The Dark Knight

2008

Reviewed by Coach Patton                                    Back to Reviews
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
 
Screenplay by: Jonathan Nolan and  Christopher Nolan
From a story by: Christopher Nolan  & David S. Goyer
Based on characters created by: Bob Kane
 
Running Length: 2:30  Rated: PG-13 (Violence)
 
Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Eric Roberts

PLOT: With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to destroy organized crime in Gotham for good. The triumvirate proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a rising criminal mastermind known as the Joker, who thrusts Gotham into anarchy and forces the Dark Knight ever closer to crossing the fine line between hero and vigilante.
 
Why So Serious?
 
The Dark Knight all but annihilates the premises of Batman Begins. In addition to the avarice of Gotham, Batman finds himself in battle with a remorseless psychotic, the Joker (Heath Ledger).

Batman (Christian Bale) is powerless against such a villain. Faced with opportunities to kill the Joker, Batman refuses to sacrifice his moral code -- something the Joker exploits. Each time the Batman restrains himself, the Joker manipulates him into making choices that result in greater catastrophes.

That, in the final analysis, is what the Joker is really interested in: to deprive Gotham of its hero, its hope, and its soul. The Joker explains to Batman that he must "work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. You've got to spend time in the shadows.”

It’s nightmare material. The Dark Knight is above all an emotionally and physically draining roller coaster ride and morality play. But the real meat is in the complicated narrative and character interaction, especially between Batman and The Joker.

Batman himself ends up getting the short shrift, and it’s a bitter irony that we’ve now returned to a Batman film series where Batman must fight for screen time against his supporting cast.

The Joker is, as he himself puts it, "an agent of chaos." He exists. He wreaks havoc on the cosmos. He arrives in Gotham abruptly, as if he’d stepped through a door leading to the Twilight Zone. And that's all we need to know. Played to the hilt as pure Id and sociopathic glee, he is simply walking death.

It is immediately clear that the Joker is playing a far different game than the Batman ever imagined. He quickly seizes control of the city’s crime syndicate and Batman’s attention with no rhyme or reason. The Joker's true motives are unexplained, unlike those of all previous comic-book villains.

"Some men," says Batman's butler Alfred (Michael Caine), the moral center of Bruce Wayne's universe, "just want to see the world burn."

The Joker kills one-time allies for pleasure, and enjoys a sexual frisson from shattering other people's lives. He is of course, a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger. It is impossible to watch Ledger’s performance without feeling a sense of poignancy.

The strength of his Joker is its complexity and dark humanity: the way Ledger wears the character’s pain is crystal clear beneath the grotesque and obscure clown’s make up, the painted smile, the lank, greasy hair, the flitting eyes and the ever-darting tongue.

To answer the next question, Heath Ledger is terrifically fun with a definitive and he burns this incarnation of The Joker into our psyche as securely as did Jack Nicholson's. Ledger inhabits the Joker the way he inhabited the body of that sad, gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain : purely, inevitably, as though he was destined to spread paint on his face and lick his mouth with delight.

Ledger's Joker is a fearsome character whose deadly game is profoundly grounded in a perverse sort of pragmatic reality, built on an unredeemable negative view of human weakness. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, take the children). He goes beyond the “Hannibal Lecter” model of criminal insanity, (with its refined serial killing and superficial gloss of malefaction), to humankind's most primeval and epic definition of evil — as anarchy that infects the order of things. "Wanna know how I got these scars?" he says brightly, but the back story doesn't matter. He tells his victims a story of the long-ago maltreatment he suffered, but offers many permutations. Sometimes he says his father cut his face into a gruesome smile, other times he says he did it himself -- as if to underscore the foolishness of looking to the Joker as a reliable narrator.

But there is desperation beneath the Joker's cruelty, and Ledger shows it to us in his hunched-up walk, and in the slurry precision of his speech. But his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once.

The finest moments in The Dark Knight belong to Ledger as the Joker. His performance is a heroic, unsettling and difficult to watch, partly because it's impossible to remove it from the context of Ledger's death. This young actor looked into the abyss. As you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering how badly he may have messed himself up in order to play the role this way.
Ledger passed on in January at age 28 from an inadvertent overdose, after primary photography was completed. His death might have cast a paralyzing, dark covering over the film if Ledger’s performance were not so alive.

Ledger’s tongue darting in and out of his mouth like a jittery animal, chewing and licking his sloppy, red-smeared lips, he turns the Joker into a tormentor who giggles manically while he hah-hah-hah heh-heh-heh’s through life --just wanting to see the world burn. He isn’t fighting for anything or anyone. He isn’t a terrorist, just terrifying. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.

What’s it worth?
For film buffs -- the price of the evening shows
For the average viewer -- matinee price at your local cinema.
I urge you to see this movie and then email me about it; I want to discuss it further.

When Oscar recommendations come out next January, Heath Ledger will have been dead for a year. Given all of the Oscar hubbub he’s engendering now, I’m sure he’ll be on that list of contenders, but can he really win?

However, there has only been one posthumous Oscar -- to Peter Finch for Network but he died only a few weeks before the final Oscar votes were made. We know the whole world is different today -- even Hollywood -- than it was when that other posthumous Oscar was awarded. If so, then maybe this joker can get the last laugh.
 
Roll credits:

Cinematography: Wally Pfister
Music: Hans Zimmer, James Newton-Howard
CAST
Christian Bale --- Bruce Wayne / Batman
Heath Ledger --- The Joker
Aaron Eckhart --- Harvey Dent / Two-Face
Michael Caine --- Alfred Pennyworth
Maggie Gyllenhaal --- Rachel Dawes
Gary Oldman --- Lt. James Gordon
Morgan Freeman --- Lucius Fox
Monique Curnen --- Det. Ramirez
Ron Dean --- Detective Wuertz
Cillian Murphy --- The Scarecrow
Chin Han --- Lau
Nestor Carbonell --- Mayor
Eric Roberts --- Salvatore Maroni
Ritchie Coster --- The Chechen
Anthony Michael Hall --- Mike Engel
Keith Szarabajka --- Detective Stephens
Colin McFarlane --- Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb
William Fichtner --- Courageous Bank Manager
 

FADE TO BLACK
In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton

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