Too many rules

National Review, August 18, 2008 by Ross Douthat

IF we can all agree to pretend that Batman Forever and Batman and Robin never happened--and with apologies to George Clooney's nippled, codpieced Batsuit and Arnold Schwarzenegger's indelible performance as Mr. Freeze, I'm pretty sure we can--then just two directors, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, have had a crack at the Batman mythos in the last two decades, and they've taken radically different approaches to the iconic vigilante. In Batman and especially Batman Returns, Burton took the essential unrealism of a comic-book landscape and deliberately heightened it, creating a stylized alternative universe populated by caricatures and freaks--its Gotham an out-of-time blend of gothic and Art Deco, the Thirties and the Eighties; its villains campy and sinister all at once; and its overall sensibility seemingly drawn, like much of Burton's oeuvre, from the fever dreams of a black-humored, bloody-minded adolescent.

Fifteen years later, Christopher Nolan has taken Batman in precisely the opposite direction--toward a harrowing realism that owes as much to Sidney Lumet or Quentin Tarantino as it does to the world of Batmobiles and supervillains. Batman Begins tiptoed uneasily along the realism-fantasy divide: One moment it was a gritty urban crime drama, pitting a not-yet-super Bruce Wayne against the Gotham Mob; the next it was, well, a comic book, in which an ancient Tibetan order of warrior monks was plotting to dump a hallucinogenic toxin into Gotham's water supply and then vaporize the water so that ... oh, you get the idea. But with The Dark Knight, Nolan delivers a Batman movie that's largely purged of silliness--a raw, dark, gripping narrative about politics and crime, terrorism and corruption, in which the fact that the hero happens to be wearing a Batsuit often feels almost incidental to the story.

The critics have already anointed The Dark Knight the finest Batman movie ever, and perhaps the finest superhero film, period. But in the long run, I think Burton's approach may hold up slightly better. His Batman movies were considerably less ambitious than what Nolan is attempting here--as much as I love Batman Returns, I wouldn't use the word "Shakespearean" to describe its ambitions--but they had the advantage of cutting with the grain of the genre he was working in. Burton aimed to fulfill the superhero movie; Nolan wants to transcend it. But no matter how dark The Dark Knight gets, or how high it ratchets up the stakes, he keeps bumping his head on the ceiling.

Here's a capsule summary of the great film that The Dark Knight wants to be. By dressing up in a Batsuit and fighting crime by night, the billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has brought some semblance of order to a lawless modern city. But the order he's achieved is transient, and when a new hero emerges--the white-knight district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart)--who seems capable of fighting crime within the system, Batman contemplates retirement. In an ideal world, Gotham wouldn't need a costumed freak to handle lawbreaking; moreover, taking off the Batsuit would give him the chance to woo back his lost love, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal)--who doesn't care to date a vigilante and is cuddling up to Dent.

The difficulty with this plan is that by wounding the Mob, the Batman-Dent one-two punch has made Gotham's gangsters desperate--desperate enough to make a deal with the devil, and let him drag the whole city down to hell. That devil would be Heath Ledger's Joker, a shambling, hissing, lipsmacking Iago in facial scars and clown makeup, and one of the scariest nihilists ever to slither into a summer popcorn film. (Ledger deserves all the posthumous accolades he's received; indeed, I suspect that his untimely death actually means that this performance will end up being underrated, its greatness slightly undercut by the sense of obligation that attends the praise that's heaped upon it.) The Joker is a man from nowhere: He doesn't want money, he doesn't want power, and he doesn't care if he lives or dies. He just "wants to see the world burn," as Wayne's butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), puts it. And stopping him will come at a cost--in laws broken, liberties trampled (not for nothing have the movie's post-9/11 themes been read as essentially pro-Bush), lies embraced, and lives destroyed--that may be more than anyone can bear.

"Welcome to a world without rules," The Dark Knight's most arresting poster promises. That's precisely what the set-up I've just sketched out promises the audience--a rare $185 million blockbuster in which it seems as though anything can happen, and nothing, not even the hero's triumph, feels rote or foreordained.

But it's also precisely what Nolan can't quite deliver, because he's making a Batman movie, after all, and no matter how dark things get there are rules you have to follow. You have to introduce some totally ridiculous technologies (like a sonar-based surveillance system that lets Batman spy on all of Gotham) and some snazzy new gadgets (the "Batpod" motorcycle) so that all the fanboys in the audience can scream, "Yeah! Wicked!" (Given the gravity The Dark Knight otherwise aspires to, these comic-book touches feel like the equivalent of Michael Corleone's whipping out a laser gun midway through The Godfather.) You have to include at least one extended action sequence where Batman performs jujitsu on the laws of physics--in this case, an assault on a mobster's Hong Kong skyscraper--even if it's superfluous to the plot. And you have to end the film with a climactic face-off between the hero and the villains, even if it drags the movie out for an unnecessary 40 minutes and saps away the tragic momentum the first two acts have built.