THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
You can get away with an awful lot in a Christopher Nolan movie, but this central fact remains--if you're in our universe, you're playing by our rules, operating under our day-to-day constraints of nature and physics. Nolan's blessed with a Lean-ian sense of scope, but his movies are, for all their shot-for-the-big-screen opulence, the most down to earth of movie epics, constantly pushing the bounds of the plausible while never straying too far from the possible It's this dizzying contrast, this constant tension between nostalgic grandeur and taste-the-grit realism, that make Nolan's films so distinctly his. They tower, yes, but they also keep their feet on the ground. And, when it comes to sheer size, none of Nolan's films has ever towered quite so high as Rises (or TDKR, at the Batboys and girls call it), the monolithically ambitious, staggeringly complicated swan song of his Batman series. Boiling over with ambition and reveling in a beefed-up budget, Nolan has made a true a big-ticket behemoth, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the days of Ben-Hur and Spartacus. One thinks of the lyric from Moulin Rouge:
"Spectacular, spectacular, no words in the vernacular/can describe this great event/you'll be dumb with wonderment!"
And, indeed, as sheer spectacle, TDKR is a bet-the-farm success from start to finish. With Hans Zimmer's score filling the speakers and Wally Pfister's camera sweeping gracefully over Gotham's neon-and-smoke skyline, there isn't a single frame of this movie that isn't impressive, that doesn't bear the mark of some creative strength or technical accomplishment. As a follow-up to The Dark Knight, however, its record isn't quite so spotless. This is a movie with a spotty but absorbing first act, an exhilarating second act, and a wildly bipolar final act, one that's equal parts fascination and frustration as the furthest-reaching director of our time struggles to get control of a story so unwieldy it escapes even his grasp. Nonetheless, as the lights came up and the movie settled in my mind, my gut told me, and still tells me,that this is a worthy successor to one of the greatest sequels of all-time--albeit just barely.
The movie, as most sentient beings now know, is the concluding chapter in what is widely considered the single greatest on-screen superhero saga of all time. I agree with the sentiment, but take issue with the wording. These are at their core anti-superhero movies, obsessed not with feats of strength but with the frailty of even the strongest of the strong. Honing in heavily on the protagonist's dark past and damaged psyche, they aren't so much the story of Batman as the tale of Bruce Wayne, a man so fucked up that he exorcises his demons in by dressing up in a big costume and whaling on thugs, and of a city and a world so fucked up that, well, they actually kind of need him. By deftly deconstructing the binary opposition between man and superman, and introducing a truly savage rogues gallery (Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow, Heath Ledger's deservedly legendary Joker) to further blur the line, Nolan and co. dealt with a question--how should an ordinary person in an orderly society respond to chaos?--that's been at the forefront of our collective minds ever since the smoke cleared at Ground Zero.
It's a dark, gutsy, and timely approach, and it works in no small part because of the man inhabiting the Batsuit, a man who just happens to be the most forcefully committed actor since Daniel Day-Lewis stepped on the scene. The Bruce Waynes of summers past have been, for the most part, one-trick ponies; Michael Keaton was the nerdy one, Val Kilmer the brooding one, and George Clooney the suave, Bat-nipple lovin' one. But Nolan's Wayne is not so neatly compartmentalized; as played by Christian Bale, he's a seething, wounded mess of a man who pacifies himself by trying on and discarding a series of masks; not just midnight vigilante but blithe socialite, spoiled playboy, and savvy technocrat. Yet underneath it all is a scalding, desolate fury, forged in the crucible of his tragic past and perpetuated by a worldview that perceives life not as something to be lived but as something that keeps happening to him, no matter how far into seclusion he slips. Indeed, it's Bale's unflinching immersion in the character that keeps a good portion of his first-act scenes afloat, as Bruce skulks around his manor, mourning his dead sweetheart Rachel and trading barbs with an increasingly frustrated Alfred (Michael Caine). Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonah have never been terribly adept at back-and-forth dialogues, and these angsty diatribes are a far cry from the ready-steady-go immediacy of TDK. At their leaden worst, they run the risk of coming off as lugubrious--as expendable musings by a duo of pent-up Eeyores. But, with Bale and Caine in the driver's seat, these scenes rarely try your patience, and, at their best, they acquire an impressive, pseudo-Shakespearean heft. They serve as a prime example of how skilled acting can redeem middling material, with a single spurned glance from Bruce or throaty plea from Alfred coming off just as cathartically combustible as any of the picture's flashier fireworks.
