Bat-May: Batman (1989)

I have so many fond memories of this movie that I scarcely know where to begin an objective review of Tim Burton’s Batman (affectionately dubbed Batman ’89 by a generation hoping – nay, longing – to distance it from an earlier era’s Batman ’66). I can’t recall with precision the first time I saw the film, but I can say with confidence that it was the very first DVD I owned, a gift from my father when the home video format was in its nascence. But when I first built my Personal Canon in 2016, it was a natural inclusion; I’ve loved this film for years, and it occurs to me that its peculiar bizarre nuttiness has really permeated my identity as a moviegoer.

Batman redefines the Dark Knight more than two decades after the go-go groovy incarnation embodied by Adam West and his Swinging Sixties interpretation. Here, Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is a brooding specter of unrelenting justice, a mystery to his city and to Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), who’s come to town to photograph Bruce’s vigilante alter ego, The Batman. While busting up criminal activity at Axis Chemicals, Batman inadvertently creates his greatest nemesis when Jack Napier emerges from a vat of acid as The Joker (Jack Nicholson), a self-described homicidal artist with murderous plans for Gotham City.

 

Batman is a film that is so iconic because of how quickly it dominated the cultural landscape. Much has been said and written about the cultural saturation of the film, how it changed the superhero genre and action films more broadly, how it reimagined how a blockbuster could perform at the box office. Nicholson’s Joker is both inextricable from the actor’s persona and yet wholly of a piece with the villain’s own flexible characterization; meanwhile, Keaton is to this day still proudly declaring, “I’m Batman.” While the comics had been taking Batman grim ’n’ gritty since the early 1970s (peaking in 1986 with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns), Batman has the titanic reputation of being the movie that set the superhero genre down the straight and dour path.

 

This is not to say, however, that Batman isn’t a whole lot of fun. In my reviews of Batman: The Animated Series (and even The Killing Joke), I’ve consistently noticed how Mark Hamill’s Joker sets me giggling on a dime, but I’d forgotten that Nicholson’s Joker has the exact same effect. Nicholson’s strength comes from imbuing casual lines like “You’ll never believe what happened to me today” with deadpan sarcasm and repressed theatrical fire, to say nothing of how well that unique Joker look has aged, even on Blu-Ray. His wheezing laugh, too, so quintessential to any successful Joker, is a hoot, especially when it transforms into a fearless manic cackle, often looped over the following scenes, giving the sense that this movie is well and truly The Joker’s. Keaton’s great, too, a perhaps unexpected choice; in fact, he’s so good that we’ve all forgotten that there’s an extended sequence of Bruce Wayne in blue jeans, which feels more out-of-character than having Joker (spoilers) revealed to be the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne. But Nicholson doesn’t lean on his reputation; he earns top billing on the poster with a riveting performance that’s so markedly different from Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn two decades later.

 

The older I get, and even as the world begins to retreat from the notion that superhero comics are (or at least ought to be) strictly for kids, I give a lot of thought to why these characters have become a kind of religion for me. Why do I cling to these four-color figures? In the case of this film, I think part of the appeal was that Batman was, for me, one of the first grown-up movies I’d ever seen – or at least it was one of the first that felt grown-up. It was a movie that didn’t talk down to me, didn’t try to pretty up the world. It painted a picture of life as a horrific carnival, Gotham City as a funhouse reflection of what civilization ought to be. It felt larger than life, but simultaneously it seemed entirely within reach, more gothic than the bright colors of a comic book page and yet divorced enough from reality that I could access it without fear. And it was a movie that didn’t really look like anything else I’d seen; it was almost certainly my first Tim Burton film, and the way it manages to make the dated feel timeless gave the film a very specific stylized identity I couldn’t find elsewhere on the video shelf. (His next film, Edward Scissorhands, feels very much a period piece, an homage to 1950s Anytown, USA.)

 

Of course, any discussion of Batman has to acknowledge the exquisitely baroque score by Danny Elfman, which has become the gold-standard anthem for multiple generations of Bat-fans. (No matter what you thought of the theatrical cut of Justice League, you had to love hearing that theme once more. It just felt right, scoring Ben Affleck astride the Bat-Signal.) The Animated Series owes so much to Elfman, as does this film overall. I’ll even venture to say that Elfman’s score is a character in itself, serving the same inextricable role here that John Williams’s work does for Star Wars; put another way, this film doesn’t work without Elfman’s ostentatious gusto over the scenes. That Bat-theme, the playful Joker melodies – heck, even the zany zeitgeist of including Prince in a few key scenes – there’s a reason these tracks are seared into our brains (and it’s not just the Lego Batman games, which aired them on an obsessive loop). Elfman is doing career – and genre – defining work with Batman.

