The Batman (2022)

I like Batman. I think you know I like Batman. In fact, I spent a month last year telling you just how much I like Batman. And so it should probably come as no surprise that I really liked The Batman, helmed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson as the broodiest Dark Knight yet. The Batman is overwhelmingly confident, hypnotic at three hours long and entirely refreshing compared to what Batman has been before. 

Two years into his war on crime, Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) has turned the mantle of the Batman into a figure of fear, of dark vengeance in a city nevertheless still overwhelmed by crime. When the mayor is murdered, The Riddler (Paul Dano) announces his intention to do what Batman never could and rid the city of its lawless infestation. As Batman races to expose a criminal conspiracy, he finds unlikely leads in the form of a slinky cat burglar (Zoë Kravitz), a mobster lieutenant (Colin Farrell), and his own trusty butler (Andy Serkis).

 

If we learned one lesson from Zack Snyder’s Justice League, it’s that we really should not be arbitrarily cutting comic book movies to a length that fits a studio’s idea of how many screenings per day a theater can accommodate. If a story needs to be four hours long, let it be. If you need three hours to tell a dark detective story introducing three classic Batman villains – by your leave, Mr. Reeves. Especially after proving himself on making two of the best Planet of the Apes movies, with the patently impossible task of making CGI apes endearing and sympathetic, Reeves is a filmmaker who’s never anything less than totally in command. Take his Gotham – at once fully realized and blossoming anew like a pressed flower, revealing itself to an audience as a layered artifact of decay and corruption. Crumbling and desiccated, Reeves’s Gotham sprawls, and while this fanboy will always lament that we never got a franchise out of Ben Affleck’s Batman (then again, never say never), this Gotham is fascinating enough to warrant the myriad spinoffs we’ve already been promised.

 

When it comes to the Dark Knight himself, Robert Pattinson acquits himself well. I had expected him to be playing up the billionaire playboy, not unlike his suave spy turn in Tenet, but this Batman distinguishes himself by leaning hard into the psychological damage that comes with being an obsessive loner vigilante. While I usually like my Batman a little more healed, this younger Bat is certainly a valid interpretation, and Pattinson plays it to the hilt. He’s visibly uncomfortable and morose every time he’s Bruce Wayne, and he’s only standing taller when he’s in the cape and cowl. It’s a fascinating and grim performance, even as we start to see signs that this bat is coming out of his cave.

 

I always say that the problem with modern comic book movies is almost never the casting, and The Batman boasts another well-rounded slate of performers. Zoë Kravitz has a unique take on the character of Catwoman, such that I forgot that this was the same character that Anne Hathaway and Michelle Pfeiffer had played before her. (The less said of Halle Berry’s outing, the better.) As Selina Kyle, Kravitz is knowingly seductive, yet there’s a fantastic character beat that will come as no surprise to fans of the comics, giving Kravitz something truly emotional with which to grapple. Meanwhile, Colin Farrell is literally unrecognizable as The Penguin, such that one almost wonders why they paid for an actor of his caliber; then again, maybe that’s the point – if The Penguin is going to have presence, you need a performer with presence. And then there’s The Riddler, and Paul Dano is spooky and deranged as a criminal mastermind who’s equal parts Zodiac Killer, Jigsaw from the Saw films, and Moriarty all rolled into one. We don’t see Dano for much of the film, ensconced as he is in military surplus and a full-face mask, but there are moments when he channels his There Will Be Blood antagonist in unhinged monologues, to great effect.

 

For the “human” parts – the ones that don’t get colorful aliases – these performances are appropriately more subdued, less flashy. Jeffrey Wright is great fun as Jim Gordon, exasperated and sarcastic. Without being showy about it, Wright builds a deep camaraderie with Pattinson’s Batman, respectful of his mission but willing to poke fun at his methods. After being told not to use his gun, for example, Wright rolls his eyes and tells Batman, “That’s your thing, man.” On the other hand, Andy Serkis as Alfred is a bit of a headscratcher. Compared to some of Serkis’s more recent high-profile franchise roles, there isn’t much for him to do as Alfred, though his clear frustration with his young charge’s calling is a bridge further than Michael Caine’s interpretation. Still, one feels that the material does not quite give Serkis room to soar, and it is in this casting more than any other that I felt I’d have rather been seeing, say, Jeremy Irons.

 

At three hours long, The Batman is an experience, and while it’s the longest Batman film by a mile (or eleven minutes, depending how you measure), it never feels excessive or bloated. There is a third-act turn that does feel a bit like it belongs to a different movie, but it cues up the fulfillment of a number of thematic and character threads in a way that’s immensely satisfying in the way that only comic book spectacle can be. The Batman also goes for broke in a way that many superhero franchise films don’t, and if they’re cuing up the comic book plot that I think they’re invoking (no spoilers), we’re in for a wild ride. If this is the only Batman movie Reeves, Pattinson, and company deliver, they’ve done well to skip the origin and dive right into the heart of Gotham. But I cannot believe we have seen the last of this Batman, and I certainly hope not, too.

 

The Batman is rated PG-13 for “strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material.” Directed by Matt Reeves. Written by Matt Reeves and Peter Craig. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell.

Monday at the Movies - March 3, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a movie brutally snubbed at last night’s Oscars.

