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Batman Begins
“They attack you because they fear you.” –Thomas Wayne By now, you have already heard the praises from the world’s top critics, citing that this is the Batman film that absolutely gets it right. You already know that the characters, from the bottom up, are true to the spirit of long-living DC Comics title, and all make for compelling, immensely likable (and dislikable) personalities. That Gotham City has never been better, chiseled out of urban decay like Hell’s interpretation of New York City. That this might be the first really good comic book film that is plausible and grounded in reality—or at least as realistic as possible for a story about a masked vigilante who has to save a city from a mind-altering villain bent on poisoning the entire water supply. That the Batmobile (here call the Tumbler) is an amazing, awe-inspiring machine, bringing to mind the towering majesty of Batman’s unstoppable tank in Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. That the action sequences are gritty and realistic, never surrendering to the over-the-top, ridiculous animation that overcame the likes of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher’s Batman films. You already know that it is the closest to greatness that any live-action superhero adaptation has ever come. What more can I add? I will add that if the above statements left you scratching you head and saying, “So what? Batman comics mean nothing to me,” then you should see this film anyway, because it will give you, for the first time, an understanding of why Batman stands as the most enduring of all superheroes (edging out, ever so slightly, Superman, Spider-Man, and Captain America). In fact, you will realize that Batman is hardly a superhero at all, but a man in a bat suit who, as he puts it himself, “clearly has issues.” This is, primarily, a film about madness and obsession, cleverly disguised as another superhero-themed, summer blockbuster. Do not miss this point. There is a reason that the critics are rating the film so highly; it is because it understands the vision of the best of the Batman tales and takes those visions very seriously. If you’re wondering what the “best of the Batman tales” is, I’m about to tell you. For me, a student of English who has been trained to interpret the great works of literature, Batman first rose to prominence as a serious player in the literary arena and not just a cartoonish character when I first read Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel (which essentially is a comic book intended for adults) that took seriously the psychological implications of a man’s drive to dress up like a bat and scare the daylights out of criminals. Batman, for the first time, was not merely a masked do-gooder, but a man driven to fight crime for the same reason that Hamlet feigns madness: It is the only way to silence the ghost of his dead father, who he was helpless to save when from murder most foul. Batman doesn’t fight for goodness, or justice, or even vengeance, even though he seems to think that all of these abstractions are his motives. He fights because it is the only therapy he can think of that keeps him from total madness—it is the only method to silence the guilt and rage that is literally tearing him apart from the inside out. There is more schizophrenia inside Batman than aspirations of heroism. Like the Bat costume, heroism is simply a mask to cover a deeply disturbed person, who nevertheless perseveres due to his own, deranged hope that with every criminal he defeats, he is closer to a retribution that will never really be reached. Frank Miller’s masterful graphic novel made me realize the endurance of Batman. He is our American Hamlet, our twentieth-century Byronic hero. He was created to sell children’s magazines the same way that Shakespeare performed Hamlet to the buying masses, yet both emerged from their pulp origins to reveal the same raw desperation and helplessness the eclipses the human condition, albeit in very exaggerated yet equally unforgettable personas. Frankly, The Dark Knight Returns is one of the finest pieces of literature that I’ve ever read, (and yes, I’m am very familiar with the works of Dickens and Dostoevsky and cherish them both), and Miller deserves to be ranked with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway as one of America’s greatest literary social commentators. Read The Dark Knight Returns. Purchase it, and add it to your library. Put it next to your dusty editions of The Complete Works of Ben Jonson or John Milton. It will hold its own next to either, and anything else you’ve got on that shelf. Batman Begins succeeds because it is the first film—indeed, the only film—to realize the character of Batman the same way that Frank Miller saw him, as Byronic hero and a Hamlet for our times. He wants to strike fear into the hearts of criminals because he fears his father’s ghost, because he wants the voices in his head to stop tormenting him. The voices, perhaps, aren’t as loud here as they are in Miller’s book: Batman is not so glaringly flawed in this film because it concerns the beginning of his crusade against his ghosts, and The Dark Knight Returns concerned his final hours, when all inhibitions and idealisms have been stripped away to revealed a weathered man who has nothing left but his obsessions, which he finally realizes will never be silenced. Nevertheless, we see in the film that this weathering has deep roots, and we are shown how they were planted and the path of madness that they will eventually take Batman on. It is, in a way, the prequel not to the previous Batman films (which the movie, by the way, does not claim to be), but to Miller’s novel. Miller, of course, wrote his own insightful prequel to The Dark Knight Returns, called Year One, but even that novel takes place long after Batman has become the obsessed antihero that we see in Miller’s earlier work. Batman Begins takes us even farther back than Miller took us, tracing the embryonic origins of the Batman and how Bruce Wayne came face to face with his destiny. Because these themes are so probing and serious, Batman Begins is nearly incomparable to any other superhero film ever made. Only The Maxx, an animated film that also addresses the delusions of any superhero who honestly thinks he can save the world, has an edge over Batman Begins, mainly because its animation enables it to create surreal worlds that match its deranged premise. Batman, on the other hand, is grounded in a 2-D existence hardly befitting his state of mind. Sans Maxx, this Batman is thematically light years beyond other films of its kind. The original Superman, Spider-Man 1 & 2, and previous Batman films are all exciting and they might have interesting conflicts or well-developed characters with plausible motivations, but they exist in the world of the comic book in which the good guys will always win and the bad guys are always far more interesting. Batman Begins