Film Review: "The Dark Knight" (2008)

The first film of the rebooted Batman franchise, 2005's "Batman Begins," was leisurely, methodical, and exacting in its establishment and exploration of the origins of its nocturnal hero--and it is a masterpiece. The sequel, last summer's "The Dark Knight" (out on DVD this week) is cacophonous, convoluted, and scattershot in its advancement of Batman's story and its attempt to establish Batman as a (to use NY Times critic Manohla Dargis' term) "postheroic" vigilante--and it is not a masterpiece.

It is perhaps unfair to judge "The Dark Knight" by the high standard that director Christopher Nolan set for himself with "Batman Begins," but I don't think it is out of bounds to remark upon the new film's violation of many of its predecessor's tonal and dramaturgical tenets. This is not all bad: "The Dark Knight" works effectively in many respects as a manic, schizophrenic, morally ambivalent, and apocalyptic counterpoint to the painstakingly-constructed, character-building, world-establishing "Batman Begins." The problem is that "The Dark Knight" attempts to cram too much mania, moral ambivalence, and apocalypse into its nearly two and a half hour running time while insufficiently developing its potentially powerful themes of the chaos of a society held captive by terror and the schizophrenia (the two-facedness, if you will) required to survive amongst such chaos.

At the center of all of this, of course, is Heath Ledger's Joker, a performance that is undeniably strong and virtuosic, but that seems to be colored by the real-life tragedy of the actor's death this past January. Visually, aurally, bodily, Ledger inhabits and interprets the Joker in a way that no other actor has--as a greasy, truly psychotic, unpalatable, and mentally unhinged terrorist trickster. Much of the performance's effectiveness derives from the inevitable intertextual comparison that nearly every viewer must make between Ledger and the suave, bright, cartoonish Joker of Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's "Batman" (1989). The Joker of "The Dark Knight," though, quite separate from Ledger's skilled portrayal, is as unhinged dramatically as he is mentally. The only glimpses of backstory or psychological motivation we get for the Joker are the bogus explanations he gives of how he got his hideous trademark smile scars and crumbs of personal details that turn out to be red herrings for directing the police to his next scene of mayhem.

The inscrutability of the Joker's characterization by Nolan and his screenwriting partner brother Jonathan is meant to establish the clown's potency as a figure of terror. The fact that we know not what makes the Joker tick supposedly makes his ticking bombs that much more terrifying. But by obscuring the origins of the Joker's psychosis and of his clownish modus operandi, the filmmakers abdicate what could have been an even more powerful exploration of the nature of terrorist acts and of the motivations for their criminal application. Instead, we get with the Joker a dramaturgical thrust that is wildly uneven, at times lurching, and hard to reconcile with any recognizable motivations.

The absence of any treatment of Joker's origins in "The Dark Knight" is important because the exploration of origins has otherwise been such a strong component of Nolan's Batman films. (It is also, of course, a central conceit of superhero comics in general and the movies adapted from them.) Virtually all of "Batman Begins" was dedicated to establishing the psychological and personal motivations that led Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne to become a caped crusader, as well as to the acquisition of the specific skills and tools required for the success of such an endeavor. "The Dark Knight" itself contains a mostly successful such origin story in the transformation of District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) into the villain Two-Face.

Indeed, as much as anything else, "The Dark Knight" could be considered to be the story of the rise and fall of Eckhart's Two-Face. This is a story in which a powerful and righteous figure (the crusading D.A. even briefly manages to bring Bruce Wayne under his thrall) suffers a horrific loss (the death of fiancee Rachel Dawes, here played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) and undergoes a physical transformation (the catastrophic burning of half his face) that makes concrete his pain and suffering. Two-Face's story is a powerful and effective one because the psychological underpinnings of the character's transformation are made clear. In contrast, the story involving the Joker suffers because of the opacity of the character's motivations and the ultimately directionless course upon which it takes the movie as a whole. Because of these issues, "The Dark Knight" fails in large part to accomplish progressing the powerful story set in motion by Nolan in "Batman Begins."

Film Review: "Flashdance" (1983, directed by Adrian Lyne)

By 1983, a couple of years into the MTV era, movie studio executives apparently began to wonder what would happen if the principles and forms of the music video were applied to a full-length feature film. "Flashdance" is what happened.

I could say that "Flashdance" is the story of an aspiring dancer who works as a welder by day but calling what happens in the film a story is being a bit generous. Over the course of the film there are characters, who do stuff, and talk to each other, and get into conflicts, some of them romantic in nature. The result, though, is not really a story but rather an accumulation of the kind of vague narrative vignettes that became common accoutrements to music videos: dramatizations that serve no dramatic purpose but exist simply so that there are dramatic-looking moving pictures to see while (or before, or after) the music plays. "Flashdance," as a result, does not have a very coherent plot. Indeed, much of it unfolds as if there wasn't in fact any script at all.

The film has become famous for the imagery of Jennifer Beals sweating and strutting in her dance performances. Beals, who plays the aspiring dancer, Alex, puts in a career-making performance, not because of its quality, but merely because of its notoriety. The supposed dramatic tension in the film derives from Alex's desire to be admitted to a fancy dance school, but this entire arc is introduced flaccidly and just left hanging for much of the film. Alex is surrounded by a cast of stock characters: a best friend, an aspiring ice skater who can't skate and instead becomes a stripper; a wisecracking male sidekick, a short order cook who is an aspiring, and embarassingly bad, comedian; a tall, dark and handsome love interest (her boss at her welding job, played by Michael Nouri); a loving and encouraging grandma who dies on her (an underutilized Lilia Skala).

As hackneyed as the narrative elements of the film are, the visual imagery, as might be expected of a feature-length music video, is relatively stronger. The cinematography (by Don Peterson) has an intriguingly gritty feel that does a good job of exploiting the quasi-story's Pittsburgh setting (especially as Alex bicycles all over the city). A few of the dance sequences are striking, such as Alex's opening number featuring cascading water (see picture above) and a later, new-wavy performance with a glowing TV screen, black light, and Alex in whiteface.

These visual strengths, though, combined with the film's famous music--the iconic title song by Irene Cara, Michael Sembello's "Maniac," in addition to a synthesizer-happy score by Giorgio Moroder--only serve to accentuate the film's narrative weaknesses. In the broader scheme of American cinema, "Flashdance" was nonetheless successful in marrying MTV visuals and popular music in a fashion that could inhabit a feature film and appeal to 1980s audiences. Other films would soon follow that did this kind of thing much better--"Footloose," for example--but "Flashdance," in spite of its glaring ineptitude, has the distinction of having done them first.