 

If you haven’t seen Batman in a while, it’s high time for another look. On this latest rewatch, I was quite surprised by Alfred’s subplot. If at all, Alfred’s role lives on in cultural memory for the moment when he escorts Vicki Vale into the Batcave, blowing Bruce Wayne’s secret identity. But it’s a moment that the film earns by continually seeding Alfred’s desire for Bruce to move on and find safety in an end to his nightly crusade – all of which, if it seems faintly familiar, seems to anticipate Michael Caine’s “I won’t bury you” plot from The Dark Knight Rises. Michael Gough is quiet and unflappably avuncular as Alfred, a pitch-perfect counterpart to the high mania of the film’s dueling leads, but his deep compassion is so key to the character often brushed off as Batman’s butler. 

 

I was also struck by the mystery atmosphere that pervades the film, which feels quite fresh nearly thirty years later. We’re so used to superhero films that walk us through the origin story as a matter of course. But here, Batman’s backstory is presented as something of a mystery; it’s The Joker who gets the straightforward origin, lending further credence to the notion that the film is as much (if not more) his as Batman’s. Of course, it’s hard to imagine any filmgoer who doesn’t know who Batman is and how he came to be (I’ve only met one such person in my life), but the film introduces the familiar story beats in an innovative story structure that doles it out slowly, with gravity. When we finally get to the shooting of the Waynes, it’s nightmarish and ethereal, a hazy encounter with trauma, and it’s presented as the final cue to understanding Bruce Wayne’s psyche.

 

On that count, I’m not sure that the film succeeds – nor, I think, does it want or need to do so. Burton is content to leave Bruce Wayne as a somewhat enigmatic freak, locked in a chicken-and-egg struggle with Jack Napier. Who created whom? Were it not for the film’s ironclad concrete conclusion, one might almost imagine Burton’s universe operating under the conditions suggested by Heath Ledger’s Joker in his final sequence: “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” With the news that Michael Keaton will be reprising his role in the Ezra Miller Flash film, at least half of that statement ended up applying. As for me, it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, so I’ll be returning to it forever.

 

Batman is rated PG-13. Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, Michael Gough, and Jack Palance.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Bat-May: Batman: The Movie (1966)

Once upon a time, the most divisive fault line in fandom was whether or not you loved Adam West’s Batman. (It was a simpler time.) Chances are that you held him in higher regard if you grew up with him, but if Tim Burton or Frank Miller got to you at a young age, you might not have had the patience for a groovier, campier Batman. By the time Adam West passed in 2017 – and indeed long before that – the tides seemed to have turned in Bat-fandom: even if Batman ’66 (as it came to be dubbed) wasn’t your Batman, it was at least a Batman with its own redeeming qualities. 

Within that neon outpost in the Dark Knight’s long and storied history, amid the pow-biff-bam of the television series, Batman: The Movie finds the Caped Crusader (Adam West) and his sidekick Robin (Burt Ward) facing the unfathomable – all their greatest villains have teamed up, with global domination in their sights. The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), and The Riddler (Frank Gorshin) have joined forces with Catwoman (Lee Meriwether), who is posing as the Russian journalist Miss Kitka, in a fiendish plot to rule the world.

 

Batman: The Movie is not quite a movie because it feels like three or four episodes of the television series strung together. You can even mark the narrative intervals with each time it seems Batman and Robin have been blown to smithereens; just supply the Bill Dozier “same bat‑time, same bat-channel” narration yourself. While this pacing can be fun on television, even if you string a two-parter together, it becomes a bit interminable as a feature film with an episodic quality. Perhaps Batman: The Movie is better understood as an artifact, a kind of analogue to comic book crossovers. Where the episodes of the television show usually only featured one high-profile villain (often played by a major celebrity guest star), the selling point here is that the show’s four biggest villains are sharing the screen. (Scrapped plans for a second film, with Batgirl in tow, suggest this pattern would have continued on the big screen.)

