The Dark Knight
Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman
152 minutes
That headline may say it all: this movie kicks ass both literally and figuratively. It works. It’s two and a half hours of the Batman, the truly dark hero that he ought to be, being what he needs to be. It’s also nearly all that screen time of some wonderful villains—truly villainous bad guys—and a few good souls to remind us that, yes, humanity just might be worth saving.
This movie expanded on and added to Batman Begins in good ways, and it corrected some mistakes from the first (while, of course, introducing more of its own, but such is movie-making). I recommend this movie for the action buffs, the superhero fans, and aficionados of noir or gritty reality, but don’t take the kids. It’s rated PG-13 for a reason: this Batman would not be comfortable on Saturday morning cartoons, in a 1960s’ camp farce, or even Michael Keaton’s nearly-twenty-year-old version of the venerable franchise. This one is dark, violent, and not for the squeamish.
For more, including synopsis and spoilerific comments, keep reading. Otherwise, bookmark the page and then read it after you see The Dark Knight yourself.
The movie opens fairly soon after the close of Batman Begins: Wayne Manor has not yet been rebuilt (instead, Bruce and Alfred are living in the penthouse at Wayne Industries). The effect the Batman has had on Gotham is noticeable, but in some ways, it’s too much… there are now copycat Batmen trying to fight crime. Some of them get in the real Batman’s way, some are just bumbling wanna-do-gooders, and some become victims.
Wayne Industries is negotiating a deal with a Hong Kong businessman, but Bruce calls it off, not trusting Lau’s honesty or background. Meanwhile, we quickly discover, Lau has been acting as the accountant for all the mobs in Gotham, and decides the best way to “protect” their money is to take it with him to Hong Kong, and then tell them about it.
The new District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), ruffled nearly all the feathers in the Gotham Police Department when he was with Internal Affairs (investigating bad cops), and we’re not quite sure if he’s a good guy or a bad guy, since he seems to constantly be at loggerheads with Lieutenant Gordon. Turns out Dent was on the right track, and, though Gordon won’t let him in on all the juicy bits, he’s smart enough to back Gordon’s play to arrest all the mobs, and all their banks, at once. Gordon, of course, is surreptitiously working with Batman to make it happen. But that’s why they’re both pissed to discover that Lau has taken all the money and run before they could swoop in the make the arrests. Nevertheless, several hundred defendents find themselves in one packed courtroom.
Enter the Joker, a mysterious character (so mysterious that the filmmakers didn’t even bother creating an origin story for him: he simply is, and when asked about his background, the story changes each time). This is not Cesar Romero’s Joker. It’s not even Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Heath Ledger made this Joker his own: truly insane, truly incomprehensible, and yet incredibly simple. This is not a Joker you want to play around with; it’s a Joker you want to throw off a building, or put in front of a firing squad, or simply tear limb from limb. And yet Batman can’t. Batman has several opportunities to off the Joker for the good of, bascially, the whole world, yet he can’t bring himself to kill. This is Batman’s conflict, and the Joker plays it to excellent advantage.
Actually, Batman’s “I can’t kill him,” struggle was one of the weaker parts of the film for me. No matter how good any man is, I think, if he sees enough horror, enough reasonless evil, and if he knows with absolute certainty that there is one cause, I think any man would be able to kill that one cause. And Christian Bale’s Batman is by no means a god-fearing paragon of virtue. Killing this Joker should be simple. So that’s where the flaw lies: Ledger’s Joker is too good in his role to allow Bale’s Batman the dithering of “I can’t really kill.” He’s an absolute psychopath, his existence screaming to one and all that quick end is necessary. Batman would have dropped this demon, cut his throat, ground him beneath his own boots, in an instant.
Okay, leaving that motivational difficulty aside, we’re confronted with a homicidal maniac who hires himself out to the mobs, offering to kill Batman, who’s been interfering so with their operations. All he asks is half the take.
So how do you go about killing a superhero who moves silently, seemingly appearing and disappearing at will? How do you track and kill such a person? The Joker knows instantly: you don’t. You make your victim want to come to you. And when you’re truly evil, hellbent on only accomplishing your goal, you really don’t care who you hurt to get there. Why chase the Batman, when with the simple expedient of threatening mass, unreasoned, unstoppable murder, you can get him to come to you?
