Gotham City nights

The Dark Knight
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“The Dark Knight” is more an ensemble drama than a superhero film, more a brooding morality play than an action saga. Yes, it features Batman, the Caped Crusader of yore, but the movie is, surprisingly, not really about him: It’s about a metropolis in turmoil, a civilization on the brink of despair; the forces of evil trying to breach the city’s walls, and the forces of good desperately fighting to keep them out. There is more than one hero, and there is more than one villain, yet sometimes they seem to be one in the same.

This is the sixth live-action Batman movie in the last twenty years, and it’s the first one to get everything absolutely right. It surrounds us with a diverse and interesting palette of supporting characters. It delivers astounding action sequences that are wonderfully shot and edited and that make perfect sense within the fabric of the story. It poses intriguing moral questions and keeps them grounded within reality. And, most impressively, it gives us perhaps the most terrifying, unhinged villain any superhero has ever had to face.

It is also the grimmest, most uncompromising Batman film yet, and it immerses us so completely within its universe that it makes the shadowy cityscapes of Tim Burton’s Gotham look like child’s play. “The Dark Knight” occupies the bleakest corners of Batman’s haunted existence, and it is intense, violent, unrelenting and sometimes very scary. Suffice it to say, it is light-years away from the campy lampoonery of the Adam West TV series.

Christian Bale returns as reclusive billionaire Bruce Wayne, whose alter-ego, you no doubt know, is the masked crime fighter Batman. He’s so good at his job, in fact, that Gotham City’s bad guys have gotten desperate, and the city’s mob bosses hire criminal mastermind and professional basket case the Joker (the late Heath Ledger) to kill Batman.

Meanwhile, recently-appointed district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) has allied with Batman, hoping to become the city’s newest hero (devotees of the series will be aware of Dent’s fate, which steers the film’s final act into an unexpected direction).

The Joker is quite a serious adversary, and he embarks on a city-wide crime spree that will not relent until Batman sacrifices his anonymity. He does this all with a perverted, bloodcurdling zeal, disguised in clown make-up and donning long, horizontal scars at the curled corners of his mouth that resemble a creepy perpetual smile. Ledger, who died shortly after production was completed, embodies the Joker so convincingly that his very presence on-screen commands our attention, and his performance inspires a morbid, terrifying fascination.

In one particular sequence, the Joker explains the origins of his scars. He’s holding a man in a headlock, playfully poking around in the guy’s mouth with a switchblade, and dutifully explains how his father, a brutal drunk, methodically carved the gashes into the sides of his face. The way Ledger plays this scene, with such relish and vindictiveness, is hypnotic, and I realized, halfway through his monologue, that I had been holding my breath, entranced, horrified, intrigued. It is a remarkable performance.

I also love Michael Caine as Bruce Wayne’s butler Albert, who is the voice of reason in times of great distress, and Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman and Maggie Gyllenhaal (replacing Katie Holmes as Wayne’s former love interest) are just as good. And Bale, too, is terrific: He seems to have realized that Bruce Wayne is, intrinsically, not a very interesting character, and, as the residents of Gotham grow weary of Batman’s presence, he allows himself to fade almost completely into the background, making him a gloomy, spectral figure.

The look of the movie is tremendous, too. All previous incarnations of Gotham City have looked like the products of art direction and production design, cartoonish and stylized and faithful to their comic book roots. But director Christopher Nolan’s version of Gotham looks remarkably like Chicago (it was filmed on location there), and although the bold look of the early Batman films are missing here, the city looks undeniably real and gritty, and the urban decay feels genuine. The strange architecture has been replaced with neutered skyscrapers, the bright colors muted so we’re left with cold, metallic grays, dismal browns and all-consuming blacks.

Nolan claims that “The Dark Knight” was inspired by the Michael Mann film “Heat,” which is evident. This movie is not a superhero picture in the traditional sense, but rather a serious crime drama in which one of the characters just happens to be a superhero. Nolan, who also helmed 2004’s “Batman Begins,” has drained the film of the series’ witty undertones and ironic subtexts—there’s no winking at the camera, no attempts at parody or comedy, and the wise-cracking villain’s one-liners serve more as an illustration of his own battered psyche than they do as comic relief.

Although he has taken a considerable risk in approaching the material as seriously as he does (a technique that didn’t work in “Batman Begins”), the film is all the more effective because of it. “The Dark Knight” assumes a grand, operatic sweep, a towering ambition that thrusts it into the realms of greatness. This movie raises the bar the way “Jaws” and “Star Wars” did in their day: It delivers as a summer blockbuster, but it also exists as an example of the genre being elevated to an art form.

Grade: A+

Directed by Christopher Nolan. Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Morgan Freeman. PG-13; 152m.