Movie Review: The Dark Knight

Jeff Simon - Buffalo News

Jul 17, 2008

The Dark Knight - ****

Batman wants the Joker to tell him something. So he goes full-goose Guantanamo all over the Joker's painted, psycho self, beating the stuffing out of him with a pre-Miranda savagery that is about as far from Super Heroism as you can get.

At that moment, as the black-garbed "hero" viciously bounces the Joker off walls and floors, good and evil are indistinguishable from one another.

Welcome to one of the most remarkable "comic book movies" ever made.

"The Dark Knight" is the best "Batman" movie since Tim Burton's remarkable first one in 1989. It is, in every way, so far above anyone's sensible expectations for a comic book movie that it stands a good chance of being the great movie of summer 2008 (and one of the great movies of the year).

"The Dark Knight" is such a deep, dark, dire meditation on heroism, evil, social class and urban corruption that you realize just how very far beyond a "comic book" this movie goes.

It IS that, of course, but it's so much more that its ancestry includes Dostoevsky far more than Bob Kane. Goodness, when it's an untrammeled outgrowth of entitlement, eventually becomes the seed of its opposite, evil. Turn right at Abu Ghraib and you can't miss it.

In Hollywood, every two-bit Brett Ratner pulling up to the curb in his brand-new lemon wants to tell you about his "vision," as if megaplex patrons were presenting him with an eye chart (such are the perils of jargon when it comes first from movie critics and scholars).

"The Dark Knight" is that rare film, Hollywood and otherwise, that gives its audience a genuine "vision" -- a glimpse of civilization where the worst chaos is caused by lawless goodness.

If the original Tim Burton "Batman" was an anarchic postmodern art movie secretly sheathed inside a product-laden summer blockbuster, this, even more, is a pitilessly dark art movie pretending to be a blockbuster (I wouldn't, by the way, encourage any but the most sophisticated subteen kids to see it. On the other hand, I wouldn't encourage anyone else to miss it.)

And Ledger's performance as the Joker, the main agent of all the disorder inadvertently caused by Batman's "crime-fighting" heroism, is brilliantly disturbing. Here is a painted-face clown with long, grease-caked hair and a rouge smile daubed over cheeks that were once cruelly sliced to create a permanent "real" one. Ledger flicks his tongue in and out of his cheeks and over his lips and, on occasion, slurps his spit in, as if dealing with massive oral scar tissue.

Pay close attention to the two times the Joker explains the early life trauma that left that "smile" hideously scarred on his cheeks. The first story is a horror tale of disfigurement by Daddy. You sit back in your seat thinking garden variety sympathetic Freudian thoughts.

The second time he explains it, the tale begins similarly but forget all that nice dollar book Freud about Crazy Daddy. What, at that moment, writer/director Christopher Nolan is telling us about one of the great villains in current movies, is that Freud explains less than nothing.

The Joker is an agent of chaos for its own sake; he embodies, with all his playful cruelty, the force of Malice in the universe. Whatever his wounds, psychic or otherwise, they're irrelevant to all the horror and pain he can engineer. And his favorite thing is putting civilized people to the test so that they'll turn on each other and make monstrous moral choices.

He's a demented and diabolical artist in his way. Hubris and human weakness are his materials. You can't take your eyes off Ledger whenever he's on screen. He electrifies the whole movie.

But it's Batman's lawless "caped crusade" against crime that inflames the Joker and every other maniac in Gotham.

And no other Batman movie I've seen has made such a brilliant point of equating Bruce Wayne's life of total billionaire entitlement with Batman's heedless vigilantism. We see a lot of Wayne's world of total privilege in "The Dark Knight." Becoming a "caped crusader" against crime, then, is just another branch of his total life entitlements.

And it's his crusade that, in turn, inflames society's worst to do their worst.

You do the moral math. We are in extraordinary territory for any kind of movie here, let alone one where people have light "comic book" expectations.

It's true that this movie, like "Batman Begins," is utterly humorless. But completely unlike Nolan's previous dreary "Batman Begins," this movie possesses a kind of intelligence that is electrifying on its own.

This movie, then, is a festival of doppel-gangers. Everyone is either made of good and evil parts or is the twin of his moral opposite.

There's D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), for instance, whose virtue in Gotham City is the only one to equal Batman's -- until, that is, his face and soul are blown up and turned into grotesque caricature. He becomes, in every way, two-faced. One face is pure, one hideous. Michael Caine, of course, is back as Wayne's butler Alfred, the embodiment of high-minded Anglo-Saxon cluelessness. Gary Oldman plays the young cop Gordon just as he becomes commissioner and Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces Katie Holmes in the role of the woman Wayne lost to Dent.

One final word about the rating attached to this: Except for one unignorable thing, this is, in every possible way, a four-star movie. What cannot be ignored, though, is that the movie is clearly a half-hour too long. Never, though, will you see excessive length in a movie that is as sympathetic as this. What Nolan has all but said is that Ledger's death put an extra responsibility on him -- to represent one of the actor's two final performances (the last major one, no doubt) in the best possible way.

I think Nolan felt honor bound to leave as much of Ledger's extraordinary performance in his movie as he possibly could. It may have lengthened his film to the point where it wears you out at the end, but I don't think you'll blame him. Who, among us, wouldn't be moved by the tragic circumstances to want to do the same thing?

Four Stars

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