Film Review: BATMAN BEGINS ****½ (out of 5)
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“Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot. So, my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts.” — Bruce Wayne, “Origin,” Detective Comics #33, November 1939
There is a beautiful moment during the climax of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins when a small boy, just saved from doom by our spectacularly revised and revivified superhero, turns to his companion and says, “I told you he would come.”
Defiantly corny and old fashioned in the midst of a smart, hip movie, the moment resonates with the whole world of superhero codes and conventions, with all previous incarnations of Batman, and with his successors throughout the 20th century. This is a movie made by people who care about movies, and who care more about Bob Kane’s original Batman creation than they do about how previous films have portrayed him — in some cases, betrayed him. Long before the moment occurred, I knew I was watching an authentic rarity, a comic book adaptation that actually gets it right, but it’s thrilling when it keeps happening throughout a film, up to and including the closing moments, and that is the brilliance of Batman Begins: it takes the time to give us what we’ve always wanted, whether we knew it or not, even as the pressures of sanitized corporate storytelling bear down, threatening to squash the innocence and the hope.
It’s a delicate thing to balance, especially in a culture that is now saturated with comic book movies, where cynical motives loom all around. The mega-conglomerates, who own the “studios” that greenlight the films, love the profits to be had from tie-in video game and DVD sales, now the primary reason many movies are made at all, but they care nothing about providing an entertainment experience for paying customers over the age of thirteen, and it would never enter their heads to press for something higher. They don’t need to; the machine takes care of itself. Even good directors, battered by careers stuck on this merry-go-round, will take on a comic book project simply for the paycheck and a little piece of the “backend,” perhaps to make the payments on their house in the Hollywood hills, or to put their kid in rehab and still keep the bar stocked, or all of the above. They don’t care about the source material, or those people in the audience who might actually love the original. In many cases, it has been so long since these directors were part of a real audience, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to sit with one.
But Christopher Nolan remembers, and I think it’s pretty obvious the producers of Batman Begins do, too. They sifted through years of terribly conceived proposals in their search for a way to bring Batman back from his box-office grave, where director Joel Schumacher left him buried in trendy excess back in ‘97. Among the ideas they vetoed: an elderly Batman with Clint Eastwood, which anyone could have told them was not on the wish list of a single moviegoer, anywhere. Much as I love Clint,…No, not ready for that.
Then, they let indie film darling Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, 2000) have a crack at development, his name generating a stir among fans who were hoping to see something good and dark. But his idea of Batman was to give us something good and deconstructionist, almost as bad in its own way as Schumacher’s post-Ambiguously Gay Duo Bat-nipples and Bat-butt close-ups. There were other proposals, all of which became snagged on the misperception that Batman himself was outmoded, that the faults of the past had been in the character rather than the filmmakers.
At last the producers listened to Christopher Nolan, another indie outsider whose primary claim to fame and competence was Memento (2001), a gripping, experimental thriller which had the distinction of unfolding backwards. But there was still reason for doubt; although Nolan is probably a visionary, it’s too early to know for sure, and the machine has a way of grinding such people into a hamburger suitable for the masses. Nolan could have made precisely twenty-seven Mementos with the budget he was given for Batman Begins.
I went to the theatre with damp expectations at best, knowing that money changes everyone and everything. Breaking my own rules against believing anything in a coming attractions trailer, good or bad, I was skeptical about the seeming interjection of martial arts wirework into a story that has never needed it before and, conversely, the stunning look of the production and costume design, which often portends a lack of actual storytelling.
Wrong on both counts, and many others. Batman Begins is unlike any superhero film that has come before, except maybe M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, which was the first serious attempt by a filmmaker to apply some realism to the genre’s conventions. Certainly Spider-Man 2 was an important advance in giving psychological realism to a movie superhero, which is only fitting for a Marvel creation, but Batman Begins raises the stakes for everyone with the sheer quality of its effort. A brilliant amalgam of Batman’s many faces through the decades, from Bob Kane to Tim Burton, with generous doses of Frank Miller’s recent Dark Knight mythos, the film is a richly imagined, exciting and original exploration of who this character really is under the mask, set in a palpable universe that is just over the line between the real world and our darkest fantasies.
Collaborating with David S. Goyer, the screenwriter of Dark City and Blade, Nolan has chosen to focus almost an hour of the film on Bruce Wayne, the billionaire who spends his nights dressing up and scaring the bejeezus out of wrongdoers. Unlike previous filmmakers, who have been content to rely on Batman’s vast cultural profile as sufficient explanation for his lunatic behavior — c’mon, let’s face it, the guy is obsessive-compulsive and suffers delusions of grandeur, even if they are somewhat warranted delusions — Nolan digs deeply into the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents, his long apprenticeship (which is where the martial arts come in), his further self-training, the ideas behind his conception of Batman, and how he achieves his own transformation: finding the Bat-cave, piecing together the suit and the car, choosing his first tactical moves, learning from his mistakes, trying again. Batman Begins is about the process of becoming, which is not just one of the core themes in superhero origin stories, it’s a major concern in the literature of any society.
