SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT
Two images to begin, the first poetic, the second emblematic.
First: A nighttime shot of the Gotham City terrorist known as The Joker (Heath Ledger), his head stuck out the side window of a swerving and careening police car. The wind whips through his hair, stringy green locks blowing wild. His eyes are closed expectantly, lasciviously. Per his trademark behavior, it would hardly be a surprise if he were to flick his tongue around, wetting his lips and lapping up the chaos he's created, even in the molecular abstract. The sound dies away as the shot (all too brief) goes on—this is the power of cinema: to put us in a headspace other than our own; to focus our attentions to a finely honed point; to experience, for lack of a better descriptor, the sheer bliss of being alive, even though the world burns.
Second: The Joker again, just entered a roomful of Gotham City mobsters. He sticks a pencil into a table and says he's going to perform a magic trick. His devil-may-care bravado angers the men around him, and one of them (who might as well be wearing a "Disposable Henchman" placard) steps up to take down this lisping, pancake-and-mascara dribbling fop. Barely missing a beat, The Joker grabs the gangster's head and rams him, face down, on the pencil. In the blink of an eye, both man and writing implement bounce out of frame, never to be seen again (almost as if they were never there). It's the ultimate punchline because there's really no joke, just a madman trickster's truth: now you see it, now you don't.
Now you see it, now you don't. That about encapsulates the depths of feeling and artistry in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan and company's sordid exercise in avert-your-eyes sadism, a work at best inelegant and at worst inept. The film would have us believe it's about dualities and polarities, the so-called Dark Knight of Gotham (Christian Bale as billionaire Bruce Wayne and vigilante alter-ego Batman) compared and contrasted with White Knight—soon-to-be literally two-faced—Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), both of them joined in messily chaotic battle with the facially-scarred villain known as The Joker, whose mid-film "You complete me" declaration to Batman is less Jerry Maguire-jest than Matrix-like pseudo-philosophy.
Yes, we're back in the realm of "awesome!" anagrams and pothead palindromes that the Wachowski Brothers popularized nearly a decade ago, only now they're spoken with a solemnity and verbosity borne of a beat-down Western warrior spirit, and lent gravitas by a cast only stellar in theory. But then it hardly matters if The Dark Knight's dispiriting view of a city at war with itself doesn't hold together, not when you have Morgan Freeman (as Wayne Enterprises liaison Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (as stalwart manservant Alfred) spouting gloomy old man platitudes about the culture of surveillance, and everyone else monologuing ad nauseum about various and sundry long, dark teatimes of the soul.
Nolan and company's previous Bat-tale, Batman Begins, is similarly infected with such verbal diarrhea (the word "fear" hasn't been spoken so much since David Lynch's adaptation of Dune), but it has a purposeful sense of momentum that occasionally treads the sublime, such as when Batman races his poisoned l'amour Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) back to his underground lair, the sequence climaxing with the Batmobile arcing violently, gorgeously through a waterfall—a sanctifying romantic impulse melded seamlessly to a shopworn race-against-the-clock scenario.
Dawes returns in The Dark Knight (this time the paramour of Dent and in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal), but now she's little more than bait, a damsel-on-the-railroad-tracks plot device. I'm certain Nolan thought he was being transgressive by killing Rachel off, but her death packs zero punch because it's so blatantly a screenwriter's contrivance—mainly to motivate Dent's split-personality revenge—and one executed with the same amount of "Gotcha!" shallowness as an earlier fake-out murder featuring not-yet-Commissioner Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman).
Nolan fancies himself a magician, but he's more of a high-minded con artist—the Barry Lyndon of the Hollywood elite. If he occasionally stumbles upon an indelible image (aside from the one noted above, a scene where the two-wheeled Batpod does a wall-assisted 180-degree turnaround gave me giddy shivers) it's quickly subsumed by his more frequent tendency toward Cusinarted spectacle. The human drama in Batman Begins held my attentions, so I wasn't so much bothered by the fact that its action scenes were murky, bordering on incoherent (this seemed intentional to some degree, even though I think it was, ultimately, a failed artistic choice).
