Cinema Hype

Remember the 90s? That mythical time when Clinton was in office, cell phones were like bricks, and future governor of California put on hockey skates, painted himself silver, and appeared in a Batman movie? What a difference a decade makes: Bush hijinks (if that’s what you can call them) and Zoolander communications aside, we’re in a new era. Comic-book movies are suddenly serious business, and the newest Batman movie, The Dark Knight, may just be the biggest and baddest (and possibly best) of them all.

The Dark Knight isn’t so much the story of Batman—Christian Bale, as Bruce Wayne/Batman, gets surprisingly little screen time—as it is the story of the Batman Universe. And what a large and complex universe it is: villains galore, a network of good guys and bad guys and in-between guys all striving for control of Gotham City. Writer/director Christopher Nolan says that he takes his material seriously, and it shows. He takes his time, building his story from the foundation up—every detail addressed, and nothing wasted, despite the length and density of the movie. Eventually, size translates to momentum, and it’s a sprint to the end.

As far as action/comic movies go, The Dark Knight is an anomaly of pacing and style: slow and precise to start, then branching into two plotlines with separate climaxes. I originally believed that this was The Joker Movie Plus Harvey Dent, and that the next Batman installment would be The Two-Face Movie. In fact, The Dark Knight covers both stories, which makes it pleasingly complex but also obnoxiously long. Nolan does have a point—a thesis by which the movie’s title becomes clear—and it’s a really good one, but it takes a long time to get there. Could the film have been divided into two movies and still retained its integrity? It’s hard to say, and it depends on the link between the Joker and Harvey Dent. Nolan could have delivered a tighter, shorter movie and given Two-Face a film of his own—more on that later—but I suspect that Nolan didn’t want a tighter, shorter movie. He’s an epic guy, and he wanted an epic movie, highlighting the direct link between the Joker and Dent’s transformation.

Whether a direct consequence of Heath Ledger’s death earlier this year, the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight has billed it as Ledger’s movie more than anybody else’s. His disheveled clown face is everywhere; there’s talk of a posthumous Oscar nomination. Ledger’s performance is indeed excellent. He’s everything you thought he would be: manic and brutal and nearly unrecognizable, absorbed by the role (except, possibly, for that telltale ripply forehead). As the movie points out, the Joker doesn’t play by the rules—by any rules, not even his own—and Ledger plays his unpredictability, unpredictability for the unpredictability’s sake, with his whole body—face, voice, asymmetrical posture, dangly limbs. Maybe this is the kind of role that inherently makes actors look good, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Ledger didn’t coast. He’s excellent and terrifying.

However, if Ledger is the front-runner in The Dark Knight, he steals the spotlight from another masterful performance, the hidden jewel of the film: Aaron Eckhart as District Attorney Harvey Dent, who later becomes the villain Two-Face. Eckhart’s an ideal choice for Dent, swinging between hero and villain with alarming ease: he is absurdly, upstandingly good-looking, milking that cleft chin for all it’s worth, but with a palpable menace just beneath the surface. Dent is probably the most interesting character in the Batman universe thus far, and Eckhart doesn’t cut any corners—he is equally believable and equally intense as both the ultimate good guy and the enraged revenge-seeker. This is another potential reason that The Dark Knight might have survived major script surgery: as it is, Eckhart gets lost in Ledger’s shuffle. In a Two-Face-centric movie, his performance might have gotten the admiration it rightly deserves.

The Dark Knight will probably go down in history as a (or possibly the) zenith of this comic-book movie renaissance: Nolan is one of the best in the business when it comes to large, dark, complicated stories, and he’s pulled out all of the stops here. This second Batman film is darker, scarier, more complex, and more emotional than any we’ve seen before, yet it also sets up the character and the universe for the next chapter. Where that next installment will go is anybody’s guess—but if this is the new road for Batman, sign us up.

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