Sunday, July 13, 2008

MovieWatch: "The Dark Knight"

"The Dark Knight"
Director: Christopher Nolan
Fien Print Rating (Out of 100): 86
In a Nutshell: [I begin this posting with a polite apology for my absence of bloggage over the past week. I have, however, Twittered nearly 150 times at my Zap2it-affiliated Press Tour Twitter feed (Follow that feed now), which will continue to be glutted over the next two weeks by Press Tour and Comic-Con. Anywho... On to the review...]

Regular readers of this blog don't need the reminder that the Fien Print ratings scale is absurd. Friends have certainly mocked me for the proliferation of ratings in the mid-60s that have filled the summer months so far.

My response? I wasn't going to over-praise a mediocrity like "Iron Man" or "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" just to expand my ratings limits.

The reality is that Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" is more than 20 mythical ratings points better than those two movies I listed or, for that matter, better than any other movie I've seen so far this year. The risk with a movie this good is overhyping it to the degree that people come out saying, "I was expecting cinema and all I got was a comic book movie."

So I'll say that I'm prepared to call "The Dark Knight" the finest comic book movie ever made and I would expect with some confidence to find it in my overall Top Five at the end of the year.

Quite simply: While "The Dark Knight" isn't without flaws, it is what you hope it will be.

But enough puffery. A review of measured substance after the bump...

Click through...

[There certainly will be spoilers here. That's unavoidable. They won't detailed spoilers and I sure as heck won't give away any of the most major plotpoints. But the fresher you want to be when you see the movie, the more you want to hold off on reading this review until after you've seen the movie. That, I guess, makes it less of a "review" and more of, as I've said before, an evaluative essay on the movie. So be it.]

The problem with Nolan's "Batman Begins," a movie that I quite enjoyed at the time, was that it seemed to go on forever. There was a lengthy origin story, followed by a loose series of short films in which Batman battled the Gotham mob, then Scarecrow, then Ra's Al Ghul. Within each of those movies, I found much to praise, but with no thematic or narrative throughline joining them, "Batman Begins" couldn't sustain itself for 140 minutes, at least not for repeat viewings.

So Nolan and co-writing brother Jonathan solved the problem.

"The Dark Knight" runs even longer than "Batman Begins," but its duration is justified by the fact that from the first to last scene, there's an arc unfolding, an arc that follows in the storied tradition of middle installments of cinematic trilogies. In Chapter One, we meet our hero and are awed by his superhuman status. In Chapter Two, we discover the limits of our hero and face his relative humanity.

Nolan make movies with a common undercurrent. Whether we're looking at "Memento" or "Insomnia" or "The Dark Knight" or "The Prestige," his heroes are men whose obsessions straddle the barrier between noble/productive and disturbing and self-consuming.

In "The Dark Knight," there are two sides to the coin. Newly introduced Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is driven by a legal and ethical imperative. He's determined to clean Gotham up by any legitimate means necessary. He's absolutely selfless in his quest, but he's limited by his status as a public figure and by rules and regulations that don't apply to Gotham's criminals. Batman (Christian Bale) is driven by a moral imperative. He's a vigilante and thus cares only about good versus evil. And thanks to his wealth and his assortment of awesome toys, he has no limitations. Except for his moral code, which places restricts the amount of wrong he's prepared to do right.

The "Dark Knight" script follows what happens to these two very good men when they face a man who has no limitations whatsoever. Heath Ledger's Joker is pure and malevolent id. He doesn't care about money or power, only chaos. He has none of the motivations or pathologies that Dent or Batman understand and none of the fears or weaknesses that they're accustomed to battling. If "Batman Begins" burdened Bruce Wayne/Batman with excessive origin and backstory, Joker has been gifted by the opposite. The Joker's purple suits and face-paint are what they are -- his sartorial choices go unexplained, as do his clown fetish and reluctance to wash his hair -- and the explanation for the gruesome scars that make his hideous smile are used as protean punchlines. We don't see his lair. We don't get to know his henchmen. He doesn't waste time brooding. He doesn't become romantically devoted to Vicky Vale. As much baggage as The Joker is doubtlessly packing on a psychological level, he doesn't burden the movie with it.

