Kelly Wand"Through a Knight Darkly" review
July 28th 2008 04:24
Who says graphite can't be hilarious?
After all the ass-fat that studios have been shoveling onto our eyeballs all summer under the exactly untrue banner of fun for all ages, it feels strange to realize that summer of ’08 will hereafter be associated with what will surely go down in history as a milestone of the medium – and not just superhero movies. The Dark Knight isn’t just as great as people say, it’s better. If it has a flaw, it may be that it tries to do too much. That for the most part it succeeds is kind of a miracle, especially in an age when few movies aspire even to make much sense, let alone entertain.
What’s fascinating about TDK is that everyone likes it, and it’s about as far removed from the summer’s other big superhero flick, Marvel’s feel-good Iron Man, as to constitute a different species. Dark Knight isn’t a feel-good movie; it doesn’t feel stitched together by a cookie-cutter studio obsessed with checkmarks on focus group cards. It’s dark and tragic and unresolved. It has only one great action sequence midway through. It’s choc-a-bloc with weighty philosophical discussions about fate and heroism and truth. The hero doesn’t get the girl. The bad guy gets all the best lines. The wrong villain dies. The hero is deliberately bland, the secondary hero blander. The jokes aren’t supposed to be funny.
I was spellbound throughout.
So were the small kids and middle-aged parents surrounding me in the theatre, born noisemakers who exist only to ruin movies, all silent and entranced save for the occasional cry of horror, amusement, and awe. We were absorbed, literally. There’s nothing ironic and detached about viewing The Dark Knight; it envelops you and drops you into abysses and shadows, even without IMAX (though not quite as steeply).
R-rated in all but name (and in hindsight it just as easily could have been), the movie’s plot basically chronicles the ramrod rise and horrific decline of an idealistic D.A. named Harvey Dent (played with underrated humanity by Aaron Eckhart), who is, like the entire population of Gotham, cruelly used as a pawn by the enigmatic Joker for the single purpose of driving Batman insane. Whether this plan succeeds or not is arguable. Either way, it’s Heath Ledger’s movie, and Bale and Eckhart know it. Ledger’s Joker is probably the greatest grace note an actor has ever ended a career on, deliberately or otherwise; it’s why phrases like “tour de force” were invented. It’s so grand and startling and creepy and original that it makes memories of Jack Nicholson’s stab embarrassing by comparison.
In a way, though, Ledger has things easy, since Two-Face is a bit of a problem as a villain; he is, well, sort of limited, the way the Hulk is. He flips a coin like Anton Chigurh and has a melted face, and that’s about it. Yet screenwriters Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan somehow transform his pedestrian origins and driving force into a haunting Shakespearean downfall, complexly weaving it into a goulash of subplots with an assurance and grace that makes the finale spin out like a pre-MPAA 1940s film noir. Dent starts as a man nobler than Batman and ends up a poster child for nihilism; if that doesn’t sound like suitable entertainment for kids, maybe you need to go ask yourself why not. Then go re-read “Hansel and Gretel” or “The Yearling.” Probably the only reason the Bros. Nolan won’t win screenwriting Oscars is because their source material was a crudely printed comic book from the 1930s and this is precisely the reason they deserve to.
Truth be told, there’s more to Dark Knight than Harvey’s skull and the Joker’s lips. Most of the subplots pay off, sometimes as quietly as the sound of a burning envelope or a bank of screens going dark*, even as the main storyline keeps hurtling relentlessly along. Every character seems to make a surprising choice that feels believable, even those stuck with traditionally thankless roles like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. Cillian Muephy’s Scarecrow, last seen tasered on horseback by Katie Holmes, shows up briefly as the type of villain Batman can now dispatch with ease, along with packs of hooded middle-aged Bat-groupies (one of the very few elements cribbed from Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic novel, which was great in a very different, Vonnegut-esque way and which will hopefully never be adapted by Zack Snyder). You get to know and sympathize with the cops of Gotham, the SWAT teams and truck drivers, the Mafia…It’s the first superhero movie I can think of where the ordinary citizens of the city not only prove themselves worth saving but alone manage to outwit the villain.
Best of all, where superhero polemics are usually mandated to browbeat you with computer-generated effects, sloppily pouring that weightless static goo into every shot as if its sugary sludge alone was intended to sate, here the CG is deployed sparingly; it’s there purely to serve the story. Nolan’s not the best action director, he seems to cut away more than he reveals and murk is his crutch. Some of his action is hard to process the same way jumbles of comic-book panels can be, yet Dark Knight’s greatest visual asset is that it’s not trying to look like a comic book; the movie takes place in the real world, by the harsh rays of daylight.
Still, far and away the single best visual effect in the movie is Heath Ledger. As convincingly taciturn and pent-up as he was in Brokeback Mtn., here he’s just as casually self-assured, articulate, and unexpectedly charismatic, a disfigured sociopath at least as intelligent as Batman who’s devoted his life to spreading flames. He doesn’t want friends. He could have taken over any city in the world, but chose Gotham because breaking Batman is his pleasure. Like the real origins of the scars on his face, none of this is explicitly stated. We know next to nothing about the Joker except that he’s tickled pink at physical pain (even his own) and that while he lies constantly (except about his passion), he’s also sincere enough to stake his life on a flip of Harvey’s coin just to win him over and eager to sacrifice himself if it’ll somehow torture Batman’s soul. And he never sleeps. Maybe it’s just as well that we’ll never see him again; in its own way, his storyline by the end of Dark Knight is complete, Ledger’s untimely death the Joker’s final, cruelest punchline.
Does anything suck about this movie even remotely? [Spoilers ahoy!]
It’s true that Bale’s gravelly rasp under the mask isn’t exactly the most expressive conduit for some of his more poetic observations (it sounds like the new cowl is strangling him) but Bruce Wayne admittedly has to disguise it somehow. Or to put it more honestly, some stuff just reads better than it sounds, as anyone who has ever written dialogue will attest.
Like others, I too wondered about the fate of all those bigwigs trapped with the Joker at Bruce’s reception once he dives after Rachel. Does he kill them all, take a few for ransom, or what? It seemed out of character for him to leave without some savage farewell gesture. And we certainly hate to miss out on any of those.
When Harvey turns bad, his going after Gordon’s family does seem unsatisfyingly abrupt; it suggests a cutting-room floor at Warner Bros. that’s hip-deep in juicy third-act rampage footage. It’s also unmotivated; Gordon himself was hardly to blame for Rachel’s fate, let alone his kids; granted, it would have been a simple matter for the Joker to make their deaths seem necessary with an eloquent speech but that particular monologue isn’t on the screen.
Finally, there are some who complain that the movie, while good, is still too long. The truth is, it’s actually more like ten hours too short.
A hearty tip of the cowl to WB for giving Nolan plenty of rein and for resoundingly knocking worthy foe Iron Man into second place on what in many respects was a risky, gutsy, altogether brilliant sequel.
Try not to spend it all on Speed Racer 2.
*I did wonder what happened with the turncoat Detective Ramirez; for the sake of synergy, I like to believe that her hospitalized mom was in the one the Joker blew up.
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