That said, it wouldn't be a Nolan movie without some trademark pieces of flair, and if Bruce spends the first part of the picture in a Howard Hughesian rut, the other characters are fired up and ready to go, as is their director, who punctuates the European ennui of Wayne Manor with a trio of crackerjack action setpieces, including a real doozy of a planejacking and a meticulously crafted stock-market holdup that plays like an adrenaline-soaked throwback to TDK's opening bank heist. Sandwiched between the two is a devilishly clever piece of business involving Catwoman (Anne Hathaway), a switched-out cellphone, and a loaded gun. About that feline femme fatale; she is, far and away, the best thing in the picture. "I'm adaptable", the former Princess Diaries star purrs in one scene, and she ain't kidding. Her eyes alternately radiating the sensual ravenousness of a cat in heat and the pitiable listlessness of a wounded puppy, Hathaway is a slinky, kinky wonder, internalizing the animalistic tendencies of Catwomen past and introducing an irresistible dash of eros into a series dominated by top-heavy mythos. Yet even at her most deliciously sinuous, she's powered, like Bruce, by something much deeper and much darker; a gnawing sense of regret. "Once you've done what you have to", she laments, "they'll never let you do what you want to." That's why she jumps at Bruce/Batman's offer of a record-wiping software program, an offer he makes in exchange for information; she must tell him what she knows about Bane (Tom Hardy), a masked mass of throbbing muscles and nihilistic mind who's recently made a scene robbing the aforementioned stock market and--yes--bankrupting Wayne Enterprises. In a sequence that will surprise no one who's read the comics or even seen the trailer, she takes him to Bane's lair, slams the door, and leaves him to endure what isn't so much a fight as an all-out, blood-spattered beatdown. Batman's strength is no match for Hardy's villain, who is, fittingly enough, the polar opposite of Ledger's Joker--whereas that character was an anarchic loon, this one's disturbingly detached and methodical in his mortiferous cruelty, espousing a series of clear-cut objectives ("Search him, and then I will kill you") that he enforces with his unmatched brute strength. Accompanied only by the cavernous echoes of falling water and Batman's agonized shrieks, Bane thrashes our hero within an inch of his life and, as he does, a movie that's been humming along fairly well beforehand comes blisteringly alive.
Batman's defeat sets the tone for the movie's middle, in which both Batman and Gotham are subjected to a seeming endless series of physical and psychological humiliations. For years, these people have kept evil at bay, but in doing so they've paid a terrible price, and in TDKR, evil comes a-knocking to collect. With our hero battered into submission and locked away in a Middle Eastern hellhole as punishment for his intrusions, Bane upends the city's social order, overthrowing civic leaders, stifling outside interference, erecting martial law, and subjecting ordinary citizens to rigged kangaroo courts, all the while brandishing, unbeknownst to citizens, an incessantly ticking nuclear bomb. Like the zealous jihadists of today's War on Terror, he doesn't just want to destroy his enemies--he wants to torment them, to subject them to the sum total of his own inner suffering. Achieved through a potent mixture of threats, lies, and sheer strength of will, Bane's takeover is deranged but deliberate, borderline implausible and yet viscerally, horribly real--in other words, it's classic Christopher Nolan. The man's always had a remarkable knack for that most important of filmmaking skills, infusing an image with ideas, and this second stretch of the film is chockfull of the sort of violently charged visuals we've come to expect from him. Men and women in fur coats fleeing a small army of freed prisoners; entire blocks plunged into darkness; leaders of the old regime cast out by the new, exiled onto massive sheets of thin ice and left to fall through and drown; these scenes are marvels of merciless ingenuity, conveying a world where the delicate societal structures that keep our darkest impulses at bay have collapsed.