exists in an entirely different plain, where the hero is his own antagonist who literally creates his own arch-villains because they give a tangible face to his inner demons. The film is working in completely different terms than others in the comic book genre. Of these other films, I often am in conflict with myself over which I like the best. The first three Superman movies were terrific entertainment but emotionally withdrawn; the Spider-Man films weren’t bad but suffered from too much implausibility (too many people realizing his secret, for example); previous Batman films were more about the villains; X-Men was inspired but tried to cram so many characters into its story that they ended up all being compromised; “Smallville” was an often brilliant look at the early years of Superman but sometimes got too soapy to be taken seriously. Of all of these comic book adaptations, I think that Batman Begins has the most in common with Russell Mulcahy’s The Shadow (1994), which as of now I’ll call my favorite. That film/comic book is also about an antihero who is plagued by his own inner ghosts, and it follows the same basic plot: In both films, the heroes are trained by a secret group of spiritual warriors based in Asia, and then they return to their place of birth to battle villains who force them to peer into their own dark souls. Both heroes use their gifts to instill fear into the hearts of their adversaries. Ironically, Batman-creator Bob Kane freely admits to plagiarizing much of “The Shadow” comics when he created the Caped Crusader. I mention The Shadow, a genuinely fun and underrated film, as a point of reference to help you understand the different between comic books films and Batman Begins. Because of its similar plot, the earlier film builds the bridge between this film’s goals and the goals of its predecessors. The Shadow hero is essentially a Hitler-like warlord, reversing his convictions to fight crime because he has literally seen Hell and doesn’t want to spend eternity there. His spirit and approach is so kindred to Batman’s that Frank Miller and Christopher Nolan, the director of Batman Begins, could have just as easily used the character of the Shadow to create their complex themes on human nature. Yet in The Shadow movie, these dark themes are a springboard for exhilarating action sequences and special effects; Batman Begins utilizes the same action elements for a different purpose: As he builds his Batcave and dreams up his suit and drives his Tumbler from rooftop to rooftop, it is the obsessions that move these moments forward. In The Shadow, and indeed, in all other superhero films, the emotional dilemmas are all setup. In Batman Begins, they are the payoff. The success of the film hinges on the actor behind the bat mask to propel the character and make his obsessions evident and underlining throughout. As Batman, Bruce Wayne brings so much depth that it often goes over our heads, unless we are paying attention. In a recent article, I praised both William Hurt and Christopher Lambert for the type of acting that Bale exhibits here. I said that they were “superb actors who are able to emit the highest possible of emotion and depth by portraying the least amount of physical activity and visible sentiment as possible. … They are both leaders in the subtle, less-is-more, iceberg approach to acting. With a flick of an eyebrow or the sniff of a nostril, both actors are able to perfectly communicate their characters to their audience and reveal their depth as artists.” Bale basically gives us two types of performances here, and I don’t mean the Batman/Bruce Wayne alter egos. One is as the hero, fighting for justice, and the other is as the private demon that rages within Batman, that motivates him about all other forces. Otherwise put, the surface and the subtext are both present in the actor’s portrayal. To be sure, Bale cuts a dashing figure as the Batman, but watch the fury in his eyes as he interrogates criminals or perches bird-like, waiting for the enemy to appear. He wants this. He thrives on it. He likes it, almost sadistically. His true nature is thus revealed. If Bale’s interpretation is not grounds from an Oscar nomination, I’m not sure what is. I also like the way that Chistopher Nolan directs the scenes in which Batman administers justice to street thugs. The Burton and Schumacher films made the mistake of focusing on Batman himself. We knew every trick he had because we watched the battles from his point of view, as he grabbed items from his belt that fit the need of the situation. There is no suspense, only action. In this film, Nolan only shows us what the thugs see—a dark, mysterious beast with demonic horns that silently lifts their friends into the air in a flash and drops them, punches them, etc. Here, he is literally a supernatural force, a deadly predator. Some of these sequences work like horror films, and it is an inspired idea, especially for those who still have lingering thoughts of the campy, 1960s television show. These scenes make it clear that we have come very far from the era of “Bang!” and “Pow!” The only aspect in which Batman Begins fails is in the crucial characteristic of Batman as a detective. The film’s action sequences are always psychologically complex, but somewhere in the mayhem, I think that there is an element of the detective story that is not fully realized. Also similar to the Shadow’s origins, Bob Kane originally envisioned Batman less as a superhero and more as a masked variation of Sherlock Holmes. According to the DC universe, Batman is a brilliant mind and “the world’s greatest detective.” Frank Miller and other writers continued with this notion, always integrating Batman’s climactic showdowns with a drive to get to the bottom of every mystery that literally renders Batman sleepless and even drearier. For as much as Batman Begins gets right, this crucial, detective element of Batman’s character is lost, and it somewhat affects his motivation. For Batman, it is not enough to fight crime. It is the ability to defeat it on every level, both physically and intellectually. Batman Begins only gets the first part right, but it creates that aspect so perfectly that there is more than enough here to compensate. To echo all who wrote before me, they simply got this one right: For the first time ever, I have walked out of a Batman film feeling that it was made by people who, like myself, read Frank Miller initially expecting Saturday matinee thrills and was instead exhilarated and moved by his literary Batman. This film attempts to hit us with the same surprise, and it succeeds. Cast: Warner Brothers presents a
film by Di Bonaventura Pictures. Directed by Christopher Nolan.
Written by Nolan and David Goyer. Based on characters created
by Bob Kane. Rated PG-13 for stylized action, violence, frightening
sequences, and brief language. Running time: 141 minutes. Original
United States theatrical release date: June 15, 2005. |
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