Batman (1989)

 

Batman (1989)

Dir. Tim Burton

Written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren

Starring Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, Michael Keaton

 A lot of guys I know associate action movies with their dads, have fond memories of paternal male bonding through the storied medium of tough guy movies from the 1980s and early 90s. There are men who have a sentimental fondness for Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis to this very day, because they associate them so strongly with their own fathers, many of whom are now gone. Well, my old man was (and remains!) a great guy, but he wasn’t really into movies; the only thing I ever distinctly remember him showing me was RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and that only because he tried it when I was way too young, completely traumatizing me pretty much from the get-go. I have only myself to blame for the cinephilia which has so thoroughly crippled me socially and emotionally during my adult life. Nobody pushed me. I just fell into it.

And yet, I do have one other youthful memory of an adult showing me a movie: Sometime around 1990 or 1991, my Uncle Richard showed me BATMAN.

I was, in fact, meeting Richard for the first time. He was a recent addition to my family, having married my Aunt Anne a few years earlier, and my immediate impression upon meeting him –the same impression he made on nearly everyone, I later learned—was one of tremendous energy and intense focus. He was a smallish man in statue, with a thick, dark beard and lively dark eyes that felt like they could melt steel when they alighted on something. The only child of Jewish parents, he was used to being the center of attention, and seemed to revel in holding court with a genial grace that sprang not from ego, but from a love of life so confident and overwhelming that it simply had to be shared. He juggled –what little kid could resist such a man?--, and vigorously attempted, without success, to teach me the skill; he waxed philosophic on politics. And he asked me if I had seen BATMAN.

            I had not. I had something of a solitary childhood, with few friends and even fewer sources of access to pop culture; the TV in our house only got a few channels, and was seldom on. The Batmania that had swept America upon the film’s theatrical released had entirely passed me by, unnoticed. I knew who Batman was, of course, but in the same way that I knew who Shakespeare or Robinson Crusoe was, as a mythic culture figure with whom I personally had almost no direct experience. So that stark gold-on-black logo on the VHS box (it was the first-ever Hollywood movie to premiere “priced-to-own” on VHS a mere six months after the film’s release!) was as mysterious and portentous to me as the Sphinx. Richard was incensed; “it’s really cool!” he said, casting a reproachful look at my parents for neglecting his nephew in this shockingly negligent manner, and I believed him utterly and without reservation. Richard was into technology; his television seemed huge and futuristic, and he approached setting it up properly for this showing the same way he approached everything in his life: with a direct, all-consuming gusto that said louder than any words ever could that if we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.

            Revisiting the movie now, many years later –my sister wasn’t born when I first saw it, and she’s a married adult with a doctorate today—I was impressed by how much I remembered, which is all the evidence I could ever require that there’s something special here. But it’s a much stranger artistic object to experience with several more decades of American culture under my belt, a curious time capsule from a distant history where it was by no means clear that audiences would accept, or perhaps even understand, a superhero film.

            It is a movie which more or less takes for granted that audiences recognize the character of Batman and know what his deal is –and if even I knew in 1990, I think that was a reasonably safe assumption—but doesn’t preoccupy itself by trying to anticipate what the audience is expecting from a Batman film. Because, after all, people weren’t really expecting anything specific. Other than the 1978 SUPERMAN a decade earlier, nobody had ever tried making a serious comic book film; even SUPERMAN’s sequels had quickly devolved into campy, kiddie matinees, ending with the ignominy of SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE just two years before a young, unusual filmmaker (boasting just two finished films on his resume, one a TV adaptation and the other a weird, grotesque comedy) showed up with a very different approach to comic-book cinema in mind. If there was any template to work from, it was only the even-campier 1966 Batman TV series starring Adam West (or, I guess, the Batman serials from the 1940s, if you want to get real technical about it) and everyone seemed to be in agreement up front that it should definitely be not-that.

This was to be a serious movie, then; not exactly a movie for adults, but certainly not a kid’s film. Something dignified, something crafted with a certain amount of ambition and maturity, though also not with so much dignity, ambition and maturity that there couldn’t be a Burger King merchandising tie-in. A movie for the masses, something with board demographic appeal, real bread and circuses stuff. Crucially, a movie for the people, not for the fans; nobody involved in the production seems to have fretted too much over appeasing diehard devotees of the character. Comic books nerds were still considered a fringe demographic of stunted adolescents, barely worthy of attention and certainly not in their wildest dreams worth pandering to. The inmates were not yet in charge of the asylum; the internet had not yet allowed them to organize and form a powerful economic block, although it must be said, they themselves were still as virulently invested in controlling the process as they have subsequently shown themselves – even without the internet to assist in organizing, over 50,000 letters from Batman fans poured into the studio to protest the casting of Michal Keaton (MR. MOM), who was generally considered too much of a comic actor for the role. The difference between then and now, however, was that the studio felt perfectly comfortable ignoring them and not pandering to their outraged fury, despite the fact that it was the shifting preferences of these very fans which in some ways made a Tim Burton BATMAN film possible.

