Cynical Cinema

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.

Michael Caine is an all-time legend in the acting world. Lately, however, that is not really a reason to see one of his movies, as he has shown absolutely no discretion when it comes to choosing his roles. He has been in some great pictures (Batman Begins, Children of Men), but that seems to be more as a result of him never saying no to a film role than as a result of any kind of discretion when choosing those roles. As is evidenced by some other films of his - Miss Congeniality, Get Carter. And Jude Law is no better a barometer for the quality of a film. Road To Perdition and The Aviator were great, All The King’s Men not so much. One of the few young actors who has been working as hard as Michael Caine. So their names on the marquee were not likely to draw many people in to watch Sleuth. The only thing that one can count on when it comes to these two actors is the quality of their own performance in a movie. And by and large, they are both terrific almost all the time.

And considering they are pretty much the only two actors in Sleuth, that should make this movie that much better, shouldn’t it? Not only that, but it is directed by Kenneth Brannagh, and he is one of the best directors of literary films of our time. You can tell that this film is Brannagh’s work because he is so very Shakespearean when he does any movie. Sleuth is divided, just like a good play, into three very distinct acts. The first act involves Caine and Law having a conversation-confrontation in Caine’s house. Caine’s wife has left him, and Law is the younger man with whom she is now shacking up. This scene opens with a series of truly strange camera shots, which make the movie feel artistic while simultaneously irritating me. Mercifully they end quickly, and the scene proceeds with some very witty and entertaining dialogue delivered wonderfully by Caine and Law. It ends with a bizarre confrontation and a very strange but compelling break-and-enter-and-murder scene. Close curtain.

Act II: A cop shows up to investigate the murder. Another one-on-one interrogation scene takes place, where Caine is put on the spot by a tough-talking, hard-drinking Scotland Yard cop, and while the dialogue does not sparkle nearly as much as it did in the first scene, this one ends in an almost equally intense way. I think most people could guess the giant revelation at the end of this scene, but since I am not absolutely certain of this, I will not reveal it here. This scene, as did the one before, makes extensive use of Caines monstrous rich-guy mansion, with all it’s hidden safes and elevators and lighting remote controls and buttons and gadgets and gizmos. It is the prototypical rich-guy ostentatious house-that-wipes-his-ass-for-him. The fact that the cop knows where all the buttons in the house are tells us all we need to know, which is why the big revelation at the end of the scene is not so surprising.

Act III: The wheels come off, and this third scene appears to have been tacked on at the end of a movie that had no idea how to end itself. The film plunges out of the realm of entertaining cleverness into the abyss of disjointed narrative and unnatrual actions. Midway through this scene, we stop caring about either character involved, and we hope the movie ends quickly. Mercifully, it does.

I give this movie six out of ten, because I rank every movie out of nine and this one was two-thirds good. (To get a ten, a movie has to cross the line between fantastic movie and all-time classic.) I have always said that if you have say, several verses to a song, and one of them is clearly weaker than the others, bury it in the middle. Don’t open with the weak verse, and certainly don’t close with it. This movie had used up all it’s creativity and intelligence by the one-hour mark. Michael Caine starred in the original, 1970 movie, with Lawrence Olivier. Caine is decent at capturing the character Olivier played in the original. However, Jude Law is nowhere near becoming the next Michael Caine. The best character in the movie, in fact, ends up being the house. And that’s not a good thing.