Prisoners (2013) – I could fill this review with 250 adjectives – breathless, intense, suffocating – but they all add up to one word.  Prisoners is fantastic, much darker and more intricate than the torture porn promised by the film’s one-note marketing.  Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard star as fathers whose daughters disappear one Thanksgiving; displeased with the methods of Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), Jackman takes hostage a mentally challenged man (Paul Dano) who he believes abducted the girls.  Prisoners, though, is much more elaborate than that initial synopsis posits, weaving a number of plot threads together in unexpected ways that are best experienced as the film unfolds – especially because some of the most insignificant details acquire astonishing relevance in the third act.  I’d never heard of director Denis Villeneuve before, but he’s certainly on my watchlist now.  There are moments in Prisoners that recall the best scenes in David Fincher’s Zodiac, moments of intense claustrophobia that have little to do with the actual set design and much more to do with the sense that the plot is rapidly closing in on itself, that events are spiraling beyond the control of the protagonists.  (Jackman’s continual reminders of how long the girls have been missing further add a real-world tenseness to the proceedings.)  Though all in the cast do fantastic work, including Maria Bello and Viola Davis as the beleaguered mothers, a special tip of the hat goes to Paul Dano, who really deserved a Supporting Actor nod.  As the disabled Alex Jones, Dano masters the mental handicap without overplaying it and subtly convinces us that something is quite wrong about Alex even if we don’t know exactly what it is (and he keeps us guessing, too).  Disappointingly, Prisoners seemed to fall off the radar once it debuted in theaters – a real shame, since it’s one of the most gripping films I’ve seen in recent memory.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, and don’t forget that this Friday is the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month (and Roger Moore’s swan song as James Bond)!

There Will Be Blood (2007)

(NOTE: This was written early in January of 2008, before the Coen Brothers took home Best Picture for No Country for Old Men. I'm still smarting over that one.)

With Oscar season upon us and the awards ceremony just around the corner, I submit for your consideration what may be the only perfect movie of 2007: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

From the director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson’s latest tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a rising self-made oil magnate attempting to strike black gold in the small religious community of Little Boston. Plainview, after successfully leasing enough land to begin drilling, crosses paths with Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a healer/preacher in Little Boston and the only person who may be able to match wits with Plainview.

To distill the movie into a mere battle between two men, however, would be to do the film a gross injustice. There Will Be Blood is many things: an epic about a Machiavellian capitalist’s boundless ambition to conquer, the story of a man’s self-imposed meteoric rise and plummeting fall from glory, or even a Marxist commentary on the parallel malevolences of capitalism and religion. But the one thing it’s not is simple. Even the film’s last line – “I’m finished!” – has at least four different levels of meaning apparent on the first viewing alone.

To the best of my knowledge, Martin Scorsese’s 2006 gangster blockbuster The Departed was the last perfect movie Hollywood churned out. Don’t get me wrong; 2007 has been a year of great movies – Sweeney Todd, Juno, and No Country for Old Men come to mind – but seldom does a movie come along that commands a second viewing like There Will Be Blood does.

I might add that my second viewing came exactly twenty-four hours after my first viewing, and though the film was still fresh in my mind Anderson offers so much at once that it’s impossible to catch everything in one go.

Day-Lewis as Plainview is one of those offerings. Day-Lewis, who previously took home a Best Actor Oscar playing disabled artist Christy Brown in 1989’s My Left Foot, is almost guaranteed to win this year’s Best Actor award. Though Johnny Depp was delightful as the musically murderous barber Sweeney Todd, he can’t hold a candle to Day-Lewis, who commands attention from the first scene to the last line. It’s impossible to look at anyone else while Day-Lewis is onscreen, so commanding is his performance.

Even Dano, who performed admirably both here and in Little Miss Sunshine, comes up short against the Day-Lewis juggernaut. Playing the dual role of twins Paul and Eli Sunday (Eli being the more prominent of the two), Dano is suitably over-the-top as he delivers quack sermons but also beautifully pathetic as he questions God’s “mysteries” in the last reel of the film.

Though this was my first Paul Thomas Anderson outing, I’ll be sure to check out more films in the canon, since Anderson’s direction here is non-pareil. The first fifteen minutes, in what feels like an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, elapse in virtual silence; the only dialogue – save for a brief gasp of “No!” – comes from those inevitably chatty people sitting behind you. From there on, Anderson launches through a tour de force portrait of turn-of-the-century California, complete with what I understand are his trademark long takes. As a film fan madly in love with long takes, extended scenes such as the one where Plainview meets his brother Henry are breathtaking. And the soundtrack, which at times sounds like a train whistle that crescendos into a swarm of bees, is instrumental in building the suspense that Anderson so effortlessly crafts.

But where Anderson truly shines as a filmmaker comes about halfway into the film, when one of the characters is permanently deafened by a drilling accident (to divulge that character’s identity would be a criminal revelation). Anderson deftly switches between shots of the flaming derrick and close-ups of the newly-deafened character, accompanied by only the swooshing noise of what the deaf character can only hear.

There Will Be Blood, as I’ve said, is one of that rare breed of “perfect movie.” When the film was over, I sat in stunned silence, desperately trying to catch my breath and looking around frantically for an usher with an oxygen tank. Seldom does a movie take my breath away like this one did, and even rarer is the film that I must see a second time in the same weekend – let alone threaten to drag all my friends to see.

The last ten minutes of the film, which more than live up to the title, are as gripping as anything I’ve seen in a film in a long time. With my hand clasped over my mouth, I watched as Day-Lewis took the film beyond great and into perfection, all with the line “I drink your milkshake!” And both times I watched in rapt horror as the film’s final, tragic moments played out like some inexorable Greek tragedy.

At one point, Plainview tells his brother, “I look at people, and I see nothing worth liking.” Yet when I look at There Will Be Blood, I see not just a movie that I liked, but a movie that demands to be liked.