In The Dark Knight, Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister extend the incoherence to the movie entire. Despite being filmed on location in Chicago (along with a brief sojourn to Hong Kong), there's little feel for the city's dynamics, just random car-commercial shots of speeding vehicles, with inserts occasionally cluing us in as to who's supposed to be where. More problematic is the tendency for characters to randomly show up as narrative twists-'n'-turns dictate, such as when mob boss Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts) just happens to be waiting outside Harvey Dent's hospital room so he can act as Jim Gordon's on-the-spot snitch (the way Roberts plays the scene, he's like a stone-faced, humanoid information kiosk waiting to be prompted with directional queries).
Since all these characters can be everywhere at once (except when disfigurement or death is called for), it severely undercuts the tension, and thus calls more attention to The Dark Knight's rickety allegorical skeleton. On his personal website, critic Dave Kehr gives an astute reading of the film's politics, calling it "Dirty Harry stripped of Don Siegel's ambivalence and ambiguity." He goes on to posit Nolan and the film as something of a George Bush apologia, but I think this is granting The Dark Knight more of a concrete ideological interpretation than it deserves. The very fact that Kehr ends his critique with a question ("Is he suggesting...?") implies that Nolan's themes—his beliefs—are too muddled to be read with any sort of certainty.
This flip-flop sensibility grows inexorably out of the film's shallow artistry. For a movie purported to be so, well, "dark," The Dark Knight spends a more-than-noticeable amount of time turning its gaze from the horrors it perpetrates. There's an early scene where The Joker holds a mob boss at knifepoint, telling a made-up backstory as to how he got his facial scars. The buildup is suitably intense, but Nolan whiffs the follow-through by having The Joker's mouth-slitting finale occur offscreen. It's the pencil gag all over again, only rendered ineffectual, monotonous, the "now you see it, now you don't" philosophy injected ruinously into the film's aesthetic fabric.
And it really only gets worse from there. Much like Bale, who disappears inside the Batman cape and cowl as surely as he wasted away in The Machinist (that's not a compliment), the film is slowly—slowly—devoured by its high-falutin' funereal pretensions. There should be a kick to seeing The Joker wreak havoc (the laughter should stick in our throat, yes, but it should always be there regardless); to seeing Two-Face consumed by vengeance (rather than turned, thuddingly, into both a walking "oh the humanity!" metaphor and a low-rent Anton Chigurh facsimile); to seeing Batman, ultimately, make a life-altering sacrifice for the present-tense good of Gotham (half self-absorption/half martyrdom). But it's all (bad) theater, as much a put-on as the posthumous Oscar buzz and Dean-comparing deifications of Ledger who, like everyone else, is playing a concept more than a character, hyped-up grist for a bloated pop-cultural mill.
It's sad to witness The Joker become an abstruse agent of chaos, as much of an emptied-out, metaphor-laden golem as Two-Face. For Nolan, he can't just be a sadistic, psychotic clown: he has to be something of a spoiled bastard child bred by humanity's indifference, a literal sickness made flesh (something that lends a particularly queasy uncertainty to the sequence where The Joker does his best Bobbi from Dressed to Kill). He gets a great entrance and a lame exit—befitting our age of summation and closure, every primary Dark Knight character has at least one enervating "Clarissa Explains it All" monologue. His overall plan is foiled, but his cackling cynic's view lingers on, driving those Gotham residents left standing into secrecy and/or seclusion. In a better movie, that note of desperation would resonate far beyond the borders of the screen, but here it remains at a cold, notional distance, just another of Nolan's trickster philosophies, a final pencil in the eye before we're bounced out of the darkness—a little worse for wear and none the wiser for the experience.
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Keith Uhlich is Editor of The House Next Door and a contributor to various print and online publications.
Yeah, if we've learned anything from the great directors over the years it's that nothing can be frightening or intense if there's no gory payoff.
Wait, what?
You couldn't possibly have watched the same film as I did last night.
That might be the most well written review I've ever read…but I still dug the movie.
Just another review that proves some people take film way too seriously. The score, the dialogue, the story, the action, the lighting, the cast of actors who truly adapted to their roles… yeah, I can totally understand why you didn't like this film. Also I find it hilarious that you criticize the dialogue when your own writing just about made me fall asleep.
Isn't that the mark of good cinema sometimes? I mean, I have a feeling that people all across the country are going to be talking about how "the Joker did this" and "the Joker did that" when in reality…you never saw it.