And that's the core of the movie. And it's a solid one. How do you do good if you live in a world where it's easier to do evil and where even the best of intentions and ideals inspire more wickedness than virtue?

To turn things over, as I love to do, to Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."

I have to confess that I only fully appreciated the marvelous complexity that Nolan achieves in addressing this conundrum after watching the infantile lack of pragmatism in "Wanted." Because no, Nolan doesn't perfectly face the dueling journeys for Dent and Bruce Wayne and there certainly are times that you wish for more of the Joker and less internal struggle for the heroes. But much of that is caused by the excellence of Ledger's final completed screen role.

Those who are less enamored of "The Dark Knight" -- people who, in advance, make me sad -- will ask a very cynical question: Would Ledger's performance here be getting this same attention if he hadn't died this January? I wondered the same thing, albeit not in print, about Adrienne Shelly when "Waitress" came out to rave reviews. My cynicism was wrong there and the Ledger doubters will also be wrong.

Keep in mind that Jack Nicholson received a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as The Joker in the Tim Burton "Batman" and that he was at least somewhat in the Oscar discussion that year. It's just a showy roll. And Young Daniel was a huge fan of the Nicholson performance and even today I can reflect on it with much pleasure. The gist of the performance was that The Joker was a fun-house mirror version of Batman. As The Joker reflected, looking a the local newspaper, "Winged Freak Terrorizes [Gotham City]... Wait'll they get a load of me!"

But that quote meant one thing: That The Joker was *weirder* than Batman.

In "The Dark Knight," Ledger's Joker, looking at Batman, matter-of-factly observes, "You complete me!" The meaning is completely different. Batman's over-reasoned sense of order is just the other side of the coin to Joker's over-reasoned sense of anarchy.

And Ledger is quite awesome, giving a performance that's both mannered and actorly and completely off-the-rails in its sense of improvisation.

Want my comparison? Ledger's performance is like John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things." In the background there's a recognizable actor and an oft-played character and you can see occasional hints of previous Ledger performances and even of previous Joker interpretations. But those moments, as well-delivered as the are, are rare compared to the moments where he's just jamming by himself, doing whatever insane thing he and Nolan concocted together.

There are the hunched shoulders, the raw and flat and accent-free voice, the licking of the lips, the way he rarely seems to be looking straight-on at anybody (and when he does, it becomes even scarier). Those are all things that were carefully delivered and prepared. But Ledger's every line reading feels like it's coming from another planet. That mixture of calculation and free-wheeling is what Ledger's Joker is all about. Ledger is scary, frequently funny and impossible to take your eyes off of. The movie's energy flags when he's absent, but that's unavoidable.

And that doesn't mean that the film's other performances are lacking. Bale is still at his best when contrasting Bruce Wayne's actual agita with his playboy front, though there's much less of the latter persona in this movie. I'm still waiting, though, on a scripted explanation for the gravel-voiced rumble he affects as Batman.

Eckhart has less time to develop Harvey Dent's arc and even if he did, it would have been upstaged by Ledger at every turn. He's fine. And his make-up/effects in the last act are icky-awesome.

The other major new addition to the cast is Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes. The character doesn't have a whole heap to do in the movie, but for what's required of her, Gyllenhaal is better suited than Holmes would have been.

The star-studded supporting cast is again superb. I want to, once again, single out Gary Oldman as Not-Yet-Commissioner Gordon. It's predictable for Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine to successfully embody decency and rectitude, but I remain genuinely amazed by how Nolan has steered the always grandiose Oldman into a performance this understated. He's gone two movies in this franchise without an iota of ham.

Two weeks ago, before this Press Tour onslaught began, I went back and rewatched "Insomnia," the only one of Nolan's post-"Following" movies I can't get completely behind. I just wanted to see if I'm missing something. I wasn't. It's still a movie of moments that doesn't add up, but on a second viewing I'm ready to put the blame for "Insomnia" completely Al Pacino, or rather Nolan's inability to direct Pacino into anything other than a Pacino performance.

Anyway... "Insomnia" aside, Nolan need prove nothing else to me and as good as "Memento" and "The Prestige" were, "The Dark Knight" is his pinnacle. If you look at the actors and at their performances and at the writing that guides them, you could argue that "The Dark Knight" is an intimate character drama.

