BATMAN BEGINS
Dir: Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" is a lot like the car featured so prominently in the trailers: muscular, oversized, not particularly eloquent or imaginatively realized (it's been called "a Humvee on steroids"--how excited can you be about souped-up version of an existing vehicle?).

The movie borrows heavily from Frank Miller's "Batman: Year One," so heavily it's possible to call this an adaptation of Miller's graphic novel; I'd say it's the best to date, Robert Rodriguez's "Sin City" notwithstanding, adding that it is at best faint praise. Judging from his work (the abovementioned plus his best-known book, "The Dark Knight Returns"), Miller's is a rather narrowly focused sensibility, bleak romanticism surrounded by stripped-down, exaggerated elements of the "noir" landscape. If I somewhat prefer Nolan's picture over Rodriguez, it's because Nolan isn't as faithful; as an onscreen approximation of what Miller's work is like, "Sin City" is about perfect--black and white, bigger than life, and dreary as hell.

One of the prime considerations for casting Batman (other than that he had to have a strong mouth and jaw sticking out from under the cowl) was that the actor had to radiate danger, had to give you the sense that at any moment he could pull a mask over his face and fight crime or grab a kitchen knife and start stabbing wildly. Bale's previous lead role was as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron's fairly witty "American Psycho"--how big a surprise can he be?

Bale does have one thing in his favor--he plays Bruce Wayne as an upper-class bastard, a real piece of work, and does it with an élan that suggests that he was born to the role (he brought the same sense of arrogant entitlement to his Patrick Bateman). That said, Nolan and Goyer fail to give him a scene where the sense of danger really breaks out, a scene like Keaton at the fireplace with a raised poker in hand--that came out of nowhere, and was all the more frightening because no one bothered to explain afterwards.

Surrounding Bale are an overqualified cast of supporting players--Linus Roache as a benign (and rather bland) Thomas Wayne; Tom Wilkinson as Carmine Falcone (the unlikeliest looking 'Carmine' I've ever seen); Ken Watanabe as a criminally underused Ra's Al Ghul. Morgan Freeman dryly makes use of his few lines as Lucius Fox, Wayne's armorer; Gary Oldman is uncharacteristically decent and stolid as Sgt. James Gordon--perversely so, you might say, which is good (the picture needs all the perversity it can muster).

Liam Neeson's large, physical presence as Henri Ducard, Ghul's second in command, reminds you that he used to play rugged-hero roles in movies like "Darkman" and "Rob Roy" (he could be our generation's Burt Lancaster). Michael Caine, the biggest star in the cast, has all the best lines as Wayne's faithful servant and surrogate father figure, Alfred; he even manages to fool you into thinking they wrote a character for him to play.

Katie Holmes as Attorney Rachel Dawes is the single worst case of miscasting in the movie. Mr. Tom Cruise's latest beard (he auditioned several before settling on wholesome Holmes) seems too young and dewy to play an upright moral touchstone to Bale's dissipated Bruce; her scenes with him are clearly unenthusiastic attempts to develop a love interest (they may have to bring in a Robin to keep him company). By picture's end, where she has an endless scene opposite Bale where they discuss their future (or lack of) together, you can't help but wish that Bale would just push her into yon nearby Batwell, and have done with her.

Cillian Murphy, who was shortlisted to play Batman, so impressed Nolan that he cast him as his opposite number, The Scarecrow; this should have led to more interesting doubling/doppelganger imagery than actually happens, which is unfortunate. Actually, Murphy's entire onscreen performance is something of a disappointment, not the least because Murphy himself seems so promising: he has the bright, glittering eyes to play a near-psychopath, and a mouth presentable enough to stick out from under a cowl.

He has nicely menacing bedside manners as psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane, but when he puts on the burlap to become The Scarecrow, Nolan makes the hilarious mistake of shooting him through throbbing lenses, like they used in cheap '50s monster movies (to suggest the waves of terror he radiates, I suppose; all I got was a serious migraine). Murphy does have one good line, just before he flicks a flame towards a gasoline-doused Batman: "Lighten up!" But too much of the movie is focused on Bateman's transformation from Bruce Wayne to Batman, so there's not much time to develop Murphy's character; he's left inhabiting the margins of the movie, a promising but never fully realized super-villain.

The absence of a memorable villain is perhaps the chief flaw in this incarnation of Batman: I understand this is supposed to be an origin story, which reminds me of an old complaint about superhero movies: how boring origin stories (which fans would already know about and non-fans would hardly care to learn) can be. For much of the film Nolan and co-screenwriter David S Goyer put Bale's Bruce Wayne on an inward-looking quest, dealing mainly with his own fitness to become Batman; he has no real equal to dispute his claim, much less match wits with him. In all this grim grittiness, one longs for the irreverent antics of a Jack Nicholson, the vicious misanthropy of a Danny Devito, the spectacularly sexy antagonism of a Michelle Pfeiffer.

Batman is a dark enough figure all by himself; without a contrasting villain to run circles around him and light fires under him and make subversive commentary about him, he's unrelieved darkness. I've mentioned Murphy as The Scarecrow, confined to the margins; Liam Neeson as Ducard is no help either--he tries to explain Batman to himself in a manner as solemnly earnest as Alfred Kinsey channeling Yoda explaining sex to a middle-class virgin. Seriousness talking to seriousness in all seriousness isn't necessarily profound; in this case, it's deadly dull.

Batgeeks complain: "what naysayers want is a return to Adam West's campy TV series, or Joel Schumacher's screechfests, complete with bat-nipples!" Not really--comedy is one of many emotional colors in a filmmakers' palette; Burton's isn't necessarily campy, or even lighthearted. He finds the horror in the humor, like Mark Twain does in "Huckleberry Finn" (ostensibly a comic novel); in fact, I find Burton's work more unsettling than Nolan's (who seems consistently humor-impaired--I'm thinking of "Memento," where the only cheerful element is Joe Pantoliano's line readings; and "Insomnia," where the only wit seems to emanate from Robin Williams' presence) since Burton's jokes throw you off-guard, unprepared for the hidden vicious barb.

I miss Burton's films--there, I've said it. I miss his irreverence, the way he'd have all the batgeeks jumping with their collective underwear bunched between their cheeks (an antagonistic relationship between a filmmaker and fans is, I suppose, ideal). I miss the way he'd strand a perfectly serious Batman in the center of his unsettlingly perverse world, where not just the supervillains but the director himself is an enemy, constantly cutting out the ground from under him (all this, and a PG rating!).

I miss the grandeur of his vision, the way he'd take Danny Elfman's doomed-hero music score and Anton Furst's magnificently corrupt sets and fuse them into a cinematic whole ("Batman Begins'" music and production design are about as memorable as junk mail); however flawed it was, it was a genuine vision, where the best that Nolan can do is show flashes of cleverness here and there (in his previous films--"Following;" "Memento;" "Insomnia"-- you saw a fondness for gimmicks masking the lack of a genuine sensibility). "Batman Begins" is faithful, all right, and successful in what it sets out to do: reduce Burton's larger-than-life Batman into just another action hero.

Note: First published in Businessworld, 6/17/05.
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