After all, comic books had abandoned their campy origins for more self-conscious grown-up fare fairly recently; Frank Miller’s over-the-top THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS had pushed Batman to edgier new places in 1986, and Alan Moore’s nihilistic THE KILLING JOKE had hit stands just a month before Burton’s film was officially greenlit. Combine that atmosphere with a then-edgy young director with a reputation for the macabre, and it’s tempting --particularly when viewed in retrospect through the lens of Nolan’s ultra-serious trilogy-- to consider BATMAN a film defined by its boundary-pushing darkness. And it would indeed be foolhardy to ignore it, because that’s definitely what struck people at the time (sensitive ol’ Roger Ebert, even while praising the movie’s design, called it a “hostile, mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people”). Still, watching it today, the thing that stands out is not so much the gothic darkness (which is expected, and perhaps even a bit of a bore after almost 30 years of increasingly insipid “adult” posturing in comic books) but how little removed from the camp of 1966 it actually is. The “darkness” is primarily the effect of the portentously gloomy production design and the ominous, magnificent score by Danny Elfman (which, to be fair, are probably the two most impactful and defining factors of the whole film), but when you get down to the plot and structure, we find something not really so very different from its pulpy roots.

Indeed, if we look at the script in the abstract, it’s not like we find some kind of moody psychological exploration of Nietzschean modes of identity. We find quintessential comic book stuff: colorful villains, silly convoluted plots, stock characters, and childish fantasies about fast cars and caped crusaders. You could have used this script, almost completely unaltered, for an episode of the Batman serial from 1943 and nobody would have batted (ha!) an eye. There’s really very little “adult” material in here. Bruce Wayne is definitely DTF, but it’s not a horny movie (like virtually every Burton film, with the very notable exception of BATMAN’s immediate sequel, sex is something abstract, a genre trope more than a compulsion of flesh). Likewise, there’s certainly some deaths, but it’s not a violent movie; death, like sex, happens bloodlessly and safely off-screen, obliquely implied but tastefully glossed over. When Batman murders what must be dozens of henchmen by blowing up the building they’re in, the movie does not encourage us to consider the subject of their charred remains or, even worse, wonder about possible mutilated survivors dragging their mangled bodies from the wreckage. Batman vanquishes his opponents and they simply vanish from his mind and ours. The hero has prevailed, the villains have been routed, good has triumphed over evil, and the movie sees absolutely no reason to consider the matter even a little bit further. There is little evidence that Bruce Wayne is traumatized or mentally unwell, or that his behavior is aberrant or antisocial; there is little evidence he considers his dual identity to be a burden or a turn-on or anything else. Indeed, there is little Bruce Wayne of any kind. The movie is almost aggressively uninterested in who he is. He is simply Batman. Who would ever bother asking what that means? Batman is Batman is Batman. You know what his deal is. It’s being Batman. Batman is nothing so vulgar as a character. Batman is an icon.

Of course, narrative film tends to be about characters, not icons, and the result of Burton’s obvious disinterest in the former is something rather weird: a movie called BATMAN which is only intermittently and reluctantly about Batman, and then only to the extent it functionally has to be. Burton loves the image of Batman; loves to see him in contour, to have him drop down from above with his wings cutting a gorgeous geometric silhouette against the backlit street, loves to watch his eyes gleam out of the darkness of his exaggerated tombstone profile. But beyond that he has manifestly little interest in the macho, repressed power fantasy which is arguably at the heart of what Batman is. In his own words: “I was never a giant comic book fan, but I've always loved the image of Batman and the Joker. The reason I've never been a comic book fan … is because I could never tell which box I was supposed to read. I don't know if it was dyslexia or whatever, but that's why I loved The Killing Joke, because for the first time I could tell which one to read” (Tim Burton, Burton on Burton: Revised Edition (London: Faber and Faber, 2006) 71.) In other words, the first Batman comic Burton ever loved came out literally one month before he was greenlit to start shooting this movie… and the thing he liked about it was the intuitive layout. Not a word about the content, even with that books’ shocking, provocative storyline. He loved the “image of Batman and the Joker,” but their story is clearly not something that resonated with him. Burton was never a kid who fantasized about punching gangsters or driving fast cars; if he had any connection to the characters at all, it’s in their shared love of an eccentric black aesthetic and swishing around dramatically in capes. But that leaves the inevitability of Batman being an action hero something which openly bores the director, and something he engages with only when he’s given absolutely no choice (and even when he’s forced to, he does a pretty middling job of it… the big climax is mainly defined by Batman furtively running up a seemingly endless flight of stairs. Probably didn’t even need a stuntman).

Instead, he refocuses the movie by skirting around Batman, centering the narrative on two other characters. One is The Joker (Jack Nicholson, THE TERROR) whose theatrical style and delight in anarchic rule-breaking is clearly more fun and appealing to Burton, and who dominates the movie to a far greater extent than Batman. The other is Vicky Vale (--you know, from the Prince song!—Kim Basinger, COOL WORLD) a plucky photographer whose determination to photograph Batman allows Burton to frame the movie in a way that bests suits his interests: with its ostensible central character as a figure of mystery, compelling and unknowable. It puts us outside Batman, looking in, all the better to perceive him as a larger-than-life figure. An image, not a character.