Greatest and most terrible of all these scenes is Bane's opening salvo, an all-out assault on a packed-to-capacity football stadium. It's one of the two or three strongest moments in Nolan's trilogy, and certainly the one most indicative of his knack for eschewing PG-13 studio convention and going straight for the throat. As a boy soprano sings "The Star-Spangled Banner", the film cuts back and forth between patriotic silence of what's going on inside the stadium with the deafening confusion of what's going on around it; a suspicious detective (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) closing in on a lead, thousands of Gotham's finest marching straight into a trap, and, of course, Bane himself, trudging into the arena, detonator in hand. It's the most startling, savage, and dead-on sequence in the movie, with music, image, and camera movement seamlessly converging to underscore a hymn to the strength and solidarity of a republic with the beginnings of its imminent destruction. If The Dark Knight was a thorny crime thriller about the price paid by a hero, then TDKR is, at its best, a sobering horror film about the price paid by ordinary citizens when said hero goes absent. Yet, even at its most terrifying, it's not painful to watch, for, like the best horror movies, it kindles a sense of gratitude and exhilaration by proving just to us just how deeply it understands our fears.
With so much focus on the destruction of Gotham, and on the two lawmen left to stabilize the crumbling city (Gordon-Levitt and Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon), it's easy to overlook Bruce's second-act scenes, which find him nursing his wounds and preparing to embark on a strange ritual that gives prisoners the opportunity to climb up an impossibly tall tower and clamber their way to freedom--or die trying. As soon as the prison warden tells Bruce that no one ever makes it out alive, the Action Movie Bible tells us all we need to know about what's going to happen next. Plus as critics have pointed out, a prison with a ready-made escape route for the strong is both cliche and, well, kind of silly. They're right, but they're also missing the point. The question isn't whether Bruce Wayne will escape, but what it will take for him to escape. As Bruce struggles to regain not just his physical strength but the mental mindset required to do the impossible, Bale turns in some of his strongest work to date, pouring every ounce of his energy into relaying the ecstasy and agony of spiritual rebirth. These scenes also feature the Brothers Nolan at their most psychologically astute, forcing Bruce to wrestle with the dark truth at the poisonous core of his persona; having lived long enough to see himself become a villain, he wishes nothing more than to die a hero. It's not Bruce's climb out of darkness that's stirring; it's his realization that having something worth living for is a much, much more powerful motivator than having something worth dying for. It's an epiphany that runs counter to the traditional superhero themes of humility and self-sacrifice, and it makes Bruce's transformation genuinely surprising and unexpectedly moving. And so, with Batman back in the cowl and ready to take on Bane, I steeled myself for one helluva finale, for a full-on Christopher Nolan war movie--but, alas, it never came. The film's final half-hour comes at you in a deluge of uninspired melees, telegraphed plot twists, and sloppy resolutions, and are less a dignified denouement than a shaky sprint to the finish.
What's to blame? The fanboys lighting up the message boards will tell you that Nolan was just plain old tuckered out--that after two BatBlockbusters in the space of half-a-decade, his heart just wasn't in it with this one. I'm not convinced that's the problem. What I see in this film's botched climax is the work of a director who was trying desperately to give us what we wanted, but deeply mistook what it was we desired. Ever since Memento, Nolan's been known for his one-of-a-kind Wowzer endings; in the last half-hour of a Nolan picture, moviegoers have always been guaranteed both a whopper of a last-act twist and a knockout of a final shot. Well aware that people expected these things from him, I imagine Nolan sitting in front of his Word document and thinking that, since this movie was the biggest cosmic event since that whole Big Bang thing, he ought to exceed those expectations. Convention be damned. Let's have six twists and sudden deaths and many, many endings! You thought Inception's dream-within-a-dream framework was complicated? Good luck navigating all five of these subplots! You thought TDK's finale was fucked-up? This one's even darker!! Indeed, as he offs major characters in mere seconds, reveals massive twists at the drop of a hat, and cuts between one Giant Action Sequence and two other Giant Action Sequences, one pictures the guy standing at the front of the movie theatre and pulling a Maixmus, shouting so even the back row can hear; "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!"
Not as much as I could've been, Mr. Nolan. Because, in attempting to top yourself, you neglect to include the very thing that took you to the top in the first place. The big-budget trickery and narrative sleight-of-hand are cool, sure, but Nolan's finales are usually so good because they take their time, slowly and steadily settling the affairs of each major character. Quick; name another comic book movie other than The Dark Knight that would spent a sizable part of its last twenty minutes letting the villain talk and talk and talk, even though he's been defeated in battle. Or, alternately, riddle me this; name another thriller other than Inception that would stop an action sequence dead in its tracks to focus on a conversation between two characters sitting at a table. Nolan's always known that an impactive ending is best achieved by taking the time to let the story come deliberately and organically to its natural conclusion. Or at least, I thought he knew; based on TDKR, he seems to think that we're impressed not by the way he shepherds each storyline to a memorable and satisfactory end, but at his ability to throw in twists and complications along the way.