 

Like the television show, the film is more enamored of its villains than of the Dynamic Duo. Adam West and Burt Ward play their parts in staid and stalwart fashion, their straight faces serving an essential role in the high camp atmosphere, but there’s no question the film only truly comes alive when it has its antagonists on screen. Of the foursome, Burgess Meredith’s Penguin takes the lead; it’s his submarine and his henchmen that run the plot, with the other villains deferring to his leadership. (Maybe it’s the monocle.) As the Penguin, Meredith is almost a Jack Burnley drawing come to life, all squawks and waddles, but what really stands out about his performance is just how hard he’s selling it.

 

Indeed, all the players are acting their parts with the gusto of a toddler at playtime, hammy in all the right places but never compromising the internal integrity of the thing with so much as a wink to the camera. Each villainous performer finds his or her lane and sticks with it. Frank Gorshin’s Riddler is giddy and over-the-top, but it’s dialed into what this incarnation of the Riddler should be (and a clear template for Jim Carrey’s Riddler in Batman Forever). Cesar Romero’s Joker, once you get past the painted-over mustache, puts the “clown” in “Clown Prince of Crime,” whooping and clapping at his own mischief. Meanwhile, Lee Meriwether (herself subbing in for television’s Julie Newmar) plays Catwoman/Kitka with all the purring puns a single screenplay can handle.

 

Kitka’s romance with Bruce Wayne is compelling enough, with Adam West suitably smitten with the passingly dismissive Soviet. In these moments, it’s a little disappointing that Bruce never sees through the disguise until the very end of the film – particularly since his Batman is marked with over-preparation for literally any other scenario he encounters. He’s got shark repellent in his helicopter, a torpedo deflector in his belt, and even a computer that can sort dust particles by color; it’s just too bad he doesn’t have a working set of eyes and ears to know when he’s being duped. Perhaps, however, that’s the point – this Bruce Wayne is a lover, not a fighter. (Though his seduction skills could use some work – quoting Edgar Allan Poe isn’t the first recourse for most casanovas.) 

 

For a Batman film, both Batman and Robin are woefully underdeveloped, static figures of justice and good manners – which is, again, the point. The camp of Batman ’66 requires heroes who are unchanging and unflinching; nothing flummoxes them, and nothing finds them ill-prepared to save the day. These do-gooders need only do good, despite the less-than-stimulating viewing pleasure such heroics provide. There’s never any doubt that good will prevail, with the only surprises being which unlikely gadget our heroes will pull from their bottomless utility belts. Like their villains, though, West and Ward commit wholeheartedly to their act, with West’s deliberately dramatic delivery matching Ward’s gee-whiz enthusiasm.

 

Batman: The Movie was originally intended to be the series debut, launching the television program in big-screen style. Released after the first season, however, it becomes instead a celebration of everything that Batman ’66 was – flashy, vibrant, and campy. It’s a feature-length distillation of the show’s successes and failings, its mod mentality dialed up to 11. If you loved the show, you’ll love the movie, but if West has never been your Batman, this film won’t change your mind. As for me, I like the show just fine, in small doses, and Batman: The Movie proves to be a bit too big a dose for one sitting. For a generation, this was Batman, so kudos to the crew for keeping the flame alive.

 

Batman: The Movie is rated PG. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson. Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Based on the DC Comics, and on the ABC television series. Starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, and Frank Gorshin.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Joker (2019)

I wasn’t going to review Joker. As you can probably tell from the infrequent updates here, I’ve been taking a little hiatus from movie reviews to recharge, focusing on other creative projects while waiting for the right film to spark up my reviewing energies again. But I can’t get Joker out of my head – nor, it seems, are media outlets interested in letting this movie just get away. On the one hand, you’ve got ardent comics fans who are beating the drum and hard for this movie; on the other, you’ve got the media at large trying distressingly to will into existence a mass shooting in this film’s name. Then again, the movie seems to anticipate and decry the media’s bloodthirsty and misguided reaction… all of which makes me wonder how certain I am that as movies go Joker is, well, just fine.

Joker is part Batman prequel, part Taxi Driver remake, leavened with The King of Comedy and flame-broiled by an incendiary performance courtesy of Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix stars as Arthur Fleck, a sad clown-for-hire with a bevy of psychological problems and a handful of pills whose prescriptions are about to run out. He’s the caregiver for his addled mother (Frances Conroy); he’s carrying a torch for Sophie (Zazie Beetz) down the hall; and he never misses a late-night episode of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But Gotham City circa the 1980s is a pressure cooker of decadence and madness, and it’s about to boil over.