Putting it in black and white like that, it sounds like an insane approach to a movie like this. A comic book movie with almost no action, that tries as hard as it can to keep its title character removed from the audience? Lunacy! And yet, watching it all those years ago as a little kid with his cool new uncle, that never occurred to me. Maybe it’s because, like Burton, I wasn’t a fan of the comics, didn’t have any attachment to the formula. Maybe it’s because unlike many comics fans, the basic premise of Batman as a fascist power fantasy doesn’t have a tremendous amount of appeal to me, and I don’t miss it when it’s shifted to the deep background. But I’m most inclined to think that Burton is just essentially correct: none of that stuff is really important. Comic books are only superficially an action genre, and their staying power and broad appeal suggest there’s something more powerful here than just macho wish-fulfillment. The content itself is barely even important; it’s the aesthetic that matters. The medium is the message. Batman is bigger than content. It’s about a vibe. As my reviewing hero Vern put it, “Tim Burton’s BATMAN is a movie about a feeling – a feeling called Batman.” Not about acting like Batman, not about being Batman, or watching him, or learning about him. About feeling Batman.

That feeling isn’t about a person, it’s not about a specific goal, it’s not about politics or even spirit-crushing, overcompensating male insecurity. It’s about the towering, tombstone art deco skyscrapers with their severe, unearthly statuary. It’s about the lurking, low rumble of the score, which feels like it scrambles up from some unfathomable depth and claws its way to the sky with just enough strength left to resolve into that lonesome, mournful theme. Like Burton’s evocation of Gotham city itself –with its ragged modernity squatting atop the sepulchral ruins of an alien vision of savagely inhuman modernist majesty—it feels not just ancient, but out of time, a half-remembered vision from a dream of the elder gods. That is the Batman feeling, that is the elusive core that has allowed a very stupid concept for children to somehow twist and evolve itself over the course of what is now 82 years. That is what could make someone’s cool uncle confidently assert that BATMAN is really cool, an appraisement that to this day I certainly couldn’t dispute. And it’s the thing that stuck with me all these years. It is not, truth be told, a movie with a tremendous amount of incident, especially by modern comic book standards. But that cool sticks with you.

Batman has stuck around too, of course; Burton would push even further into aestheticized dreamland with BATMAN RETURNS, and Joel Schumacher would exaggerate it into feverish camp with a soft underbelly of crass corporate commercialism with his two sequels, finally crushing the series under its own weight and allowing Christopher Nolan to start fresh with his gritty, self-serious trilogy in the ‘aughts. And then of course there was the steroid-sweaty, abortive Synderverse run, with Affleck playing the character, and now there’s a new reboot on the horizon as well. But while all of those have their merits, there’s something to be said for Burton’s ability to –or maybe just inability to do anything else but—strip the character down to the pure mythical core and let that Batman Feeling speak for itself. Other directors have had varying success doing other things with him, but in some ways, there’s a pureness of vision right here, at the very beginning of things, which has somehow been lost along the way. The Nolan films, for instance, are fun, but almost in spite of starring Batman; you get the sense that the director might have been just as happy making films about a rich playboy detective who didn’t have the embarrassingly pulpy habit of dressing like a bat. BATMAN (1989) could never be about anything but a caped crusader – it wouldn’t be anything, would have no reason to exist at all without that distinct silhouette with the bat ears, without the sleek lines of the rocket car, the grotesque Conrad-Veidt-inspired Joker’s visage. It’s not always a real exciting watch, but there’s always something magnetically compelling about it. I felt it back then as a kid, full of wonder and amazement at this strange thing unlike anything else I’d ever seen before. And I feel it even now, all these years later, though maybe with an adult’s sense of amused distance from it.

That’s no small feat, because those two viewings are separated by a lot of years. I’m an adult now – not even a young adult, but sinking ever closer to middle age. Uncle Richard is gone, died a year ago of complications from a stroke. When I was briefly in his house after the funeral, I made a point to look for a BATMAN Blu-Ray by the TV, but I didn’t see one. I never got to watch another Batman movie with him, never even got to ask him what he thought of RETURNS, or the Schumacher movies, or anything that came after. I wondered what he would have thought if I had told him what an impression that night made on me. Would he even remember? I wish I had asked, but it never came up, and now it’s too late. Here’s some advice, kid: when people mean something to you, tell them so. Don’t wait. If you miss your chance, you’ll never get another one.

Sometimes people are gone before you’re ready. Life can seem so static sometimes, as one day drifts into another and everything seems the same. But nothing is permanent, and suddenly your youth is gone, your loved ones are gone, and you find yourself grasping to try to hold onto something. Even memories fade, quietly rearrange themselves. I ask myself – wait, did Richard show us the juggling tricks the same night that we watched BATMAN? Or am I confusing two different visits? I can’t be sure. The past recedes like a heavy fog, shaping the world we imagine but retreating as we try to approach it. But life moves on. There’s always a new Batman on the horizon. Maybe that’s why we can’t bring ourselves to let him go – maybe by holding onto Batman, we’re trying to hold onto our cool uncle, or our older brother, or long-gone childhood friend, or just our childhood selves, back when we were earnest enough to simply bask in that Batman Feeling without all the emotional clutter of complicated adulthood dulling its potency. As always, we take the wrong message from things, end up thinking it’s Batman himself that we care about, let some goofball like Christopher Nolan try and tell us it’s a psychologically rich concept, let some stunted fascist like Frank Miller tell us it’s gritty and dangerous. But Burton knows –or at least, knew then—that’s it’s both simpler and deeper than that. Batman is about being a kid, swooshing around in a cape and feeling mysterious and elemental, about allowing yourself to be swept up in that feeling, and maybe even sharing it with someone else who really needs it. In that sense, although Burton would best capture the Batman Feeling on the screen, it would be Schumacher who had the final word: Batman is, indeed, forever.

For Uncle Richard and Uncle David, my cool uncles.

