Bat Dung
Batman Begins
The Batman movies were surprising in at least one respect: They rarely displayed much interest in their title character, orphaned industrial heir turned vigilante Bruce Wayne. Even Tim Burton's original Batman joined a superhero career already in progress and fixated on gadgets, Deco-noir sets and Jack Nicholson's funny-flamboyant villain, the Joker. Subsequent movies followed much the same template, occasionally flashing back to the murder-by-mugger of the hero's parents and his traumatic early encounter with bats, but reserving most of their fascination for the Penguin, the Riddler, Mr. Freeze and company.
Batman Begins breaks with tradition by focusing on Bruce's transformation into the Caped Crusader, synthesizing elements from six decades' worth of DC comics into a solemn origin myth. Young Wayne (Christian Bale) departs the moral cesspool of Gotham for a distant icy nation and makes like Luke Skywalker, studying the lethal arts with mystical mentor Ducard (Liam Neeson, who else?), who's hooked into an underground army led by the mysterious Ra's al Ghul (Ken Wantanabe of The Last Samurai).
Returning home, he finds Gotham still mired in crime and despair, and resolves to do something about it. With help from assistant district attorney and longtime gal pal Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), resourceful butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and Wayne Enterprises gadgeteer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Bruce channels his rage and grief and becomes Batman, squaring off against Gotham crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and corrupt Arkham Asylum shrink Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy of 28 Days Later), who employs the insanity defense to coddle Falcone's incarcerated thugs.
The above makes the film sound like a denser version of the usual, but its ambitions are grander than that. Writer-director Christopher Nolan (Memento) and cowriter David S. Goyer (Dark City, the Blade trilogy) don't just want to keep a lucrative franchise going. They want to wipe the slate clean and start over (there's even a hint that the next film will pit Batman against the Joker!) with the degree of seriousness they feel this material deserves.
In one sense, the filmmakers achieve their goal; this is surely the most earnest, even-tempered, precisely acted, overtly intellectualized Batman picture yet, with dialogue that plays like George Lucas by way of Dr. Phil. ("My anger outweighs my guilt," Bruce tells Ducard. "You have learned how to bury your guilt with anger," Ducard replies.) But these prosaic virtues are purchased at poetry's expense. This is the first Batman film shot in the super-wide Cinema Scope ratio (2:35 to 1); yet, paradoxically, it feels smaller and more cramped than the others, and not just because it focuses on one character rather than dispersing its energy among bad guys and foils. Nolan and Goyer's script spells out every significant narrative and psychological point in boldface, with footnotes-a pop culture thesis paper on 35mm, the Far from Heaven of comic book movies.
Nolan compounds the film's aura of valedictorian drudgery by failing (or perhaps refusing) to think in pictures. Even bad comic book movies have the decency to offer one strikingly composed, metaphorically loaded composition after another, and the best of these linger in the mind; think of that E.T.-inspired shot from Burton's original of the Batwing silhouetted against a full moon, or the high-angled long shot in the opening of Joel Schumacher's perversely entertaining Batman Forever that showed Two-Face's yin-yang parachute gliding to earth. Visually, Batman Begins is a glossy snooze. Wally Pfister's nighttime photography is intriguingly lit, striking a balance between comic book noir affectation and real-world urban texture, but the compositions are distressingly plain; they lack graphic pizzazz and dreamlike pungency.
Except for a wide shot of the adult Wayne rising in defiance amid a storm of bats, and a few frustratingly brief shots from the points-of-view of Gotham citizens on hallucinogens, Nolan resists visual invention at nearly every turn. He treats the camera not as a poetic instrument, but as a recording device, shooting nearly every conversation in tv-friendly over-the-shoulder close-ups with perspective-flattening lenses, and obliterating the spatial dynamics of the fight scenes by putting the camera so close to his combatants you can hardly tell who's thwacking whom. (Memento was a very clever movie, but its cleverness was encoded in its narrative structure, not in its Cinema Scope compositions; ditto the director's follow-up, Insomnia. If abuse of 'Scope were a crime, Nolan would be wearing leg irons.)
One could argue that Nolan serves the material by stripping it of everything but content. (Friends have tried to defend Ron Howard's muddy, wobbly, mostly prosaic Cinderella Man on these grounds.) But we're not talking C.S. Lewis or Philip K. Dick here, and even if we were, I submit that a compositionally undistinguished fantasy is as oxymoronic as a musical without music. (The scornful pans and mostly sheepish, apologetic praise for Revenge of the Sith-a movie conceived with absolute childlike conviction, and filled with ecstatically designed, lit, composed and edited images-suggest that critics have unlearned the idea that images create their own eloquence.)
Considering the talent assembled before the camera, Batman Begins' missteps are even more annoying. Caine and Freeman leaven the glum mood with dashes of wry humor; Murphy is effetely freakish as Dr. Crane; and Holmes projects intelligence and moral fervor as Dawes, the angel on Bruce's shoulder. (Neeson, however, is boring as hell, which has less to do with acting than casting; eleventh-hour plot complications notwithstanding, we've simply seen him play this role too many times.) As Bruce Wayne, Bale cements his movie-star bona fides. He's credible as a lost boy, a tech geek, a tuxedo-clad hunk, a depressive wastrel and a warrior; he radiates intelligence, psychological depth and a hint of entitlement (which old movies might have described as "good breeding"). His performances in American Psycho, Shaft, Equilibrium and The Machinist were fueled by insecurity, arrogance and malice-electrifying traits rarely glimpsed in leading men since the 1970s, when movies didn't care if a character was likable as long as he was interesting.
But rather than turn Bale loose and let him play Bruce Wayne/Batman as an attractive-repulsive antihero-a vigilante bruiser who serves humankind while feeding his own private demons, a la Ethan Edwards, Popeye Doyle and "Deadwood" lawman Seth Bullock-the film goes the extra kilometer to let us know he's just a big sweetie-pie, kissing the hero's posterior just like every other big-budget Hollywood movie. (When Bruce takes two model-actress-whatevers for a night on the town-shades of American Psycho!-the movie makes sure we know it's part of his decadent playboy cover, and he'd rather be tinkering in the Batcave with Alfred and Lucius.) "Justice is about harmony; revenge is about making yourself feel better," Rachel tells Bruce-a corny but valuable sentiment that would have a lot more impact if Nolan and Goyer hadn't tipped us to the fact that Bruce already agreed with it.
Even Wayne's industrialist family gets the golden aristocrat treatment; at various points, Batman Begins informs us that the Wayne family nearly gave away its entire fortune to save Gotham during the Depression, and that 150 years ago, it helped escaped slaves find freedom. If Bruce is just the latest in a long line of marvelously selfless rich folk, bred for righteous decency and ordained by God and Gotham to save humankind, where's the drama?