The Dark Knight

You thought we could be decent men in an indecent world. But you were wrong; the world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance.

-Harvey Dent

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It's fair.

-The Joker

Rarely was a film more aptly titled.

The Dark Knight, director/co-writer Christopher Nolan’s excellent second take on the Batman mythos, is certainly the darkest Batman film to date.

In both tone and style, this Batman bears zero resemblance to the campy sixties television show and, thankfully, it also bears little similarity to the four Batman films that appeared between 1989 and 1997.

The darkness here shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with the character’s comic book incarnation, but it is likely to surprise a good many folks whose only exposure to the character stems from the camp of Adam West or the overblown Day-Glo stupidity of the nineties films.

This is the real deal, folks.

By now, however, the film has been out for a week. It remains the number one film on all of the charts, and it has raked in something like a gazillion dollars (just don’t quote me on that amount). Its press coverage has been enormous, and its plot has already been well covered.

And now I am contributing to the hype. Damn it.

Nevertheless, for once a mainstream summer blockbuster deserves the praise. Falling in the middle of a summer cluttered with explosions, pallid thrills, and vacuous spectacle, we finally have a mainstream summer film that manages to be about something.

Oh, it has the requisite explosions and blockbuster excitement. Never fear. And yet Nolan is a crafty, clever man. He and his co-writer (his brother Jonathan) have used the superhero genre as a means to comment on the current zeitgeist.

Batman has always been one of the most complex of superheroes – a vigilante without superpowers, a man obsessed with eliminating crime, and a man that won’t willingly kill but who isn’t averse to terrifying and even severely injuring criminals. Bruce Wayne is a deeply flawed man, and Christian Bale does an excellent job of portraying both the foppish and the frightening sides of this character.

Wayne’s dual nature is made explicitly clear in this picture, through his tactics, and through his interaction with the character of The Joker.

The performance of the late Heath Ledger has already been talked about a great deal, and he is extraordinarily good in the part. This Joker has neither the camp of Caesar Romero nor the ham of Jack Nicholson. He is instead as he was originally intended: an ironically named psychopath, whose jokes are funny to no one but himself. As written here, he is a highly disturbing figure – a psychopath with a brain, a firm belief in the essentially anarchic nature of the world, and absolutely no morals.

The Nolans are helped immeasurably by the presence of Ledger, who never lets the character slip into cartoonish theatrics or overblown buffoonery. Too often summer blockbusters create silly villains who lose all power to frighten or disturb by way of two dimensional writing and cartoonish characterizations. Not the case here. Ledger (backed by a solid script) creates a frightening, highly disturbing figure largely through his voice and body language. Watch the scene in which he performs a “magic trick” with a pencil and a gangster’s head. Or the scene in which he crashes a party and proceeds to explain to Rachel Dawes (the excellent Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes) how he got his facial scars. Or the crucial scene in which he and Batman share an interrogation room, and The Joker explains some of his philosophy. These are the kinds of dramatically intense scenes that don’t normally appear in superhero films.

In fact, slapping this film with the terms “comic book” and “superhero” does it a disservice. Mention superhero and film together, and most people start getting the idea of kid-friendly fare. This isn’t to demean all superhero films – not at all, for some of them have been great fun (notably Superman, Superman II, and Spiderman II) - but the term does conjure up certain ideas.

The Dark Knight is not kiddie fare. How it avoided an ‘R’ rating is beyond me, as its content and thematic material is way beyond the maturity level of preteens. This Batman deals with such supremely non-chipper themes as the loss of hope and the nature of chaos. Its heroes are profoundly troubled men who don’t always do good things. Note the quotes that start off this review. They represent some of the key questions the film explores.

There is another key exchange in the film, one that occurs between Wayne and his faithful butler – and moral conscience – Alfred (Michael Caine). Alfred attempts to guide Wayne away from some of the darkness by relating a story from his years in the British secret service. He tells Wayne of a man he hunted, a man without morals or scruples. Wayne later asks Alfred how he caught this man. The butler replies, in a restrained but emotionally ambiguous manner, that when the man escaped into a forest, he and his men burned the forest down. It’s a wonderful moment, ever so subtly acted by Caine, but one that drives home just how precarious is Wayne’s moral ground. In other words, in catching the criminal, try not to lose your soul.

Indeed, Caine’s contribution to the film is important, as are the contributions of Morgan Freeman as scientific guru Lucius Fox, and Gary Oldman as policeman Jim Gordon. The nuances of Freeman’s delivery are masterful – particularly in a scene with a Hong Kong business competitor and in another with a potential blackmailer. And Oldman is finally allowed to flourish in a non-bad guy role. A fine actor too often saddled with playing cartoonish bad guys, Oldman manages to fully inhabit the body of a working class cop, and make him truly good and truly likeable.

I recently wrote a review of the current X-Files film, and I criticized it for failing to adequately deal with the character of a pedophiliac priest. I was once a big fan of The X-Files, and to this day I have fond memories of that show. But it goofed in its newest film, bringing in a difficult subject – one that is certainly worthy of discussion – and then failing to adequately address it.

The Dark Knight doesn’t make the same mistake. That it implicitly references the post-9/11 atmosphere of paranoia (and even references the now famous imagery of firemen at Ground Zero) is not to say that it cheaply exploits such references for the sake of simple thrills. The film may be disturbing, but it steadfastly tries to deal with the issues it raises, and is largely successful.

It isn’t perfect, mind you. There are a few scenes that don’t work as well as they should. The initial introduction of District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is a little too contrived. Cillian Murphy’s cameo (he was the Scarecrow in Batman Begins) is rather perfunctory, and the final big action sequence, conducted at night, is a tad too confusing.

But the film is, on the whole, very effective. It is a relief to find a summer film that is about more than simple explosions – a film that tries to say something about the world. It is dark, but it isn’t dark for darkness’ sake. To know that, you need simply watch one of the film’s final scenes, when The Joker tells two ferry boats (one filled with prisoners doing hard time, the other with ‘civilized’ people) that he will blow them up unless one boat decides to blow the other up first. One huge, African American prisoner asks his ferry’s captain for the detonator. Credit Nolan with craftiness here, as he plays on people’s assumptions of narrative and race. Instead of having the prisoner blow the other ship up, Nolan upends expectation and has the man do the moral thing (he throws the detonator out the window), while the citizens on the other boat vote to kill the supposedly vile convicts. Point taken.