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)

Batman Returns

Batman Returns (1992)
Dir. Tim Burton
Written by Sam Hamm, Daniel Waters, Wesley Stick
Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough

 

Originally published on Letterboxd, where the majority of my reviews now go. Included here for posterity.

 

In a way, it's kind of comforting to see that the Achilles’ heel of modern huge-budget franchise IP movies --too many overbearing egos pulling them in too many directions and winding up with scripts rewritten into chaotic incoherence-- was vividly present even here, at the very inception of the concept of a big-budget comic book movie franchise.* BATMAN RETURNS (to cinemas, presumably, since there's no suggestion the character has been anything but a continuous presence in Gotham City) isn't just haphazardly plotted, it barely has anything which could even be called a plot, and its few absent-minded gestures in that direction (most of which materialize only well past the halfway point, and still peter out before the arbitrary "climax") certainly have nothing whatsoever to with each other --or any character named "Batman," for that matter. This makes for a movie which is fundamentally and unavoidably broken, a movie which we can parse for any meaning only in the manner of archaeology, by interpreting and extrapolating from tantalizing artifacts which survived the presumed dozens of re-writes, and offer hints at what actual intent might have once flourished before being buried in a mountain of arbitrary wheel-spinning. And of course, because it's me, that's exactly what we're going to do. What, you have better ways to spend your time?

In this case, we don't have to dig very deep before we find that others have pondered the film before us, and come to a pretty consistent conclusion. The consensus as to what was being attempted here --which emerged concurrently with the movie and has only solidified since-- is that director Tim Burton believed himself to be making a movie about the experience of social misfits, or at least decided that whatever the suits eventually decided about the script, he would make a movie about freaks and misfits and just sort of ignore anything --plot, for example-- which might get in the way of that goal.

There's some evidence for this interpretation which survives even in the script; the famous exchange where Penguin contemptuously tells Batman ”You're just jealous because I'm a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask!” to which Batman sadly assents; Alfred pointedly asking Bruce "Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?”; Selina Kyle's lament that "It's the so-called 'normal' guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me. Least they're committed." But that's honestly about it for textual evidence; most of the rest of the dialogue is devoted to weirdly sexual quipping or "plot" mechanics. It’s weird, in a way, that a movie could get a point across so strongly despite the fact that it occurs almost nowhere in the script or story. But the sentiment comes through loud and clear in the direction, particularly its almost fetishis --did I say "almost"?-- its blatantly fetishistic interest in its deviant, not-all-there protagonists, namely Penguin and Catwoman. And lest you wonder if I mistakenly left somebody out, I want to point out that in the original Daniel Waters script, the word "Penguin" appears 465 times, as opposed to a mere 342 for "Batman," including the title.**

 

 

So it is our villains, then, who will be the focus of the movie, to the point that it's dubious to even call them villains at all. Despite how overwhelmingly repellent he is, the movie is weirdly sympathetic towards Penguin, an outcast from his very birth --where the movie begins, as perhaps the only film in history to begin with the birth of its apparent antagonist-- who longs, it seems, in equal measure, for both acceptance by a society which shunned him and for violent revenge against them. And it's even more sympathetic to Catwoman, a put-upon wallflower*** who finally just snaps and starts lashing out at the world, which the movie clearly posits as an empowerment fantasy. Whether or not the movie validates their behavior, it at least understands, and is much more interested in understanding than judging. Whatever the script may say about them (and it’s too all-over-the-place to really say anything specific), Burton as director hones in on their pain and their feelings of persecution and rejection in a way that feels deeply personal. The 90's was the decade for wallowing in self-pity and feeling like an unfairly ignored misfit, and certainly no director seems to have more fully embraced that zeitgeist than Burton, who was at the time--and it's hard to remember this now that he’s spent the better part of the last two decades becoming a garish parody of himself—considered a genuinely subversive and eccentric auteur, the cinematic patron saint of macabre weirdos. EDWARD SCISSOR-HANDS is more concentrated in its fixation on outsider-dom at the hands of suffocating bourgeois normalcy, and ED WOOD is a better parable of a misunderstood artist, but BATMAN RETURNS is, without question, the pinnacle of Burton's fixation on --and, of course, fetishization of-- social deviance as empowerment.

Burton is even less interested in punching than he is in Batman, so that empowerment is not manifested in grandiose action, but in sexual capital. The movie is overtly, startlingly sexual; not just surprising for a PG-13 movie about a comic book character, but for a Burton movie in general. Burton is almost categorically an unsexy director. I don’t think I can even name another director anywhere near his level of success and ubiquity who has left behind such a thoroughly sexless body of work; even the fetish-y Ed Wood or the heaving bosoms in SLEEPY HOLLOW or PLANET OF THE APES**** play out with an almost naïve, childlike lack of kink. But here, the movie's erotic fixation on Catwoman is almost uncomfortable in its intensity. I'm not sure Penguin says a single thing to her that isn't overtly sexual, and while Batman/Bruce Wayne's interest in her is (a little) more refined, the entirety of their relationship is about their desire for each other. Curiously, the costumed thing comes between them, rather than bringing them together, and I think I know why: Catwoman is, like Penguin, a "genuine freak" (she may, in fact, be some kind of zombie?), uninhibited both in and out of costume. But Batman is still in the closet; he's not ready to give up on being respectable, dorky Bruce Wayne and admit that he's a full-fledged freak. For all his money and cool cars and stuff, his hesitation to commit to either lifestyle is isolating him; his relationship with last movie’s love interest, we are told, couldn't survive his being Batman, and now his relationship with kooky dominatrix Catwoman can't survive his being tethered to Bruce Wayne. He's not a normie, but he's not quite a fully committed freak, either. He lacks the courage to embrace who he really is, and consequently is never 100% present in his own story. No wonder Burton so openly doesn't care about him. 

