I ask a movie to make me feel something, and The Batman had me genuinely rattled.
I ask a movie to make me feel something, and The Batman had me genuinely rattled.
A fter all these years, there have still been only two genuinely great Batman movies: Batman Begins (2005), the defining superhero movie of this century; and The Lego Batman Movie (2017), one of the funniest movies of this century.
The Dark Knight? The last two-thirds are great, but it suffers from a slow start. Sorry, but the Joker’s bank robbery is dumb. He won’t get far in his yellow bus, nor is killing all of his accomplices a great tactic. Also, the early Harvey Dent scene in the courtroom is silly.
Matt Reeves’s The Batman doesn’t rise to the level of the last two-thirds of The Dark Knight, but after an initial viewing, I’m inclined to rank it as the fourth-best Batman movie yet. (It would be fifth behind Joker, but since Batman doesn’t appear in that movie, I don’t label it a Batman movie. And Arthur Fleck is obviously not the same Joker as Batman’s enemy anyway.)
My high opinion of The Batman puts me at odds with fellow NR writers Armond White — who dings it for being “grim,” “cynical,” and “dumbed-down” and for lacking the core of spiritual repulsion seen in F. W. Murnau films — and Jack Butler, who says “The Batman smells” and complains that the movie is “far too long,” presents “an abiding atmosphere of dark-dark-darkness,” and encourages its actors to act instead of goof off. Portraying a Batman villain, he says, is starting to become a quest for an “immensely complex character portrait instead of something imagined for a product marketed for kids.”
Say, why can’t The Batman be for kids? Well, because it’s a different type of movie: the kind made for grownups. It’s too slow, grimy, and disquieting for kids. But we rate a film based on how well it does whatever it’s trying to do, not whether it’s the movie you imagined seeing when you bought your ticket, or whether it’s the movie promised in the trailers, or whether it’s like previous movies featuring the same characters. You wouldn’t complain that Seven or Zodiac offers too much “dark-dark-darkness” or fails to be “for kids.” Darkness is not merely the style of these films; it’s their subject.
We have plenty of movies for kids. Most of the other studio pictures these days amount to a birthday party for middle-schoolers: Yay, here’s the piñata and let’s have some cake. Birthday parties are fine with me. Spider-Man: No Way Home is such a movie done poorly; Spider-Man: Homecoming was such a movie done brilliantly. However, there is a place for grownup movies, and Batman Begins broke down the walls of the box into which superhero films were previously confined.
The audience quickly develops a tolerance for new cinematic approaches, though, and what was “dark” for a comic-book movie in 2005, a year when the most recent Batman movie was 1997’s campy Batman & Robin, has less sting today, when we’ve all seen Joker. The Batman director Matt Reeves is constrained by what Warner Bros. must have demanded be a PG-13-rated film, but within those limitations, the film does an excellent job of creating an anti-thrill ride — a chilling experience closer to a horror movie than to an adventure.
Butler calls the Riddler’s m.o., which depends on leaving sick jokes as clues, “unintentionally hilarious,” but I didn’t hear anyone laughing at those scenes, which echo the police-taunting letters sent by the Son of Sam and Zodiac killers in the Seventies. It’s hardly a stretch to imagine a real-life serial killer fancying his murders to be funny jokes, and the way Reeves presents the Riddler (Paul Dano) is spellbindingly creepy.
The Batman makes it a point of pride not to give us relief with a half dozen of those pointless but dazzling “Wow, wasn’t that cool!” CGI interludes the Marvel movies rely on. It takes a carving knife to the comic book and cuts a toxic urban drama out of it. As Joker proved, a comic-book film’s script can adjust what were once silly caricatures to make them recognizable symptoms of today’s urban alienation and malaise. Actors then become freed up to try for “immensely complex character portraits” rather than buffoonery.
“Dark” has become a strange aspiration for the cinema, and a film isn’t necessarily a success just because it has grit in its teeth. Zack Snyder’s films, for instance, grew increasingly ponderous but were silly at the same time, notably his version of Justice League. But I ask a movie to make me feel something, and The Batman had me genuinely rattled. Reeves and his actors, cinematographer, and production designer are all on the same page here, conjuring up a vision of a rampant social and moral decay that’s so pervasive it even implicates Bruce Wayne’s father Thomas, previously depicted as a saintly paragon of urban progress even by Christopher Nolan in Batman Begins.
Reeves’s bleak Gotham turned out to harmonize with bleak reality — a moment when America is about to hit its millionth Covid death, children are reeling from the torments of useless restrictions meted out by a panicky and superstitious bureaucracy, and crime is surging in cities across the country. Institutions in The Batman are disdainful of the public, corrupted by their own pursuits and morally astray; we watch the film with a shudder of recognition. Is it fun? No. Effective? Definitely.