But is it? And is he? Or did he…? One of the central tenets of The Joker is that he’s an inscrutable cipher, a man without an identity or an origin. “If I’m going to have a past,” Joker says in Moore & Bolland’s Killing Joke, “I prefer it to be multiple choice!” (Bolland gets a “special thanks” credit, and if Moore didn’t hate movie adaptations he probably would have, too.) Without giving away too much of the game in Joker, director Todd Phillips is very careful to intimate (and at one point outright declare) that Arthur Fleck is an unreliable narrator. For any of my grievances about the film, I have to give Phillips a strong pat on the back for circumventing the certainty that would have run this film counter to The Joker’s innate unknowability; indeed, the one moment where Phillips baldly explains that a thing we saw happen did, in fact, not happen is one of the film’s major missteps, assuming the audience is not clever enough to understand that what Arthur sees isn’t always what’s real.

Joker has been surrounded and very nearly drowned in a morass of “hot takes” and cultural extrapolations that wonder if the film is “bad for society” or “dangerous.” And the truth of the matter is, Joker is nowhere near dynamic enough to merit such extensive commentary. It is, in a word, fine, elevated by Phoenix’s bravura performance as the man who would be clown prince. Phoenix is stratospheric as Arthur Fleck, manic depressive and skeletal with a painful persistent laugh that nags at him like a hiccup. Wholly void of mirth, Arthur’s laugh is, like its owner, a shell of humanity, an empty imitation of glee. He’s trying to fit in, trying to find joy, but the world beats him down again and again. It is in this sense that Joker is a kind of four-color Taxi Driver, and if you’ve seen the preceding film you’ve seen much of what makes this Joker tick. (Perhaps I would have loved Joker if I didn’t already love Scorsese.)

The comparison to Taxi Driver explains and simultaneously deflates the hogwash claim that the movie is sympathetic to the kind of lunacy the media has feared this film will inspire because – and this is key – presentation is not sanction. Or, as Mark Kermode so eloquently puts it, “He’s not sympathetic; he’s pitiful.” It would take a very special and deliberate misreading of the film to find unchallenged sympathy for The Joker in this film. Again, Phillips is quite deliberate about deflating Arthur’s own notions about himself, about unbalancing the audience just when it thinks it understands him. In that sense it’s a surprisingly smart and nuanced film, coming from the director of the hilarious but hardly erudite Hangover, whose sequels were the very definition of diminishing returns. 

In another sense, though, the film is brutally one-note, single-minded in its relentless bleak worldview. Its gags (if one can call them that) are telegraphed loud and clear, with all the subtlety of an oncoming train. This brutal directness works to the film’s advantage in a climactic third-act sequence, which works like a perfectly tense setpiece, though the film doesn’t quite build to the scene in a unified manner. Throughout the film, everything is terrible, no one is trustworthy, and hope – so key to what I love about comics and the superhero genre – is nowhere to be found. Batman, too, is just out of reach, though the sidelong glances Phillips throws his way are among the more interesting pivots from conventional mythology, interesting precisely (though perhaps only) because they are pivots. In a genre that is constantly imperiled by sameness, persistently in danger of being “note-d” to death by bonebrained studio heads, I’ll always be a champion of the peculiar, of the different, of the unique, though I find I can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm for Joker in the same way that I did and continue to do for Batman v Superman. Where the latter is positively bursting with ideas, doomed like Icarus never to see its full potential met, Joker contains only about one or two – intriguing ideas, no doubt, but hardly enough to merit the vociferous condemnation of those who haven’t even seen the film.

Ultimately, I think Joker ends up as a cipher, a bit like its titular character. It means what you bring to it, and it doesn’t quite challenge any of those notions – except, I maintain, that we are meant to sympathize with Arthur Fleck. In true noir fashion, every scene is told from Arthur’s perspective, so even in those moments where you might feel sympathy, you must recognize that it’s because the story has been filtered through a teller who is (perhaps willfully) unstable. If you want to read this as an “eat the rich” Occupy fable or a prayer for mental health care or an argument on one or the other side of the gun debate, Joker gives you a coil of rope but doesn’t commit enough to hang you with it. Put another way, Joker is only ever really dedicated to showcasing Joaquin Phoenix’s idiosyncratic madman, and in that regard it’s the only place where the film unapologetically succeeds. 

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with my review style and my tastes in pop culture should know that I would love nothing more than to love this movie. I should probably see it again to make sure I’m confident in my take on the movie, but I’m not in a particular rush to see it again. It was fine.

Joker is rated R for “strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images.” Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen.