|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Dark Knight Review |
|
Posted on
1:00 p.m. PST July 22, 2008 |
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff
07/17/2008
Ledger's Joker brings a twisted smile to a long and
brooding Batman sequel.
Two hours and 32 minutes long,
"The Dark Knight" is grimly magisterial. It's a summer
blockbuster that contemplates near-total civic disaster:
Crowds surge, tractor-trailers flip, and buildings explode,
but the pop violence feels heavy, mournful. Light barely
escapes the film's gravitational pull.
Yet flitting through this 10-ton expressionist murk is a
diseased butterfly with stringy hair and a maniacal giggle.
Played by a dead actor, he's the most alive thing here.
It's not quite fair to say that the late Heath Ledger steals
"The Dark Knight" from Christian Bale and the forces of
(problematic) good, but, as the Joker, he is the movie's
animating principle and anarchic spark - an unstoppable
force colliding with the immovable objects of Batman and
director Christopher Nolan's ambitions. Much more serious in
intent and message than 2005's "Batman Begins," "Dark
Knight" would be fatally ponderous without Ledger's nasty
little sprite. As it is, the movie strains at its own
Wagnerian seams.
"Knight" begins where "Begins" left off, with Gotham City
desperately trying to wrest itself from the grip of the
criminal underworld. New mob boss Salvatore Maroni (Eric
Roberts) cuts deals with the Russians and Chinese while the
media tries to figure out whether this Batman guy is a hero
or a vigilante. Imitation Batmen run amok, led by the
earlier film's Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy, in a brief and
unexplained appearance). And someone is robbing the mob
banks of Gotham, leaving a Joker behind as a calling card.
Is Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) of the Major Crimes Unit
somehow involved in the heists or merely taking advantage of
them to seize the bad guys' assets? What does the new
district attorney, a white knight named Harvey Dent (Aaron
Eckhart), want? Why is Wayne Enterprises holding merger
talks with a shady Hong Kong businessman (Chin Han)? "The
Dark Knight" takes a while to sort itself out; even at 152
minutes, you can feel the three-hours-plus monster this was
carved from. Confusion reigns in the opening scenes; loose
threads abound toward the end (including one major figure
literally left hanging).
Yet the generous midsection works as an agonized big-muscle
action film about a conflicted superhero. As Bruce Wayne,
Bale is gravely shallow, and he lacks the sense of fun
Robert Downey Jr. gave his obscenely rich playboy in "Iron
Man." Bruce uses his secret identity as a hidden camera to
glean information from the city's upper echelons, but he's
not quite there otherwise. This, oddly, is what makes him
interesting, both to us and to assistant DA and
ex-girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking over
from Katie Holmes and providing the character - at last -
with a spine and a brain).
Batman's a whole other story.
The filmmakers have worked out the mask problems from the
previous film; Bale fills the suit with grace and danger.
His voice is disguised as well - it's now a bass-heavy
synthesized whisper. The character seems more than ever an
extension of his high-tech toys (like the neat-o Bat-scooter
that pops out of the Batmobile at one point, ecstatically
rearing up like the Lone Ranger's Silver). He represents a
citizen's darkest urges, though, and it eats at him. He's
Dirty Harry crossed with Hamlet.
The complicated plot involves Batman, Gordon, and Dent
putting the squeeze on the mobsters, who look to the Chinese
businessman as a financial savior and to the Joker to rid
them of Batman. The Joker, of course, has his own agenda,
and if you're not sure what that is, he's happy to spell it
out for you. "I'm an agent of chaos," he sneers in one of
the script's more italicized bits of dialogue, but we don't
need to be told, since Ledger embodies that sentiment in
every brilliantly off-kilter line reading.
We never find out where the Joker came from. Every time the
character tells the story of how he got his smiling scars,
 the
details are different, as though he were making himself up
on the spot. The gambit works because Ledger re-invents the
comic book super-villain as a wildly watchable Method nerd.
The character's body movements are wobbly but controlled,
the eyes darting with nervous energy as he calculates his
next move. The tongue slithers.
Yet even when he's done up in drag as a nurse - a freakish,
hilarious scene - this Joker never grandstands like Jack
Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman" or Cesar Romero on
the old TV show. Instead, he mutters and natters with bent,
subversive intelligence. He's a small man delighting in
tipping over the big guys.
"The Dark Knight" itself comes close to tipping over in its
final act (or two). Whirling action set pieces like a Hong
Kong kidnapping and the detonation of a hospital have come
and gone, and the appearance of a subsidiary villain named
Two-Face - half his face burned horribly away, keeping the
film out of kiddie territory - ups the stakes. At one point
Nolan finds himself cutting frenziedly between Batman,
Gordon, the Joker, Dent, Rachel, and a crazy man in the
police cooler, and you feel the film's sense slipping away
between the smoking edits. (I haven't seen the IMAX version,
but I imagine it's overwhelming, and not in a good way.)
On top of this are laid themes of moral complexity that make
"Hellboy II" and "The Incredible Hulk" look like, well,
comic books. The question of whether a true hero is a
due-process man like Harvey Dent or a "dark knight" who
breaks the rules and gets innocent people killed is worried
at throughout the film, building to a climax that forces us
to confront exactly what murdering someone might do to the
average man's soul.
"The Dark Knight" prods at the boundaries of power and
surveillance as well, casting a shadow over Batman while
leaving his technological guru (Morgan Freeman) in the
light. (Michael Caine's Alfred, meanwhile, acts as the Caped
Crusader's enabler, politely urging him to stay the course.)
These are good and necessary things to ponder, yet they're
nearly lost in the cross-cutting clutter. You come away
impressed, oppressed, provoked, and beaten down, holding on
to Ledger's squirrelly incandescence as a beacon in the
darkness.
So: Is the performance on a par with "Brokeback Mountain"?
In its interiority - in the sense that it springs from a
mysterious engine at the actor's core - yes. Is it Oscar
worthy? Sure, if that's how you measure these things. In the
end, though, the achievement's more than that, or harder. It
makes you mourn a gifted man's stupid death with fresh and
vigorous sorrow.
|
 |
|
Original Review Link |
|
|
|
|
|
|