 

 

 

Of course, this sort of defeats the purpose of making a movie ostensibly about, you know, Batman. Batman is fundamentally a juvenile macho power fantasy –just look at the fevered testosterone-driven nightmare by Frank Miller from which BATMAN RETURNS almost certainly derives its name--, and if you don’t find Batman’s butch fascism appealing, or find Bruce Wayne very interesting, there’s simply just not much for the character to do. I hear this has more action than the 1989 BATMAN, which is frankly kind of mind-boggling; there are maybe a handful of halfhearted action beats in here, but Batman barely has anything to do because there isn’t really much to do. Penguin is sort of the villain, but his evil plan is barely hinted at until the last 20 minutes of the movie, and Batman foils it with some weird abstract anti-cinematic computer program that mostly happens off-screen. Catwoman doesn’t have any kind of arc at all, and in fact her storyline barely even involves Batman and gets resolved without even a glancing intervention on his part. There’s barely any conflict here, and most of the movie finds its characters idling around (in one case, literally; it’s pretty funny to see the Batmobile just cruising around the city under the speed limit) without any clear long-term objective or any reason to get involved in each others’ lives. In fact, a huge chunk of the movie, probably pound for pound the most screentime of any of its six or seven plots, is spent on the political machinations of Penguin and greedy capitalist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), a very, very weird and self-defeating decision for a movie which claims to be about an action hero, but an equally self-defeating one for a movie which stubbornly insists on itself as a fairy tale (more on that later). 

This weird diversion into politics, and really the character of Shreck himself, is the apotheosis of the film’s wildly divergent, contradictory impulses. Shreck’s role here is obvious; he’s the one character who’s not a freak, and consequently the one Burton feels most comfortable identifying as a clear villain. He is venal and debased in strictly normal, aggressively mundane ways (his evil plan, barely even mentioned, is, I guess, to secure city permission to build some kind of energy-stealing power plant?). He represents the oppressive, stagnant forces of straight society, comfortably asserting himself around mayors and rich, well-connected socialites in a way that Penguin and Catwoman could never dream of, and Bruce Wayne has little interest in. Unfortunately, this means that he must serve as antagonist for all three of our freaks, making him the only person in the movie who seems in any way active or meaningfully consequential to conflict of any kind. He’s the character who’s designed to be a dull foil for our colorful heroes, and yet he’s the one who motivates virtually every single bit of action. 

 And this is made even worse because he’s played by Christopher Walken, by far the most “genuine freak” anywhere around, who undermines the character’s bourgeois venality by playing him as a total fucking weirdo (kudos to Andrew Bryniarski, who plays his son Chip with a committed and pretty hilarious Walken impersonation). As with most of the movie, including its inexplicable political interlude, there are good ideas here; framing the movie as outcasts vs establishment is a solid idea, and putting Christopher Walken in there is always a good bet to make things more entertaining. Unfortunately, these are two ideas which not only don’t work together, they actively cancel each other out. Either Shreck is a despicable stuffed shirt or an entertaining weirdo; he cannot be both, and the movie posits that he must be for it to work. It does not work.

 

 

 

Much of the movie, then, cancels itself out; it's an action premise without almost any significant action, it’s a movie about fetishy outcasts which never actually gets around to examining what that might mean, it’s a Batman movie which is mostly uninterested in Batman, it’s unbearably plotty without ever actually establishing a plot. That leaves the content almost a complete wash.

Fortunately, in swoops the style to save the day! While Burton was neglecting the plot, it seems, he was not idle; instead, he was constructing gigantic art deco dreamscapes full of towering statuary, neon kitsch, and gothic menace, a world so potently evocative that, especially when draped in Danny Elfman’s iconic, career-defining score, it actually manages to conjure meaning and purpose to a movie which otherwise has none. It’s pure alchemy, but it’s there. The script may disagree, the title might disagree, but the style informs us decisively and with a focused confidence otherwise completely absent from the movie: this is a macabre fairy tale, a tragedy in the original sense of the word, about people The Fates have plucked from obscurity for an arbitrary, cruel odyssey through life. From the film’s mythic opening to its melancholy final shot, Burton tells us through pure cinema what he cannot through narrative cinema: it’s lonely out there for a freak. That is the pervading sense one gets from BATMAN RETURNS; one of timeless, lugubrious hopelessness, of disconnection and desperation and frustration, about sad people groping out –or lashing out—to find each other, and failing. Even if Batman foils the Penguin’s evil plot, this is a movie about failure, about not getting the girl, about not getting the job, about being too broken to transcend your pain, about searching for a place that doesn’t exist in a society that doesn’t want you, only to find yourself right back where you started after the dust settles.

