Batman Returns

Commonweal, August 14, 1992 by Richard Alleva

Even simple entertainment isn't simple anymore. Take the Tim Burton-Batman enterprise for example. The very first frames of the first installment announced that the director wouldn't, perhaps couldn't be content to make enjoyable junk out of Bob Kane comic books. The sets and photography were obviously masterminded by someone familiar with Art Deco, German Expressionism in both cinema and painting, and the "graphic novels" of Frank Miller. Nor was the script unsophisticated: Joker was presented as a mirror image of Batman. Just as the crime-fighter was germinated when little Bruce Wayne witnessed the killing of his parents by a criminal, so the archfiend was created when that same murderer was dropped into a vat of acid by Batman. Criminal initiates Superhero, who, in turn, transforms Criminal into Archcriminal. A, the inextricability of Good and Evil! This was pulp rewritten by Jung, the preliterate dipped into the subconscious.

But the funny thing about Batman was that the putatively central dramatic idea simply wasn't explored by the script, only exploited for a little metaphysical frisson. Michael Keaton could mutter darkly to Joker. "You created me," as he slugged it out with his nemesis at the climax, but this self-revelation did nothing to change the hero's nature or alter his destiny. It was merely a conceit that allowed the first generation of graduate school film critics, starving on the junk food of American movies, to kid themselves into thinking that they had seen entertainment with a touch of profundity to it. What gripped the general audience were the fights, the explosions, the aerial stunts, the sly wit of Jack Nicholson's villainy, the bizarre violence (the rictus on the faces of the victims of Joker's poisonous cosmetics), and the endless parade of gadgets. In other words, what really worked in Batman were the same things that work in better James Bond movies, which have never had intellectual pretensions. But the James Bond movies no longer have the box office appeal they once enjoyed (only millions raked in instead of billions) and the most recent unneurotic entertainment. Warren Beatty's sweet, wholesouled Dick Tracy, left some critics and audience yawning. Our palates grow more jaded with each passing year, so Batman, like the Terminator films, the Alien series, and even the latest Spielberg films, tries to awaken us with little doses of Jungean imagery, apocryphal foreboding, broody psychology, hip sociology.

Batman Returns is better than Batman. In terms of sheer spectacle, there's a genuine improvement. The noir of photography isn't overdone this time; the visuals are satiny rather than murky. Bo Welch's sets are as good as Anton Furst's but this time Burton really explores them with his camera. Danny Elfman's swooping, racing music isn't much different from his previous Batman score but, since this movie's look is more precise and the action better choreographed, the music seems more in accord with what we see and sight and sound now feed off each other more effectively.

Michael Keaton's characterization has slightly improved. It still puzzles me that such a volatile, facially expressive actor is being used to play a masked man. It's like hiring Orson Welles to play a mute. Any number of actors can thin their lips and dart their eyes as well as Keaton does but at least this time he uses his body more expressively, employing sharp right angle moves as he turns from one catastrophe to another that suggest that Batman's singleminded dedication to crimefighting is turning him into an automation. And Keaton now allows more of Batman's edginess to seep into Bruce Wayne so that, as the billionaire, Keaton no longer seems to be doing an impersonation of Jeff Goldblum. If he isn't exactly a character yet, Keaton's Batman is at least a force to be reckoned with. What also helps is that, instead of trying to melt the iceberg Kim Bassinger, Keaton now gets to make love to, and fight with, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.

I've never been particularly taken by Pfeiffer. She was always seemed more wan than subtle. But here the very preposterousness of the role - the skintight suit, the acrobatics, the karate moves, the feline sexiness - seems to have liberated the actress. She gives a scintillating performance.

By contrast, Danny De Vito as Penguin is suppressed by his make-up and costume. The clownwhite face, long nose, and twenty pounds of silicone layered onto his body certainly give De Vito the Penguin silhouette, but the actor can't penetrate the stuff emotionally. His vocal performance is so limited - wheezing punctuated by snarls - that he begins to bore only a few minutes after his first entrance.

But it is the better villain, Catwoman, that truly reveals the echt-ersatz nature of Tim Burton's enterprise. In this movie, Catwoman isn't merely a slinky temptress and amazon, she's a feminist fury. Her daylight self, Selina, is a used and abused secretary to an evil tycoon (Christopher Walken, who manages to be magnetic even when he's totally miscast) who first patronizes her attempts to contribute to his business and then tries to murder he when she accidentally uncovers one of his corruptions. Resurrected as Catwoman. Selina avenges not only her own wrongs but those of her entire sex. And she seethes at the very idea of female dependence. After dispatching a mugger, she then rounds furiously on the helpless female victim because the latter had screamed for Batman when attacked. "I am Cat-woman!" she hisses, "hear me roar!" before backflipping away into the shadows. I laughed at the send-up of the Helen Reddy lyric and I was amused at the effort to turn Catwoman into both an archetype and a reductio ad absurdum of feminism. And it was interesting, when Selina and Bruce Wayne fall in love, to watch two schizoid costume-freaks try to get together. And this romance, too, is used by Burton and scenarist Daniel Waters, to kid feminism and the war between the sexes; should Selina give into her tenderest "womanly" feelings or should she, as Catwoman, concentrate on wreaking havoc on male-dominated Western civilization?