Think about Reservoir Dogs. How many people CLAIM they saw Marvin Nash's ear get cut off?
They didn't.
I think you've missed the mark. The themes in this movie were hidden so well that I'm not surprised. If Batman hadn't smashed the Joker into the mirror of his interrogation cell, would the movie have continued much further?
Ultimately, Batman is just as much an element as the Joker. This movie works brilliantly because it very subtly illustrates the fatal flaw of Batman as a savior. A point made so gently that Bruce Wayne would never hear it; nor, probably, most of this film's audience.
Nice Thesaurus work there mate, but just because a few hundred people gave it a fantastic review, doesn't mean that you have to be the awkward rebel and act like it was terrible. It was a fantastic and intense movie, and you need to get off the high horse.
Bravo, Keith!
You nailed it.
Exhilarating!
For so many words you say so little. You're a critic and I respect your profession, but you certainly could have summed all of that up succinctly in about three paragraphs. You desperately need an editor.
"a low-rent Anton Chigurh facsimile"
Sorry to burst your bubble but I believe Harvey Dent/Two Face was flipping a coin and putting things to chance LONG before Cormac McCarthy wrote No Country For Old Men. In fact, I'm gonna say Harvey has him beat by about 63 years.
You're entitled to think what you will about the film, that's just a very poor comparative statement.
Well, you can't really blame them for shooting for a PG-13 rating in the interest of sales. This is the Dark Knight, but it's still Batman. There are the brooding geeks and film snobs, and there are the costumed kids. And with the unveiling of Two-Face, a real money shot, sacrificing the gore of a pencil to the eye or a blade through the cheek is welcome. I got what I paid for.
I found THE DARK KNIGHT stunning — easily the best and most fascinating summer blockbuster to come out in recent years. And I couldn't muster up much enthusiasm for BATMAN BEGINS — but they've created a spectacular morality play on an appropriately epic scale here.
Do you not understand that the director and the producers and all the legal team have to remain loyal to the fans and to what Batman (a superhero) represents. Oh sure they could have included gory mouth cutting scenes, but they would have doomed themselves to an R rating which nonetheless would have generated profit but would have put a slightly bad taste in everbody's mouth. Secondly such graphic depiction would have given the Joker to much of a "Jigsaw" feel considering the writer's adaptation of the Joker. As for the city, they did their best to show as much as they could, but the fact is Gotham is a fictional city. Which means if you want to show it in full scale you would have to do something on par with Tim Burton, and create an entire city, or you could just go ahead and show the Sears Tower and ruin the whole fact that it is a fictional movie meant to play upon the realities and feelings of our world. So unless you want the movie to end up like post 9/11 terror flick, then don't fret about them not showing Gotham in its entirety. Ultimately the fact is that regardless of whether or not Heath Ledger died, this movie would still be great. Because that's what it is a great movie, that takes us from our own lives for a few hours and entertains us. And until you can stop peeling the neverending onion that is movie making, you will never appreciate a great movie for what it is: entertaining.
I wonder what it says about a critic who goes against the grain of 99%(don't worry its called exaggeration) of the rest of proffesional critics who say it's top notch. I believe the technical term you may have wanted to use but couldn't think of when writing your review was "crap", yes I know it's only four letters, but think of time you'd save "critiquing" a bad movie. Seriously you couldn't find one great thing to say about this movie? I'd say this movie just wasn't for you, but then that just ridiculous. :}
Um, sir, that movie you just talked about was super awesome.
It, in many ways, completed me.
I couldn't resist the army of characters with no direction. It helped me not care about anything and just look at the flashybangs.
I just don't understand why it was called the Dark Knight. It seemed to me the Joker was in it more.
You're a professional reviewer? Hard to believe. Half the scenarios you brought up as examples of "failures" apparently soar above your head. You question Nolan and Bale?? Nolan's directing is 2nd to none. The mood he intended does not slip nor does anything seem contrived. Not to mention the extraordinarily beautiful cinematography. Bale! You can not deny him the Machinist. Any actor who devotes his soul to a character already has surpassed most. You don't even begrudge Ledger his Joker? Surely your "brilliant" comment about him playing an idea and not a character is a joke. The joker is not a 2-dimensional "character". Like Alex Delarge, he is the embodiment of insanity and careless malevolence. Learn to enjoy the best movie of the year.