It is a strange thing to find at the heart of a movie with BATMAN in its title, but it’s equally indisputable and unmissable; it is the movie; everything else is just window dressing. I cannot in good conscience call BATMAN RETURNS a good movie, but I also can’t deny that if all that window dressing is messy and incoherent, the movie’s heart and soul are as vivid and affecting as any movie ever made. It’s a masterpiece hidden inside a corporate junkheap, its greatness nearly always obscured, but always palpably near, a diffuse warm glow behind a frost-covered window pane. I’ve never been sure how much of a “genuine freak” Burton actually is, but there’s a howl of lonesome despair in BATMAN RETURNS which is as genuine as anything as you’ll find in mainstream cinema. It’s an inarticulate howl, but it echos back to us throughout the entire film, giving definition to the dark spaces in-between the silly plot where our eyes can’t quite reach. It allows us to plunge on into that darkness with this reverberating echo as a guide.

Like a bat.

Speaking of which, what’s up with casting Michael Keaton as Batman, it really doesn’t make any you know what, this review is running kinda long actually let’s just end it there.

*Strictly speaking, The 1978 SUPERMAN and its three sequels and one spinoff probably ought to be considered the genesis of the modern comic book franchise, but for reasons we could reasonably debate, the consensus seems to be against that reading.

** Including "Bruce Wayne" pushes the character to a narrow lead, but still.

*** Read: "That unbelievably gorgeous supermodel has glasses"

**** Estella Warren, not the Apes.

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)

Dumbo (2019)

Dumbo (2019)

Dir. Tim Burton

Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Based on Disney's DUMBO by Otto Englander, Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, which in itself was based on Dumbo, the Flying Elephant by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl

Starring Colin Farrell, Nico Parker, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Alan Arkin

I was going to begin by saying that 2019’s DUMBO takes Disney's recent "why does this exist?" energy to bold new heights, but I guess that's not really true; nothing could have less reason to exist than a scene-by-scene photorealistic LION KING remake, and that’s still too traumatically fresh a memory to ignore. We’ve already reached rock bottom, no need to indulge in any more hyperbole than necessary. But just because kicking you in the balls is clearly preferable to shooting you in the face, that doesn’t make the former commendable behavior. DUMBO may not be a harrowing, soul-churning pinnacle of anti-art the way LION KING 2019 –good God, they came out the same year—was, but it has a different kind of "why does this exist" cloud hanging over it, avoiding Disney's recent fetish for grotesquely tarted-up slavish recreations of their beloved animated classics… by instead throwing out virtually every single part of the original movie which bears the same name and replacing it with --well, not quite a new movie, exactly, because despite adding a second, comfortably feature-length scenario to the runtime, the new material isn't anywhere near cohesive enough to call a "movie" in its own right-- but certainly a whole lot of new stuff.

The "new stuff" consists of basically everything apart from the concept of a flying baby elephant named Dumbo who resides in a circus and is separated from his mother. Anything else from the original DUMBO –for example, original surrogate protagonist Timothy the mouse-- is included here only in the form of stultifying throwaway references, often hitting exactly that sweet spot of being far too emphasized to ignore, but having no meaning whatsoever outside their reference to the original film. Which mean that if you haven't seen 1941's DUMBO, this movie will be a baffling puzzle of inexplicable and meaningless visual cues.* But if you did see 1941's DUMBO and enjoyed it, you are now stuck with a movie that has functionally almost nothing in common with it, but insists on constantly reminding you of it. Cool.

The setting for the 2019 version remains the same as its predecessor, albeit with some odd added specificity. As before, we are introduced first to a rag-tag circus embarking on a tour of the American South at the end of World War I. This particular interwar American South, you will quickly notice, is very pointedly a land of harmonious integration and racial diversity, where an interracial family traveling by rails might receive a hearty handwave from the simple white farmers working the fields they’re passing by on their way to perform in front of a merrily heterogeneous audience which has apparently never known division along lines of gender, race, nationality, religion, or economic status. This is a little jarring, needless to say, but after some reflection, I’ve decided that it was ultimately the right approach, at least if we assume that this all absolutely had to be set in 1919 for some reason. You’d be entirely justified, were you so inclined, to slam it for whitewashing the brutality of segregation and Jim Crow, but hey, this was always fantasy – might as well be everyone’s fantasy. Once you’ve committed to “flying elephant” as a premise, I think it’s safe to say you’ve bought yourself sufficient distance from reality to be absolved of responsibility for hard-hitting journalistic accuracy, especially in service of broadened approachability. Or at least, I thought so until the movie arrived at its final act and decided it had some very serious thoughts on the morality of keeping animals in the circus. So, no problem brushing aside a century of brutal racial oppression in the name of fantasy, but cruelty to performing animals is just too pressing an issue to stay silent about. Got it.

At any rate, after a very leisurely scene-setting, our story starts to get going with the birth of the title character, a little elephant with gigantic ears which for some reason everyone considers a hideous, unspeakable deformity which brands him forever a freak and an outcast. Maybe because they never invented racism in this alternate reality, people are just real assholes about ears instead, I dunno.

Of course, he is a freak and should be cast out, but not for his ears. I mean, look at this fucking abomination:

This goddam thing looks like a baby C’Thulu cosplaying as Robert Blake’s character from LOST HIGHWAY. It reminds me of those grotesque “realistic” renderings of The Simpsons or Spongebob or what have you. This character design was all well and good in the squishy abstraction of cartooning, but you rip it, against God’s will, off the page and into the photorealistic real world, and you’ve got an unholy nightmare on your hands. Maybe COOL WORLD had a good point about keeping the ‘doodles where they belong.

