I'll let you in on a secret: I'm a woman in my mid-twenties, and I love comic book movies. Even the debacle that was last year's The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer could not manage to quench my enthusiasm for the genre. After all, it has everything that I think makes for a great movie-going experience: hot guys in tight clothing, a little existential discussion on the nature of good and evil, and things that go boom.
I've been looking forward to The Dark Knight since I knew they were making it. I saw Batman Begins in cinemas five times, and while it's far from perfect, it opened the door for movies like this year's Iron Man, which blends a stellar cast, a bit of fun, a bunch of big toys, and some serious post-9/11 discussion on the nature of war, the nature of responsibility, and perhaps most importantly the nature of guilt. I was blown away by Iron Man and, while I hoped The Dark Knight would be as good, I couldn't imagine it would be better.
I was wrong. The Dark Knight takes the "I'm-not-really-a-comic-book-movie" ethos of Iron Man a step farther, into territory darker than most crime movies dare to go. It has more in common with hardboiled flicks like The Departed or Layer Cake than fluff like The Fantastic Four. While it's only rated PG-13, this is definitely not a movie to take your kids to: although there is very little onscreen gore, I haven't been this monumentally uncomfortable watching movie villains do their thing since The Silence of the Lambs. And The Dark Knight has more in common with that film than it'd appear to, at first. The antagonist and protagonist here also dance circles around each other in a relationship that becomes surprisingly codependent: "We could do this forever," purrs the Joker in one climactic scene, and by that point we understand why. Batman and the Joker are the Yin and the Yang of crime.
But The Dark Knight is more than just a masterful crime thriller, although it has its fair share of perfectly-timed mayhem. It's also a highly effective look at the torn post-9/11 American psyche. Batman wants to hang up the mantle and live a normal life, but he's also created a world where his very existence means he can't. He's a character compelled to continually clean up the messes of the world, but in the act of doing so he creates the possibility of endlessly worse ones. He's playing a game with an opponent who doesn't have any rules, and so he is faced with the question that haunts so many films of this type: where does one draw the line? And how does one fight a force that doesn't want anything but, as the wise Alfred puts it, "to watch the world burn"? Wisely, the film doesn't offer any tidy answers, and it doesn't put everything back together in a neat montage at the end. Things get broken that will never be fixed.
Because of its obsession with deep psychological issues both political and personal, The Dark Knight is Gotham Noir. It's not a happy movie. Children have guns pointed at their heads. Women get hurt. People die. Even the overall look of the film is murky. But every once in a while it shows a glimmer of very dark comedy, and surprisingly the humor in this film comes almost entirely from its darkest denizen: Heath Ledger's Joker. This performance has been talked about for months, and while I've always been a fan of Ledger (even in godawful movies like A Knight's Tale), I had to wonder whether the performance could possibly live up to the hype.
It does, and more. Nicholson's Joker was a ham with wacky clown makeup; Ledger's, a deeply psychotic, tragically wounded young man who sucks on his scarred cheeks as he talks and likes to kill with knives, he says, because he likes to "savor all the emotions" that a blade brings out. Yet he also brings a deadpan humor that verges on slapstick in some scenes: the physical comedy Ledger brings to one scene involving a malfunctioning bomb timer is nothing less than brilliant. The balance is perfect. He's disturbing to watch, but you can't take your eyes off him. I can say without reservation that he'll be not only the quintessential Joker but the gold standard for psychotic movie villains in general for a long time to come, and would have been even without his tragic and all-too-soon death.
The rest of the cast are excellent, although nobody else comes close to touching Ledger's level of connection with his character (perhaps to the benefit of the audience, as this film is emotionally draining to begin with). Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne is as slick as ever, and although the raspy voice he uses as Batman can be distracting, he holds his own admirably against his opponents - no easy feat in this film. Aaron Eckhart is your typical handsome blonde good-guy as D.A. Harvey Dent, but even before his inevitable downfall we sense there's something not-so-noble lurking under the attractive surface. Gary Oldman's flawless Gordon makes it easy to forget he's acting. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are, well, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. And thankfully, Katie Holmes is nowhere to be seen, replaced by a competent if outshone Maggie Gyllenhaal.
The Dark Knight has raised the bar for not just comic book movies, but movies in general. One reviewer claims that if it gets anything less than a Best Picture nomination, he'll be outraged, and I agree, particularly with the last few years of Oscar-nominated (and winning) movies like The Departed, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men, all of which deal with the psyches of the deeply disturbed and question if any of us are really normal. My one real quarrel with the film is that, even at 2 hours 32 minutes, it's too short. I wanted in particular to see more of one character's transformation, but I think there's room for that in a third movie, hints for which are definitely dropped in this one.
Just do me one favor, Chris Nolan: don't bring back Robin.