But it's really a $200 million -- give or take -- summer blockbuster and there's absolutely no precedent for a director working on this scale to concentrate so equally and successfully on both the nuances of performance and absolute spectacle. That's a pretty big statement, I know.

Ledger *will* get his awards recognition -- be it inevitable nominations or even actual wins -- come the end-of-the-year and Nolan will deserve the same kind of honor, but the below-the-line talent will hopefully be remembered as well. Wally Pfister got Oscar nods for "Batman Begins" and "The Prestige" and he should expect another here. His use of Chicago in creating Gotham City is excellent, as the city is both recognizable for what it really is, but also pleasantly alien. Pfister shoots Chicago the way Chicago's mayor and City Council wish the city actually were. And in "Dark Knight," he does the same for Hong Kong in the movie's best Ledger-free sequence.

I can't emphasize this enough, kids: SEE "THE DARK KNIGHT" IN IMAX. SERIOUSLY!!!

Nolan and Pfister shot establishing shots and core action sequences in 65mm for the purpose of IMAX presentation and the IMAX-ready material is breathtaking from the movie's very first frame. Literally breathtaking. And there more than a half-dozen additional shots in the movie that produced a similar reaction, where my mouth was absolutely agape at the amount of information and clarity being delivered. There are occasional moments where the IMAX screen produced a sensory overload, but it's not overload in a Michael Bay way, which is a tribute to how Nolan shot the action scenes and how Lee Smith (the former Cubs closer?!?!?) edited them. The action scenes are taut and muscular and rely on expert stunt work and second unit photography rather than computer effects and post-"Matrix" whizbang. These are John Frankheimer/Don Siegel/John Sturges action scenes, paced out by a score featuring as much heroic bombast as Hans Zimmer can muster.

There. That's more than 2000 words to say that "The Dark Knight" is a superb movie, the year's best to date.

I probably should have just said that and saved us all some time!


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At 6:52 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've never really thought your ratings system made any sense and now that you've explained how it really doesn't make any sense it makes even less sense. The Dark Knight is the best movie of the year so far and it gets an 86? If we were equating these numbers to a high school grading system that would only be a B.

At 7:29 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Isn't it the high school grading system that doesn't make any sense? Why are 0-60 all "F", and everything else has a range of 10?

Anyway, he never said it was normalized by year. Why shouldn't TDK get an 86? Surely it's not the best movie of all time, right? An 86 leaves 14 places for better movies from other years.

(Sure it doesn't make a lot of sense, but neither does any other rating system. Dan is just honest about it.)

At 8:54 PM, Blogger Daniel said...


A few things...

1)I've always said my ratings system is goofy. Never said otherwise. I wrote 2000 words about the movie, though. That clarifies my feelings more than any two digits.

2)I *sure* never said my system was meant to be equated with a high school grading system. If I'd wanted to do that, I'd give movies letter grades, like Entertainment Weekly does. As Anonymous #2 said, the basic grading system has a lot of dead space that's almost never used. Me? I'm happy to give a movie a 15 or a 25 or a 30. If the Ivy Leagues have a "Gentleman's C," though, you could consider a "60" to be the numeric equivalent of *my* Gentleman's C. Work from there.

3)When I wrote for LA Weekly and my stuff got picked up and added to Metacritic, I was shocked to see that a film I had given a positive review to had been tabulated as a 100 in the Metacritic system. A 100. Perfection. I'd probably give 100s to fewer than five movies ever. If that many. And none of those movies were the 9/11 drama "The Guys," though I really liked Anthony LaPaglia's performance. That's the reason I don't visit Metacritic anymore. Because some dumbass in their programming department can't tell the difference between a positive review and perfection.

4)My ratings system is arbitrary and stupid, but it's pretty consistent. If you see I gave a movie, say, a 70? I liked it. With reservations, maybe. But I liked it. If I gave a movie a 75? I really liked it. An 80? You know it'll probably be in my Top 10 for the year. So it's comparative. I think I'm reliable in that respect.

5)I grade low. In the two years I wrote regular movie reviews for Zap2it -- before the site decided movie reviews were best served reheated from other sources -- I gave 4 stars (out of 4) to maybe two or three movies. I figure as the years go along, I scale up in my mind based on repeated viewing and long-term memory.