Telling Bruce Wayne’s complete story is a tack that has never been tried before because the front office is usually skittish about funding a superhero who doesn’t start banging heads right away, but it’s a necessary step in humanizing the figure of Batman and making him a complex, memorable hero. In fact, what Nolan and Goyer have discovered and put to good use here is that Bruce Wayne is actually three warring personalities inside one man, not merely two, as screenwriters usually assume: he is a mystic seeker of truth, as well as a billionaire playboy and rogue crime fighter, and he pits the two public disguises against each other as multiple distractions, while he acts out his demons for the greater good. It is a dimension that has always been there, but Batman Begins establishes its presence better than any previous film. As a result, when the action really takes off in the second half, we aren’t just looking at some clever set pieces with a guy in a cool suit; we are invested in Batman, and the superbly staged fights and chases carry a meaning beyond their obvious thrills.
Nolan writes and directs this film as if no one ever made a Batman movie before, filling the cast with some of the best actors in the world. One of the longest kept secrets in English language cinema, Christian Bale is wonderful in the triple role of Bruce Wayne-Errant Playboy-Dark Knight, giving the Caped Crusader a delicious menace that no one else has managed while still projecting a deeply sympathetic personality. In one respect, this is definitely Bob Kane’s original concept — we have no doubt why the guy gives criminals the willies, and he is certainly one tough sumbitch — but he also chooses his symbolism for the best of all possible reasons, a man who has faced his fears and knows how to use them.
Mr. Bale is surrounded by a first rate lineup of supporting actors: Michael Caine, the maestro, is a perfect Alfred the Butler, dignified, eminently charming, and usually right; Cillian Murphy is a blood-curdling Scarecrow, the most disturbing Bat-villain a filmmaker has ever tackled; Tom Wilkinson is almost as frightening in a more down to earth way, as Gotham gang lord Carmine Falcone, the essence of power used for mundane evil; and the great Liam Neeson, as Bruce Wayne’s mysterious mentor Henri Ducard, is simply dazzling as usual.
Every now and then, a real moviemaker sneaks in and is able to do it right. I was reminded of watching The Mask of Zorro (1998) for the first time, or going a little further back, The Fugitive (1993), films that presented no outward reason for high expectations, but that proved their mettle at the beginning and hardly took a misstep afterward. Zorro needed to be an old-fashioned romantic swashbuckler, and somehow no one interfered with that; The Fugitive needed to be a hair-raising, cat-and-mouse chase movie, no more and no less, and miraculously no one ruined it with the usual superfluous additions; any new Batman film needed to return to the roots, to give us Bruce Wayne becoming Batman, and Christopher Nolan refused to let himself be distracted from that mission.
There are quibbles to be made about one detail or another — the editing occasionally falls into random hyperactivity during action scenes, for instance, and the Writers Guild needs to send out a memo about the inadvisability of letting superheroes give away their secret identities too often — but such things must be weighed against sheer entertainment value. It may be that I liked this film so much because my expectations were low going into the theatre, and Nolan and company exceeded them early and often. But I also saw Batman Begins with a sold-out audience of the only critics that matter for this kind of film, middle-class parents, kids, teenagers and assorted movie fans. I can tell you they laughed and gasped when they were supposed to, and they applauded at the fade to black.
I’d pay a lot for that to happen at the movies on a regular basis.
Batman Begins
directed by Christopher Nolan; screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, story by Goyer; based on characters created by Bob Kane; director of photography, Wally Pfister; edited by Lee Smith; music by James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer
with: Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Michael Caine (Alfred), Liam Neeson (Ducard), Gary Oldman (Jim Gordon)
2 hr., 21 m.; Warner Bros. Pictures, rated PG-13
release date: June 15
Notes:
ORIGINS: The character of Batman made his first appearance in the May 1939 issue of DC’s Detective Comics, #27. He was actually a collaboration between artist Bob Kane (1915-1998) and writer Bill Finger, who would add many important touches as time went on, such as the characters of Robin and The Riddler. The origin story did not appear until six issues later and was written by Gardner Fox. It was told in a mere two pages.
Batman had his own magazine by the next year and is currently the star of five monthly comics in a wide variety of visual styles and storytelling attitudes. Over the ensuing seven-and-a-half decades he has proven the most durable of DC’s submyths, next to Superman, evolving through many incarnations on radio, in movie serials, live action and animated television, and most recently, feature films.
Eric Barker is an indie writer-filmmaker returning to Indy this month, after a long self-exile in Denver. He has not decided on a secret identity yet.