The Joker targets the innocent, the guilty, authority figures, and anonymous extras. The horror is that he really doesn’t care who dies (although on his hitlist are the mayor, the judge, the police commissioner, and the district attorney), and acts accordingly. Many of his targets die; some are merely maimed; those who survive do so under Batman’s protection, but even they are not completely safe.
I haven’t mentioned ADA Rachel Dawes. Bruce Wayne’s one true love, the woman of his life, who is not only working for Harvey Dent, but in love with him. Oh, she loves Bruce, too. And if he weren’t Batman, she’d probably have married him already. But he is, so she hasn’t, and it’s eating away at Bruce. Katie Holmes in Batman Begins did as well as she could with the role, but there’s nothing about her that anyone would believe is an old enough, mature enough person to be an assistant district attorney. Apparently it was Holmes’s decision to not return, but that decision was an excellent one for the film. Her role has been recast to Maggie Gyllenhaal, and it was an excellent bit of casting. She’s always believable, from the good-natured argument with harvey over who’s going to prosecute a case, to her “I love you but I can’t be with you” with Bruce (whether they’re alone, or under the almost oblivious eyes of Harvey), to her standing up to the Joker when he comes calling at Bruce’s penthouse fund raiser for Harvey. And that, too, was a problem with the film: that Bruce and Lucius Fox can waft through a high-security building without being noticed I can accept; but the Joker says several times that he doesn’t plan, he’s not big on high-tech, and there’s no way the Wayne Industries building would have such poor security. But back to Gyllenhaal’s Rachel: she’s believable, even when she tells Alfred she’s leaving, and even when she’s under a seemingly inescapable death threat.
And then we come to the other bad guy in the film. Fans of the series will have recognized the name Harvey Dent as Two-Face. I recall meeting Dent in previous incarnations of the series, but they never lived long enough to create a decent Two-Face. This series doesn’t have to live so long (heck, this one movie is long enough), and we see that, through the Joker’s machinations, the upstanding, true hero, Harvey Dent, becomes Two-Face. If the Joker is anarchy personified, Two-Face is blind chance. Here, too, is a failing of the film: though the makeup to create Two-Face is wonderful, I just don’t buy that Dent would allow himself to become this villain. Yes, he’s lost the woman he loved (although, other than asking her to marry him, and hearing his verbal breast-beating when he loses her, we just don’t feel it), but we see no evidence of brain damage, and we wonder why he doesn’t vow to clean up the villany and scum (perhaps becoming Batmanlike), rather than turning to the dark side himself. His reasons are wrong, but once we gloss over those, his reliance on simple chance is almost as terrifying as Joker’s “I don’t know, I don’t care, it’s all your problem” attitude.
In the end, Batman sacrifices himself. As newly-empowered Commissioner Gordon tells his son “Batman is the hero Gotham deserves, but he isn’t the hero Gotham needs.” And together, Batman and Gordon contrive to make Batman the public villain of the piece, in order to let the hero Gotham needs shine. A true act of selflessness That Alfred explained to Rachel much earlier, in a completely different circumstance, but that completely justifies the term “knight.”
I haven’t even touched on Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox: Bruce Wayne’s Q. Mr. Fox has grown from the previous film, he’s given more dimension, more to do in the world of light, and more of a conscious (to go so far as to threaten to quit working for Wayne rather than compromise his principles). But he’s also learned that there are some things so evil that they require the bending of our principles. He’s a bright spot in the film, as is Michael Caine’s Alfred.
There are several appearances that are incredibly brief: William Fichtner’s scant minutes in a bank, and Anthony Michael Hall’s ever-so-brief seconds as a tv reporter, but those are merely appetite whetters. The aerial footage is stunning, but over Hong Kong and above Chicago’s Gotham City (admittedly, we saw the film on the IMax screen; your mileage may vary). And because so much was filmed in Chicago, I saw several little homages to The Blues Brothers which made me smile. And one other difficulty: at times the pounding bass of the music overwhelms characters’ lines, leaving audience members asking “Huh? What did he say?”—watch out for it.