Review: Batman Begins

Batman Begins
Starring Christian Bale, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman
Directed by Christopher Nolan

3 stars (out of 4)

Batman Begins is a fitting title for the fifth film about the Dark Knight; in an era of tentpoles and franchises, when studio heads are looking for the next Harry Potter or Wolverine, the latest film from Christopher Nolan (Memento) feels laden with the hopes and fears of CEOs across Hollywood. As I write this, accountants across Southern California are wringing their hands at the 17th consecutive week in which box office attendance is down by 9% and revenue 6% from last year. Batman isn’t a superhero, but a commodity designed to resuscitate a limp box office and begin a new series of films that promises enough ancillary tie-ins and DVD sales to boost revenues in a losing business. Ah, the glorious innocence of the dream factory.

Nolan, who’s grown more linear and mainstream with each successive film, succeeds here in offering the ultimate summer movie for boys of all ages. I’m not ashamed to admit that I found myself grinning like, well, a little boy at several scenes, particularly the Batmobile’s rampage along the rooftops (yes, rooftops) of Gotham City. A heartfelt ode to the Y-chromosome, Nolan has brought us a gritty world of steel skyscrapers, heroes in tanks, and women that never talk. There’s only one female role in the entire film with more than two or three lines, and that honor falls to Katie Holmes, whose character is written with all the bludgeoning precision that can be expected for such a clichéd role. Rachel (Holmes) is a placeholder, a space filler; she represents all women and the hero’s interaction with them. And while young Bruce Wayne’s father is a saint, a righteous doctor and caring philanthropist, his mother’s a mute: the only time I can remember her speaking in the film is when she screams as she and Bruce’s father are gunned down in an alley as 10-year-old Bruce stands helplessly by.

Bruce grows up in the care of family butler Alfred (Michael Caine) before running away and eventually winding up in a Bhutanese prison camp. The script from David S. Goyer (Demonic Toys, all three Blade movies, Kickboxer 2...I think you get the picture) moves quickly through the necessary exposition. While most people know about Bruce Wayne’s motivation to become Batman, Goyer and Nolan still have run through the story anyway, and it’s a testament to Nolan that these scenes work so well. He is freed from the prison by a man named Ducard (Liam Neeson), who claims to be a representative of Ra’s Al Ghul, the leader of a group of ninja assassins calling themselves the League of Shadows. Bruce trains with them and leaves on less than pleasant terms, and spends the rest of the movie putting together his suit and car and stopping an evil plot by Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), a.k.a. the Scarecrow, who uses people’s fears against them. Just when things seem to be getting wrapped up with that plot, the one with Ra’s Al Ghul reemerges, as it must, but the dual meandering storylines push the runtime to 2 hours 20 minutes. A little streamlining, or at least some tenuous connection between the villains, would have gone a long way here.

Does Batman survive? Does he stop the bad guys? Does he take a few setbacks but still learn from them in the end? If you really have to ask, then I can’t help you.

Tim Burton’s films (Batman, Batman Returns) were built on rubber and steel, all blacks and cold grays. Joel Schumacher’s films (Batman Forever, Batman & Robin), if they could be called such, were mindless orgies of comic coloring, senseless spectacles attempting to dazzle the viewer into, if not forgetfulness, at least forgiveness. But Nolan and production designer Nathan Crowley (Nolan’s Insomnia) have managed at last to create a more believable Gotham City, forged in ambers and greens. There’s always a golden sheen to the light reflecting of Batman’s body armor, a dirty golden brown that lends Bale a weight and a presence that Kilmer and Clooney never had. It’s this subtle distinction, the feeling that this just might be happening somewhere in the world, that turns Batman from a freak in a costume to a genuine superhero. The slums of Gotham, called the Narrows, are patterned after Hong Kong tenements and Blade Runner, one of the many details that makes this Batman film the most believable yet.

Fantasies like Batman work best when the myth walks hand in hand with the personal. If a story engages on the personal level but doesn’t make the myth believable, you wind up with an oddly costumed melodrama (TV’s Lois and Clark springs readily to mind); on the other hand, if a story’s myth works well but leaves no one to care about on a personal level, you’re stuck with an epic bore. (Examples of the latter include all three Star Wars prequels and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings series.) In recent years, only Spider-Man 2 has been able to successfully combine the mythic arc of the hero’s journey with the personal trials of young love to ascend into the upper echelons of pop storytelling; not since The Empire Strikes Back has Hollywood produced such an intersection of the epic and the everyday. It’s this search for and lack of balance, unfortunately, that holds Batman Begins back from being truly great pop filmmaking. Bruce Wayne deals with his parents’ murder remarkably well, turning out more pissed off than emotionally scarred, and his mission seems less driven by a desire to make sure crimes like his parents’ murder happen again and more by a general playboy malaise: young, rich, and with plenty of leftover toys from an abandoned Wayne Enterprises military contract, Bruce in Nolan’s film is just a ninja with a good arsenal. I almost prefer the inventive basketcase, the borderline schizophrenic with deep-seated emotional issues, that Tim Burton and Michael Keaton brought us in 1989 or that Fox brought to the animated small screen in the mid-1990s. Rachel wanders through every cliché available to superhero-story screenwriters; the audience is too busy assuming she’s Bruce’s love interest to ask where the actual love is. Bale and Holmes exhibit the kind of chemistry underwear models might display in an ad, which is to say not much.

But all this comes after, and is only something that can be realized after the credits have rolled. While you’re on it, Batman Begins is the most enjoyable summer ride in years, a great example of popcorn Hollywood and a solid action movie. It’s only when you stop to think about it that you realize what might have been.