Yes, I was mildly surprised at a last-minute reveal regarding Bruce's ingenue, Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), a character so insignificant to the movie's first two hours that I totally forgot to mention her up until the sentence you're reading now.
Yes, it was kind of neat to see Nolan cut back and forth among five different points of view with all the effortlessness of a maestro sitting down to play "Chopsticks".
But I was more preoccupied with what I didn't see; a fully realized conclusion to the central conflict of the movie. After their physical and psychological beatdown at the hands of Bane, we desire nothing more than what the title promises; a rousing pushback against the encroaching darkness, centered around the looming rematch between the Bat and the Baddie. What we get is a sixty-second fistfight amidst a barely choreographed horde of brawling cops and thugs, resolved in a cheap and arbitrary way that strips Bane of all his carefully established gravitas and mystery and turns him into a bad joke. This leads us to blink-and-you'll-miss-it battle centered around the Cotillard character, but just as we're settling into that, Nolan drops it, too, tossing in a ticking-clock gambit straight out of a Rush Hour movie. Stacked on top of each other, the multiple climaxes deflate; the impact of whatever came before is negated by whatever rapidly unfolding Biggerer and Betterer thing comes after. It's as if Nolan's trying to prove to you that in tying off his trilogy, he left no leaf unturned, no stunt untried or plot machination unused. But I'd much rather have a perfectly prepared meal than a helping of every single thing you have in the kitchen. The plot's natural path leads to a confrontation between the film's central hero and central villain, and I'd've much preferred a generous and protracted resolution of that conflict to the introduction of a hundred new ones. By sending his film down a single pathway with finesse and focus and then circumventing the last stretches of that pathway by going in a hundred directions at once, Nolan hobbles his movie, keeping it from the classic status attained by its two predecessors.
An overburdened climax isn't the only problem with this picture. There are also, as every website ever has now pointed out, sundry plot holes (How does Bruce get back to Bane-occupied Gotham? Why can't SEC just overturn Bane's fraudulent stock market takeover?) and lapses in basic common sense (On what planet does a city send its entire police force to the same place at the same time? What is the Gordon-Levitt character smoking that makes him such a damn good guesser?). There's also a last-minute coda that elicits tears without really earning them. I wept through it the first time, but the more I think about it, the more I roll my eyes. Nolan creates a touching final tableau to put the finishing touches on the fates of his main characters, but here the emotions come at the cost of basic logic. While you're reaching for your Kleenex, it's worth remembering that this scene, however affecting it may be, depends on:
1) A sudden revelation regarding the relationship of two characters that runs counter to everything we've learned about them in the past two hours.
2) A character having an almost robotically subdued reaction to a situation that would reduce any sentient human being to hysterics.
and
3) Frankly, a lead character being kind of a douche, ushering in countless hours of pain and grief that could've been allayed with a phone call or a post card, all in the service of creating one final "gotcha" moment.
I hesitate to ruin an ending that many moviegoers have deemed flat-out sensational, but, then again, Pauline Kael used to say that critics ought to "help by explaining the ways in which (movies)...can work over your emotions in unworthy or dishonest ways." Or, put plainly, if you're eating shit because it looks like Godiva, you have the right to know that it's actually shit.
Yet, ultimately, the greatest handicap to this picture isn't the anything that's in it but something that's not; the voices and faces of the citizens of Gotham as they endure some of the greatest hardships imaginable. In his first two Batman films, one of the advantages of Nolan's realist approach was the way it reminded us that all of the hero's cape-and-cowl derring-do didn't just occur in a vacuum, that his mistakes could cause the suffering of thousands and his successes might alleviate it. The frightened boy fleeing the Scarecrow's chemical attack, the citizens on the boat, bickering over the Joker's bomb plot--these people served as urgent, potent reminders that the lives of real citizens, not just the welfare of a couple of set extras, hung in the balance. In TDKR, when Gotham's citizens are more directly affected by Batman's actions--or lack thereof--than ever, Nolan never bothers to zero in on their emotions, to add a shade or two of true emotional dimension to their predicament.
