full-blown drama? After watching The Dark Knight, I become convinced that maybe it's not long before we see the death, a literal death, on screen, with blood, of a superhero whom we always believe to be WMD-proof, invincible, even immortal. Every superhero movie is actually a reflection of human fragility; we watch supermen in the hope of learning something about ordinary men. And death is the ultimate proof that someone, or something, is really human - a mammal, to be precise, like all men and bats.
Before death, however, we must discuss violence. It's only logical that Mr Nolan, in order to bring his superhero narrative closer to the plain of reality, will have to shift gear to the R-rated level of physical fury (The Dark Knight, as well as all other superhero films, is rated PG-13). In fact, the cackle and howl of the Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger with such creepy immersion, is enough for the film to earn the R label, and part of the awkwardness suffered by The Dark Knight is this off-screen ambivalence between creating a realistic vision of decay, lunacy and violence, and the need to conform to the limitations of "a family film" (of course every kid wants to see Batman!) and the PG-13 aversion of blood and death. It's an ambivalence of a sophisticated director working with something he knows to be inherently banal, even naive.
The R-rated Batman would satisfy an adult's wet dream stoked by the titillation presented here, but it means young viewers would forever lose one of their comic-book heroes to the pretentious domain of kitsch-art, or arty kitsch, and they will have to stick with the Cartoon Network for the nerve-friendly version. But then again, isn't The Dark Knight almost too disturbing, not to mention too convoluted, for children anyway? The potent, sinisterly realistic performances of the main actors are the cause here. Throughout his many reincarnations, the character Batman, no matter how sombre he appears, seems to suffer from the pure camp of his costume - those pointy bat ears, the cape, the dominatrix latex suit. Dark and deep, Batman is also slightly laughable, either with Michael Keaton or George Clooney inside the cape.
With Christian Bale behind the mask here, director Nolan pushes Batman deep into the nocturnal nightmare, and he becomes a modern soul with a manifest angst. When cape-less, Bruce Wayne is a sad playboy who covers his insecurity with the company of buxom women. But once he dons the costume, Bruce as the big Bat bares his fangs as he speaks, his voice like a sonar reverberation. Bale is a physical actor, not as much but passably in the same socks as De Niro or even Brando, and it would not be hard to imagine him, as Batman, being crucified by the angry Gotham mob, for this dark knight seems fated to martyrdom in the hands of Mr Nolan.
And the Joker. Is all the raving about Heath Ledger's acting a little inflated? Are his reptilian tics annoying? Not to me. In the relatively calm era of 1989, Jack Nicholson's the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman comes across as a homicidal clown, a childish prankster who plays with gunpowder. Here, Mr Nolan and Mr Ledger remove the comic-book condition of the villain and make him, well, an ungovernable force. The 2008 Joker is a lunatic, a nihilist, an anarchist-hipster (his fashion sense adds to his disturbing quality, his infernal glamour). Immediately the talk is whipped up about how the Joker represents the pandemonium of global terrorism, from Al Qaeda to Thailand's southern insurgency. The analogy is logical - the psychotic Joker wants to cause a lot of deaths - but such simplification could be superficial, too. The Joker's greatest prank is to prove that goodness is transitory and evil everlasting; he's an absolutist, and such is his own weakness in perceiving the world.
In The Dark Knight, the stake for the battle between Batman and the Joker is the soul of Harvey Dent, an honest, hotshot district attorney who goes after the mob, but who's later betrayed by the authority he dedicated himself to. Played by Aaron Eckhart, Dent is the trophy in the tug-of-war between optimism and nihilism; in an early scene, he voices his approval of dictatorship when "the city is in trouble" and acknowledges the inevitable risk that comes with such hero-worshipping. Is that his strength or weakness, to embrace such an undemocratic idea? To stretch it a little, say, is he for or against the withdrawal of troops from Iraq? Dent is a charming character, up until his surrender to the fire of vengeance. That may be the most ham-fisted plot-point, the one that puts a little bump into Mr Nolan's attempt to distance his narrative and realism from the plain of comic-book logics.
Ideally, in the next Batman film the nocturnal vigilante has to take off his mask, disrobe his cape and allow the ungrateful Gotham bunch to flagellate him before erecting him on a crucifix awash in blood. He will have to make do without all the impossible gadgets that make him fly or see in the dark or remain unscathed after falling from the 50th floor. To complete the moral journey of Batman, Mr Nolan has to make him a real human, that is to say to prepare him to become a god, revered and misunderstood. That would make an interesting movie, though one that would never be a hit.
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