Film: Too Many Rules

IF we can all agree to pretend that Batman Forever and Batman and Robin never happened-and with apologies to George Clooney’s nippled, codpieced Batsuit and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s indelible performance as Mr. Freeze, I’m pretty sure we can—then just two directors, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, have had a crack at the Batman mythos in the last two decades, and they’ve taken radically different approaches to the iconic vigilante. In Batman and especially Batman Returns, Burton took the essential unrealism of a comic-book landscape and deliberately heightened it, creating a stylized alternative universe populated by caricatures and freaks-its Gotham an out-of-time blend of gothic and Art Deco, the Thirties and the Eighties; its villains campy and sinister all at once; and its overall sensibility seemingly drawn, like much of Burton’s oeuvre, from the fever dreams of a black-humored, bloody-minded adolescent.

Fifteen years later, Christopher Nolan has taken Batman in precisely the opposite direction-toward a harrowing realism that owes as much to Sidney Lumet or Quentin Tarantino as it does to the world of Batmobiles and supervillains. Batman Begins tiptoed uneasily along the realism-fantasy divide: One moment it was a gritty urban crime drama, pitting a not-yet-super Bruce Wayne against the Gotham Mob; the next it was, well, a comic book, in which an ancient Tibetan order of warrior monks was plotting to dump a hallucinogenic toxin into Gotham’s water supply and then vaporize the water so that . . . oh, you get the idea. But with The Dark Knight, Nolan delivers a Batman movie that’s largely purged of silliness-a raw, dark, gripping narrative about politics and crime, terrorism and corruption, in which the fact that the hero happens to be wearing a Batsuit often feels almost incidental to the story.

IF we can all agree to pretend that Batman Forever and Batman and Robin never happened-and with apologies to George Clooney’s nippled, codpieced Batsuit and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s indelible performance as Mr. Freeze, I’m pretty sure we can—then just two directors, Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, have had a crack at the Batman mythos in the last two decades, and they’ve taken radically different approaches to the iconic vigilante. In Batman and especially Batman Returns, Burton took the essential unrealism of a comic-book landscape and deliberately heightened it, creating a stylized alternative universe populated by caricatures and freaks-its Gotham an out-of-time blend of gothic and Art Deco, the Thirties and the Eighties; its villains campy and sinister all at once; and its overall sensibility seemingly drawn, like much of Burton’s oeuvre, from the fever dreams of a black-humored, bloody-minded adolescent.

Fifteen years later, Christopher Nolan has taken Batman in precisely the opposite direction-toward a harrowing realism that owes as much to Sidney Lumet or Quentin Tarantino as it does to the world of Batmobiles and supervillains. Batman Begins tiptoed uneasily along the realism-fantasy divide: One moment it was a gritty urban crime drama, pitting a not-yet-super Bruce Wayne against the Gotham Mob; the next it was, well, a comic book, in which an ancient Tibetan order of warrior monks was plotting to dump a hallucinogenic toxin into Gotham’s water supply and then vaporize the water so that . . . oh, you get the idea. But with The Dark Knight, Nolan delivers a Batman movie that’s largely purged of silliness-a raw, dark, gripping narrative about politics and crime, terrorism and corruption, in which the fact that the hero happens to be wearing a Batsuit often feels almost incidental to the story.