Yeah. That's all the defense I feel inspired to do of my ratings system. It's *SILLY*. I'm always happy to fight for and defend my OPINIONS. The ratings system? Not-so-much.

And thanks for reading!


At 9:02 PM, Blogger Christina said...

Dan's scale correlates more to the European marking system. Dark Knight w/ an 86, is a "high pass." That's first class.

I cannot wait to see it next weekend! Right after the Sox game in Anaheim on Saturday. Whee!


At 9:28 AM, Anonymous Drew Melbourne said...

What I'm waiting to find out is whether the movie falls apart into superhero action noise in the last 20 minutes, ala the original (or Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk or the first X-Men movie or...).

Also, David Goyer called. He says his first Batman movie is thematically tied together by saying the word "fear" a lot.

At 9:27 AM, Anonymous Carmichael Harold said...


I actually thought it did fall apart at the end, though not just into action noise (though there was some of that. . .for example, one late upgrade to his suit is there, I think, for sub-textual reasons, but causes visual incoherence), but also into some weak, nonsensical plotting and a psychological turn for one of the characters that I don't think was earned.

I would agree with Dan's review with respect to the first 2/3s of the movie, but not the last 1/3. Granted, this may somewhat to do with the fact that the theater I saw it in had sound-mixing problems, is that any dialogue spoken over music was mostly inaudible.

At 2:31 PM, Anonymous Drew Melbourne said...

Hmm. Just saw it last night. Man that's dark. My three complaints are (a) didn't quite buy into the tech, (b) 2nd boat resolution felt a little hammy, and (c) weird to see Two-Face without the "multiple personality" angle. Probably a stronger choice thematically, but it definitely makes the final turn a little harder to believe in.

Also, it was strange to see that all of the "Harvey Dent" election marketing was basically just for the marketing. "I believe in Harvey Dent" gets one reference, and it's delivered almost as if the director believes the audience will recognize the line from the advertising. (Which I did, so I guess they did their job.)

At 5:15 PM, Blogger Christina said...

Because I'm probably going to go see this again in IMAX at some point, I was really concentrating on the writing and editing in my first viewing of "The Dark Knight," rather than the composition and other visuals. From that first line, "Three of a kind, in the car," to the last the whole script worked brilliantly, I thought. I was especially fascinated by the way in which triangulations, as a hermaneutic, function in the narrative, as opposed to diads, i.e., not just your standard "good vs. evil" -- which, of course, the Batman story never has been, but I don't think any film before has really tackled this so thoroughly in the way the characters are writen in relation to each other.

Operative triads (w/ central character as mediating entity):

Joker-Batman-Two Face (rationality/irrationality)

More to say. Doubtless, I should be writing a post on my own blog instead of replying her. Just wanted to chime in to say I thought the movie was about as engaging as I've seen in the main stream this year. Really very good.

Bruce Wayne-Rachel Dawes-Harvey Dent (romantic love - the standard narrative-driving triad)

Alfred-Bruce-Lucius (father-son dynamics)

I think there may even be:
Batman - Alfred - Joker (origins / identity)

More complexly:
Lt. Gordon-Batman/Bruce Wayne - Harvey Dent (Law / society dynamics)

At 7:51 PM, Blogger Christina said...

Er, "...any film *in the franchise* before, &c., &c."

OK, off to do a refresher on Rene Girard before writing my own, more extended remarks on TDK.

P.S. - Congratulations on surviving another round of Press Tour and being appointed? elected? to the board. Hope you maintain craniofacial integrity through your stint at Comic Con this week.

At 8:43 PM, OpenID andythesaint said...

I can back up Daniel's breathtaking assertion of the IMAX cinematography, as there was an audible gasp in the theatre when the first scene appeared on screen.

At 7:27 PM, Anonymous Fienprint Blog said...

Hi Dan -

This is your blog. I miss you.

'kay, bye.


At 2:12 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I seem to remember Young Daniel seeing the Tim Burton Batman...

And, if you haven't seen it already in IMAX and plan to, try your darndest not to be sitting in the first few rows... WHOA!


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