Take one of the action sequences at the end, where Gordon-Levitt is trying to shepherd a group of kids onto a bus and get them out of the city. If this movie followed the blueprint set by its predecessors, we'd actually see inside the bus, plunging headfirst into the childrens' confusion and fear. We'd remember that these are the faces of actual citizens, and that, unless someone steps in and does something, well, super, their lives will be short and terrible in ways that we'd never wish on anyone. Instead, Nolan focuses exclusively on Gordon-Levitt shouting directions to a fellow cop--on Movie Bravery instead of Real Terror. This is a story that cries out more than ever for the voices of ordinary Gothamites. With Bane running the show, wouldn't it have moved us to see these people set up support groups or thrilled us to see them assemble a citizens army? As it is, the vox populi is silent, and its absence is deafening. It is this silence, not the logical loopholes or the cluttered climaxes, that truly keep TDKR from reaching its potential. In the end, TDKR is not this trilogy's Spider-Man 3, nor its Return of the King. It is instead the Return of the Jedi of the series, a deeply problematic but often thrilling and always honorable finale.
And yet I have to say that, in their own way, the disappointing aspects of the picture seem fitting, given its themes. As Nolan cut back and forth among subplot after subplot, with each lead character doing their part to save the city or damn it, it realized the chief message of this movie and of the whole series, a message that's deeply antithetical to the rah-rah individualism championed by most comic-book epics, and by American action cinema in general;
One man can only do so much.
It's a ballsy, deeply complicated message, one made almost unbearably poignant and prescient in the aftermath of the deplorable massacre that happened at a screening of this very picture in Colorado. It's a message that cuts both ways; it is true, sadly, of the Batmans and Barack Obamas of our world, and, luckily, of the Banes and James Holmes's. And, indeed, in the aftermath of this unspeakable tragedy, this message is central to what ought to be our goal as a nation; diminishing the achievements of the criminal who perpetrated it. We have already reached out to the good people of Aurora, joining Facebook groups and donating to charities, saying prayers and sending good vibes while all the while shepherding our families into the house to hold them a little closer. We have already done our part to comfort those affected by this crime; now we must turn our attention to the criminal, and, exercising our right to free speech and our gift of human ingenuity, show him just how little he got away with. Admittedly, killing twelve people is no small crime, but I have the feeling that Holmes, who purportedly modeled his bloody actions on those of the Joker, was aiming to leave more than just a pile of dead bodies; by opening fire on a group of people engaged in one of our most sacred and enduring past times, I think that, consciously or not, this man wished to damage not just our day or our week, but the very act of going to the movies, infecting one of our greatest venues for reflection and escape with his own suffering and razor-sharp mania, so that every time we stared at a cinema screen, we envisioned his haunted face rippling just underneath it.
Well, sorry, big guy.
When we listen to "Imagine", we don't think about a man who fired a few shots outside of the Dakota; we think about unity, about peace, about a harmony that escapes all understanding. In the coming weeks, we must remind Mr. Holmes that the same is true of the movies; that he has not sullied the sheer thrill of stepping into a dark room, plunging headfirst into another world, and coming out a little surer about your place in this one. As soon as I heard the awful news, I knew instinctively what I had to do; buy a ticket and see the picture again. Admittedly, for the first half-hour or so, my fellow audience members and I were clearly on edge, throwing jerky, nervous glances at the exists and keeping a close eye on backpacks and purses. But, around the sixty-minute mark, I could feel it; that beautiful, unquantifiable moment when, eyes focused on the screen, we were unbound from ordinary reality, and, for two and a half hours, permitted to experience something extraordinary. In that moment, I knew we'd already won. It's not a concrete, historical victory, but it is a real one, and it's a victory you can perpetuate by going to see a movie, whether it's a brilliant gem like Moonrise Kingdom, an escapist romp like Ice Age: Continental Drift, or a flawed but deeply satisfying franchise film like The Dark Knight Rises, which, for now, gets a B in my book. It's a verdict that may change over time, but for now, I'm sticking with it.
I'm sure that my final judgement of this picture is one that many will take issue with. Some have suggested that I ought to really tear into it, to castigate Chris Nolan for letting so many of us down. There are others, much greater in number, who will insist that I've gone overboard, that I've deliberately looked for ways to tear holes in the seamless fabric of a film that's actually a masterpiece. To both groups I say this;
I'm tough on Christopher Nolan because he can take it.
Because, when he's at his best, he's the director we need, and probably a better one than we deserve.
But, I'm merciful because, even when he doesn't hit all of his targets, he's still a brilliant artist.
A studio-movie savior.
A Dark Knight.
