Batman Begins
Written by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Warner Bros.
2005
Rating:


Bob Kane began Batman in the noir tradition in 1939. The idea of a man defending a city from evil undoubtedly found its roots in Superman, but Kane stripped his hero of superpowers, placing the burden of saving Gotham City on the very human shoulders of a playboy who could no longer allow evil to go unpunished. Batman was a detective, first and foremost, a Sam Spade with wonderful toys and above average strength. Batman was often awash in silliness that sometimes descended into camp and it would take Frank Miller to give Batman gravitas again with his seminal "The Dark Knight Returns." The comic was an influence on Tim Burton's 1989 film "Batman," but Burton's dependence on German expressionism and over-the-top performances kept the Dark Knight in cartoon territory.

Like Miller before him, director Christopher Nolan ("Memento," "Insomnia") returns Batman to the darkness for a pop masterpiece that will forever be remembered as one of the all-time greatest superhero movies. Plumbing more than 65 years of Batman lore, Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer (the "Blade" trilogy) have taken from the best of the Batman stories — including Miller's "Batman: Year One," Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's "Batman: The Long Halloween," the Denny O'Neill and Neal Adams issues from the 1970s, Paul Dini's "Batman: The Animated Series" and, of course, the two-page backstory "The Legend of the Batman — Who He Is and How He Came to Be" written by Kane — to create a story steeped in mythology, psychology, character and reality.

Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) looks nothing like a hero the first time he's glimpsed, initially appearing as every bit the kind of thug he will later defend Gotham City from. Grimy and bearded, Wayne awakes in a Chinese prison and has his breakfast interrupted when seven inmates challenge him to a fight. Wayne has spent the past several years trying to understand the criminal mind to better combat it after the murder of his parents by thug Joe Chill (Richard Brake) when he was a child. Like the iconic image of John F. Kennedy Jr. at his father's funeral, Wayne became the most public, lonely child in the world. His loneliness is compounded by his sense of guilt at having contributed to his parents' deaths, and when he can't even kill Chill, Wayne goes on a kamikaze quest to become a crimefighter or a dead man, which ever comes first. The Osama bin Laden-like Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and his vigilante group the League of Shadows find Wayne and, in hopes that he will join them in destroying the corrupt Gotham City, have him trained by Ducard (Liam Neeson). After conquering his fears and becoming something a little more than a man, Wayne leaves the League on bad terms when he decides to save Gotham City rather than annihilate it.

With the help of his butler Alfred (Michael Caine) and Wayne Enterprises inventor Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Wayne creates his Batsuit, Batcave, Batmobile and Bat persona to take on the evil that lurks in Gotham's shadows, including crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and corrupt Arkham Asylum psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy).

For Nolan, the action isn't really the point. When the film does take a turn for the vigorously furious, it does so in the manner of "The French Connection" or "Bullit" rather than "The Matrix." There's a spectacular car chase that finds the Batmobile zooming from rooftop to rooftop that borrows generously from "The French Connection," taking Batman through a realistic urbania reminiscent of an "Untouchables"-era Chicago. "This is not a dance," Ducard instructs Wayne while teaching him to fight, and there's nothing of Yuen Woo-Ping's influential action choreography. The violence is brutal, hard and sloppy. And scary. More than any other Batman incarnation, "Begins" visualizes just how disturbing a man dressed as a bat can be. Wayne even changes his voice to a disconcerting gnarl to further disguise his identity and to strike fear into his enemies.

That fear resonates throughout the film and drives Wayne, as portrayed by Bale in his layered performance, more than anything else. Wayne chooses the bat as his symbol because the animal traumatized him as a child and led to his parents being in that alley the night they were shot. The fear of not living up to his father's high standards leads first to Wayne's years of suicidal tendencies and then his transformation into a hero. And Wayne's belief that the fear he brings to the underworld will bring hope to the good people of Gotham (including Gary Oldman's exceptional Det. Gordon) fuels his need to help the city.

Nolan burrows deep into Batman's psyche to uncover what would make such a man do the things he does, and the answer he comes up with is fear and the desire to transcend it. In a manner similar to his "Memento," Nolan sees Wayne as a man in the midst of an existential crisis who must grapple with the thin line between justice and vengeance and the madness that struggle can yield, concepts that lesser comic book movies like "The Punisher" can't even begin to fathom. "Batman Begins" begins something tremendous: the birth of the comic book film as a mature art form.

Posted Sunday, July 3, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/batman.begins