'Knight' moves

“Batman Begins,” Christopher Nolan’s reboot of the DC Comics franchise, was not just the best film of 2005; it may have been the greatest comic-book movie ever. Or maybe I should say “comic-book-derived,” for part of Nolan’s accomplishment was to strip away the broad, campy baggage that had accrued over years from the ‘60s TV show through the Tim Burton features and finally in the debased Joel Schumacher installments.

Focusing on the process of Bruce Wayne becoming Batman, Nolan’s movie followed a well-defined arc. As an origin story, it was complete unto itself — which can be a problem for a blockbuster that demands a sequel. “Batman Begins” ended with a hint of the direction Nolan was interested in going in — that, even as Batman cleaned up Gotham, his flamboyance and theatricality would attract equally flamboyant villains to fill the gap his housecleaning had created. And that’s precisely where Nolan has gone in the “The Dark Knight.”

The emergence of the caped crusader has had another effect: His dramatic persona has, not surprisingly, generated a multitude of fanboys who imitate his costume and attempt to imitate his vigilante actions, as we learn in the dazzling opening sequence. Thugs are breaking into a bank, stealing mob money. Arriving to stop them is Batman ... no, wait ... two Batmans.

After the real Batman (a returning Christian Bale) takes care of business, we learn that his dual existence is taking a toll on him — both physically and spiritually, and the latter is the more dangerous. He’d really like to hang up his cape and pay more attention to Bruce Wayne, but the conflict he signed on for just won’t end; worse yet, he may be responsible for its escalation. He is the Dark Knight who prays for a White Knight — an upfront hero, operating within the law — to relieve him of duty.

Batman seems to have found his man in Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), the newly elected district attorney, who is a regular Boy Scout, but smart. There is only one complication: Harvey is dating Bruce Wayne’s longtime love Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes, in the only major casting discontinuity).

Within this framework, the Joker (Heath Ledger) appears out of nowhere, looking to take over from Gotham’s current crime lords. But the Joker is very different from mobsters like current boss Maroni (Eric Roberts); they’re interested in money. That the Joker is motivated by something loftier makes him much more of a threat.

As Nolan has already revealed in interviews, the Joker is a force of chaos. He wants to wreak havoc for its own sake, to put average law-abiding citizens into a position where they must confront their own hearts of darkness. Essentially, he wants to prove that the rest of us are no better than him: animals temporarily affecting a moral posture. How he got this way is never made clear. (The film’s best running gag is a mocking of the standard psychological explanations and of the simplistic back-stories with which most comic-book heroes and villains are saddled.)

All of the above is just the expression of the thematic material “The Dark Knight” takes on. The full plot is way more complicated; it may in fact be a little too complicated.

In Nolan’s first four films — “Following,” “Memento,” “Insomnia” and “Batman Begins” — the narrative cleaved very strongly to a single character’s POV. With “The Prestige” Nolan broke away from this practice, dividing the POV between the two major players, the magicians played by Bale and Hugh Jackman (who, to complicate matters further, were themselves not actually single characters). Most of the time, we saw each through the eyes of the other. This had the advantage of creating suspense: with our identification split, we weren’t sure until the very end whom to sympathize with — in oversimplified terms, whom we should
root for.

The POV is even more splintered in “The Dark Knight.” Batman is only sorta-kinda the central figure. Harvey Dent is the character with the closest thing to a protagonist’s development; his progression is much more dramatic than Batman/Bruce Wayne’s. But we spend as much time with both the Joker and police detective Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), so much so that it’s safe to say that Ledger, Eckhart and Oldman all get more literal “face time” than Bale. Bale may be on screen more (although I’m not sure of it) but, for the greater portion of that, he’s in his Batman persona: just a mask, a suit, a mouth and a growl.

All of this adds up to a lot more plot, stretched out to 152 minutes, up from the previous film’s 139. There are so many balls in the air that during the final big action sequence it’s easy to get a little confused as to what’s going on.

Still, despite the multi-thread plot and the various character and theme levels, “The Dark Knight” is very close to all-action. There are fewer pure dialogue interactions this time; the movie is basically a series of spectacular action sequences with little rest time. There is the sense that Nolan, having dipped one foot in the water in “Batman Begins,” became infatuated with the possibilities of visceral filmmaking. 

This may make the film sound like a Michael Bay production, but the main difference — and God knows there are others — is in the interplay of the action stuff and the thematic development. It’s another step in Nolan’s attempt to make action blockbusters more “serious” without stripping them of the genre’s upsides.

One cavil: “Serious” has a downside as well. There is almost no humor in “The Dark Knight,” even less than in its predecessor. This is not merely serious; it’s downright somber, even grim.
… Which brings us to Ledger’s much-discussed performance. Yes: It is pretty amazing. Nolan and Ledger must have consciously worked to get as far from Jack Nicholson’s 1989 portrayal as possible. Where Nicholson declaimed, Ledger mumbles; where Nicholson gave us some glimpses of a recognizable inner life, Ledger gives us glimpses of a nearly abstract darkness. Most of all, he provides the Joker with a whiny voice that is as obnoxious as it is evil. 

There are a few clearly deliberate parallels to recent politics here, most obviously when Batman makes Fox complicit in a monumentally intrusive and illegal bugging operation. A second viewing might even reveal that Dent’s and Batman’s and the Joker’s conflicts all work as an allegory of the current fight for America’s soul.     

The film’s most memorable line — a corollary to Lord Acton’s bit about power corrupting — is that the fate of a hero is to “either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.”