Fortunately for the little freak, children can’t recognize the face of a Lovecraftian blasphemy when it’s staring right at them with its hateful squid eyes, and “Dumbo” finds allies in two hardscrabble circus urchins, siblings Milly (Nico Parker, giving a performance which cannot be described without the words “affectless automaton”) and Joe (Finley Hobbins, who the movie is so actively disinterested in that I frequently forgot this character existed while he was on-screen). The children discover Dumbo’s amazing power of flight (a feat of fanciful delight in the original cartoon, and a source of profoundly disturbing wrongness when translated to weighty, high-definition photorealism) which drags the young pachyderm from despised outcast to celebrated circus star.

So far, so good; sounds basically like the story of the original DUMBO with kids subbed for mice, right? And yet, while all of that happens on-screen, the above description doesn’t really accurately describe the movie, because it makes it sound as though this is Dumbo’s story. That would be a perfectly reasonable assumption to make, considering the title and the source material, but that is not the movie we have as a subject here today. You see, in a baffling feint towards gritty realism for a movie which --I feel I must stress this point-- features a flying elephant, Dumbo and his fellow circus animals do not talk or appear to experience any emotional state beyond what would be expected for an average trained circus animal.** Despite the disturbingly expressive face, Dumbo’s enormous, unnatural eyes stare impassively out from an empty, soulless void utterly alien to any human sensibility, and hence, despite various human characters frequently announcing aloud what his desires and wishes may be, he is really more of a MacGuffin than a character. He’s central to the plot, but more of an object to be acted upon by his human co-stars than a protagonist in any proper sense.

Horrible. Just horrible.

What we need, then, are human characters, and obviously the more the better. What’s that you say, we already have two human children to act as surrogate protagonists, and even one of those two is flagrantly unnecessary? No no, I mean celebrity human characters. We’re trying to spend 170 million bucks here. What’s that you say, there’s no possible artistic purpose in adding extraneous adults to this already entirely self-contained little fairy tale? What is this “artistic purpose” you speak of?

Therefore to fill the absolutely unavoidable storytelling necessity of having at least three A-list names printed on the movie poster, the simple story of talking circus animals trying to reunite an outcast baby elephant with its mother has been larded up with about 90 new humans (we do not, if I recall, see a single human face in the original DUMBO), all of whom must be given something to do (because they have no obvious purpose in the story as originally conceived) and yet not quite enough to do to  constitute an "arc" for any of them. Therefore recoil in horror as Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, and Michael Keaton are dutifully trotted out for no clear reason, all giving career-worst performances while at the same time giving the distinct and worrying impression that they're trying very hard.*** They’re eventually joined by Eva Green, who manages to maintain her dignity rather better, and considering she must endure the mortifying indignity of being CGI'd onto the back of a flying baby elephant, this may be evidence that she is the greatest thespian who ever lived. Alan Arkin also appears in three scenes and so openly doesn't give a shit that you've kind of got to respect him for it. Sometimes being a pro means making a sincere effort regardless of the circumstances… but sometimes it just means recognizing a hopeless cause and giving up gracefully. Look, he set his margarita down for the take, what more do you want?   

The movie, alas, is too brain-dead to be able to follow Arkin’s example. Consequently, an absolutely exhausting amount of time is taken to establish each of these characters, even though only one has any narrative purpose whatsoever. Or, rather, only one is so completely extraneous to the original plot that establishing him essentially drags the movie in entirely new direction, thus creating a new narrative purpose for the character to fulfill. You see, once the movie has dutifully plodded through every single plot point from the original DUMBO, minus any part where animals talk or racism is happening, we’re still barely even sitting at the 40-minute mark. Now, the original DUMBO is only 62 minutes, but remember, we’re trying to spend $170 million here, and are therefore contractually obliged to pile as many convoluted plot points as money will allow into an appalling snake’s nest of wriggling chaos. That’s the law. And so, out of the blue appears Keaton, as a flamboyant, rapacious capitalist who buys the circus and immediately sets to work exploiting his star attraction, sadistically endangering his human employees, and eventually just straight up announcing that he’s going to murder Dumbo’s mom for absolutely no reason whatsoever. To accomplish these goals, he essentially kidnaps the entire cast and forces them into servitude in his garish, art-deco dystopian theme park known as “Dreamland.”

Savvy viewers will quickly notice that not a single detail of this has any relationship whatsoever to the 1941 movie DUMBO, which doesn’t even have a central villain character and is more about the generalized cruelty and randomness of the world. This is, then, basically a movie and its demented sequel uncomfortably shackled together roughly halfway though, as if somebody had edited BABE and PIG IN THE CITY to bare-bones shells, chopped the credits off the former, and then run them back to back as one movie. It’s deeply weird storytelling, but at least once Keaton appears the movie finds some focus; absent any kind of identifiable protagonist, it locates in its antagonist at least some measure of organization which utterly eludes it during the opening 45 minutes of wheezily recycled non-story. That doesn’t make it good, because it’s nothing of the sort, but at least it’s not quite so shapeless and inexplicable.