I disagree with you review of the movie. I thought it was well done, and I for one had no interest in seeing the violence that was done off camera. I did think that the movie was a little over the top. I really was looking forward to this movie, but I felt that Nolan really went too far with some of the things that Batman was able to do with the help of Mr. Fox. There were a lot of far fetched moments in the film, and I think that brought the movie down a bit.
Hmmm… Maybe the theater you went to received a rough cut, pirated, or spliced-up copy?
Today was film night with the family and the first thing my 80 year old grandma said when Dark Knight ended was, "That was exciting!"
I agree with my Grandma and I have to say it was also one of the most unnerving and wildly haunting films I've seen in a while. I detest super hero comics (sorry) but I found this film to work on its own, altogether separate from the trappings and overblown fantasy of the comic book genre.
There comes a time when every critic ought to remove him- or herself from the psychology of film critique (or the grandiose expectations of a given high profile film). There comes a time when you need to simply sit back and enjoy, with a flexible though scrupulous eye, what is delivered on-screen.
With a straight face I would liken Ledger's performance to that of Anthony Hopkin's Hannibal Lecter. Both characters are haunting, feverishly grim, and exhibit a genuine hopelessness and inner turmoil that goes so far as to exceed their literary source material.
I have respect for all kinds of opinions, but yours seems mislaid somehow… as though you have a vendetta toward entertainment. I hope that in 25 years' time you can watch Dark Knight again and take notice of some of the rather endearing qualities it has to offer. I hope you can be entertained by it at least, if you are unable to pull anything more poignant from it.
You have a way with words, that I will give you. But man, you missed so much if that's all you gathered from it. I'd honestly suggest seeing it again, without the mindset that there isn't anything deep about it.
To be short, I find your article's description of the film's script as nothing but verbose platitudes to be more than a touch ironic.
Naw, you've misread the film pretty poorly here. While the world of Gotham City is in and of itself muddled (I prefer the term "gray", this film isn't, nor is its' message. This is the story of a city deciding, painfully, that it wants to break ties from its' dark past, and hope for a better, if perhaps less plausible future. And there are growing pains, a great big spanner in the works, and a whole lot of darkness trying to shut out the light. But there is a light here, which comes out uncowed.
I think the Bush reference is a misplaced one. If anything, the unbridled hope and optimism of Harvey Dent brought Barack Obama to mind, though (hopefully) unlike Obama, Dent had feet of clay. Dent's meteoric rise was an easy one, and as soon as figures set about the destroy him, he became just as bad as them. IN the end, Bruce Wayne/Batman must rise into the role he wanted to pass of to Dent: Wayne has suffered the same loss as Dent, and worse, and it didn't break him. I find the ending scene (further spoiler alert) quite novelistic, in the way that both Batman and Dent fall to earth from lofty heights, but Batman is not broken by the experience, and is able to stand. This is a movie with dark thigns in it, with a positive message, which I think is distinct from it being simply a dark, cynical movie, as this review seems to make it out to be.
Anton Chigurh, or I should say Cormac McCarthy, stole the shtick from two face not vice versa. Thinking two face would act like anyone other than two face is a little ridiculous. My only criticism is the lack of practical effects for his make-up. The effect was awful.
The mere thought of the hate mail you're going to receive for this automatically earns you my respect, as I don't think that you're trying to be sensational.
I loved the film, but have no problem letting a critic be a critic. Keith's review represents the film as he and a few others saw it (a vast minority, admittedly, but one with valid points from a particular perspective).
"There should be a kick to seeing The Joker wreak havoc (the laughter should stick in our throat, yes, but it should always be there regardless); to seeing Two-Face consumed by vengeance (rather than turned, thuddingly, into both a walking “oh the humanity!†metaphor and a low-rent Anton Chigurh facsimile); to seeing Batman, ultimately, make a life-altering sacrifice for the present-tense good of Gotham (half self-absorption/half martyrdom)."
Yeah, all of those things should be joyous to watch.
You might try leaving spoilers out of your review although I find it overly verbose. Any real reviewer will refrain from adding so many spoilers into their critique. Also I don't have an issue with whether you liked the movie or not. It is just a very unprofessional review.
It makes you look like you have a vendetta and also that you don't understand the material.