This movie is easily 40 minutes (the equivalent of one villain) too long, has some awful dialogue, pretensions to ethical "complexity," and a cluttered supporting cast. These are problems, but they are all problems of ambition--of trying to make a *real* movie, and not a cartoon. I don't necessarily applaud that ambition, because it seems misplaced and at times pretentious, but the resulting flaws are at least forgivable on that account.
What is that ambition, exactly? Weirdly, it seems to be to tell a story about a *city*--where most movies today are blandly "topical." This gives Gotham much more time and attention than one would expect for what is usually a faceless Chicago/New York hybrid--touching on city politics, geography, the way personal lives run into our jobs when we don't live in the suburbs and compartmentalize these things, media spectacles, etc. It doesn't have a lot to say about these things, but they are there, along with the dominant motif that the film links with the urban setting: hope and faith in our public servants. This theme produces the over-long Harvey Dent/Two-face plot, which is a kind of tumor clinging to the much-more-interesting Joker plot, but the film clearly feels it welded these together more than it really did. Two-face is supposed to be the "ultimate" mechanism in the Joker's plan for destabilizing Gotham: throwing the city into chaos, and exposing the noble and normal for the frauds they are. But that summary is much more succinct than anything you'll get in the movie.
Batman/Bruce Wayne (the chiseled and unreadable Christian Bale) gets less screen time than his deformed, villainous counterparts--proving the tired cliche that villains are more interesting than heroes--but if I can turn this cliche on its head, isn't the point of Batman that he has this interesting dark side? So actually that truism explains nothing, because of all superheroes, Batman is the closest to being a villain--a point taken up IN CONTENT by the film's plot, but not at all IN FORM (i.e. it is still much more interested in the "real" bad guys).
Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart are really great here-- Oldman disappears into the role, while Eckhart perfects the way charming and charismatic (blond) people can really annoy you. I wasn't very moved or sympathetic with Dent's tragedy...for whatever reasons... Maggie Gyllenhaal did nothing for me... Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman seem like one too many old actors for basically the same role... Again, the film obviously thinks it has some real drama here, but for the most part it doesn't. Why does Hollywood think that *we* will care as much about these characters as the director does?
The centerpiece of the film is a long car chase through the underground thoroughfares of Gotham--when most of the threads of the plot are drawn into the outcome of this one sequence: it's completely riveting. The other contender for best scene is when the Joker blows up a hospital---there's an incredible long take that is uncannily real-looking and disturbing; it's not shot like an "action film" at all. And that is the film's greatest strength--when it succeeds at being "not just a comic book movie" it is really astonishing; but because these (for the most part) aren't geniuses at work here, some really great shots and situations sit amid a lot of bloated could-have-been material.
2 comments:
I agree, the Two Face plot was a bad move and should have been saved for a sequel which hopefully wouldn't happen. It pretty much begs to be a cliffhanger, and Nolan and co. were probably just trying to flout convention by tacking it on to the last quarter of this movie, but coming at the end of the film it really leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
Did you read Ebert's review of this movie? It's kinda interesting... he misses the point of the Joker almost entirely, exemplified in passages like "His clown's makeup more sloppy than before, his cackle betraying deep wounds, he seeks revenge, he claims, for the horrible punishment his father exacted on him when he was a child." Later in the review he says "There are no references to Batman’s childhood, but we certainly remember it, and we realize that this conflict is between two adults who were twisted by childhood cruelty — one compensating by trying to do good, the other by trying to do evil. Perhaps they instinctively understand that themselves." It makes me think maybe he went to the bathroom or something and missed a crucial scene or two.
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