Speaking of the villain, what are we to make of the fact that, with his flashy showmanship, single-minded reckless ambition, and ostentatious theme park (complete with Epcot-center-esque “City of Tomorrow!”) this despicable sociopath is an unavoidable analog for Walt Disney himself? The comparisons are far too specific to even entertain the idea that this is not where the movie wants us to go, but why does it want us to go there? Is this some kind of sniveling JURASSIC WORLD-style apology for the tortured needlessness of the thing we’re watching, couched in ironic self-awareness? Is writer Ehren Kruger (damned forever for his part in writing three of five TRANSFORMERS films, and also producing the spectacularly moronic DREAM HOUSE, which is maybe even more embarrassing than having written it, though at least he can hold his head up with pride as the scribe of RENDEER GAMES) possibly deluded enough to believe this is somehow subversive? Or should we just consider this a tortured cry for help from the subconscious of Tim Burton, who Disney kidnapped and replaced with a TWIN PEAKS evil doppelgänger sometime in the mid-2000s? I’d dearly like to believe in the latter to be the case, but frankly by this point in his career Burton seems to have less in common with the misunderstood weirdos of the circus than he does with Keaton’s mercenary hired goons who happily trot off to murder Dumbo’s mom when their Disney-like boss tells them to, no questions asked.

Indeed, I’ve put off saying so as long as possible, but now there’s no escaping it, so let’s just face facts: Tim Burton is credited as the director here. He’s been in bored corporate lackey mode long enough now that I guess I can’t claim it’s a surprise, but even so, DUMBO 2019 conveys an alarming sense not just that the director’s a bored hack, but that there’s nobody at the wheel at all. Maybe twice in the movie he seems to perk up a little around some of the garish sets of “Dreamland,” but even the circus itself, which seems like the kind of thing Burton should have been able to work magic with in his sleep, is a disappointing nothing, lacking even the flop-sweating overdesign of 2005’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and 2010’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It’s a dreary, lazily shot-on-soundstages huddle of low, perfunctory structures populated by limply defanged stereotypes whom the movie is far too fretfully woke to allow to lean into their inherent cartoonishness, but also dismissively disinterested in imbuing with any other traits (at least DeObia Oparei, as the circus’ strongman/bookkeeper, gets to make some archly funny faces). The whole thing is then color-corrected into an unsettling alien landscape of not-quite-right chromatic mismatches, where the grass is an odd pine green verging on blue, and the sky is perpetually tinged with an anxiety-inducing orange-red, as if the sun was always right about to set, even when that’s manifestly not the case.

According to the film’s press kit, the production design drew inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper, an odd choice any way you want to look at it -- Hopper’s best known work came from decades after the movie’s 1919 setting, and is marked by a spare, quiet sense of modern alienation, making it a baffling aesthetic touchstone for a childrens' fantasy—but made even weirder by the fact that the movie’s nettled plottiness and overabundance of unnecessary characters all but ensures that Hopper’s serene minimalism is entirely out of the question.**** The only way this makes any sense is as an explanation for why Burton’s recent penchant for seizure-inducing overproduction is ratcheted down to simply garish overproduction. It’s depressing possible that this is what Burton believes qualifies as “minimalism” by this point in his career -- although it’s probably a lot more likely that this is just a simple case of barely giving a shit at all, and having his production crew try to run cover by throwing out an aesthetic which wouldn’t be immediately familiar enough for most people to call their bluff.

Let's compare this 1957 Hopper painting entitled Western Hotel...

...to this frame, from 2019's DUMBO. Anybody else not seeing much similarity? 

Which is, ultimately, the real problem here: despite the effortful ponderousness inherent in any movie pushing a 200 million dollar budget, there’s not a single aspect of this that doesn’t seem to be operating on autopilot. At no point throughout the momentum-free 112 minutes***** does the movie ever make even the flimsiest argument as to why anyone thought it would be worth making; there’s nary a character, setpiece, storyline, or sequence that feel inspired by recognizable human interest. The sole artistic inspiration in this entire sorry affair was the marketing departments’ dead-eyed certainty that people will pay to see an insanely expensive iteration of a recognizable brand name. That’s the movie they tasked Burton and co with making, and that’s what they got: a huge pile of busy but meaningless narrative clutter indifferently trying to obscure the fact that this exists exclusively to remind you of that famous thing you’ve already seen. Despite all the added narrative detritus, there is literally no other purpose here, and the movie never even pretends to aspire to any. It is more reference than film.

This tendency reaches its zenith during a little vignette –too insubstantial to call a “scene”—where Dumbo sits in a tent while some clowns blow large, elaborate bubbles in the air while a wordless snippet of the tune “Pink Elephants On Parade” --the big showpiece hallucinatory number from the original (brought to the pinnacle of its form by Sun-Ra and the Solar Arkestra in 1988)-- wheezes over the soundtrack. This all plays out in an entirely literal, straightforward way; there’s nothing subjective of surreal about it, we’re just watching a CG elephant baby watch a mildly impressive circus act set to inexplicably ominous orchestration for a minute or two, while he kills some time. There’s no reason for this to happen; Disney in 2020 isn’t going anywhere near “drunk baby elephant” territory, and it has no baring whatsoever on the plot and is never referenced again.

Now, there isn’t exactly an overwhelming narrative necessity for this sequence in the original film, either, but the reason for including it is immediately obvious: just in the fun of it. It exists entirely for a bunch of hungry, energized artists to indulge in the sheer joy of going hogwild animating a bunch of surreal nonsense. Their delight in it is palpable, and its ability to inspire similar delight has not diminished in 80 years, not due to any quantifiable utility, but entirely because it is a curious bauble, a creation entirely of whimsy.

Again, let's compare.... this still from the original sequence...

... to this one from 2019. Which one of these looks like a human being actually cared about it? 

That is categorically not so in 2020; here, the same basic elements exist entirely to fulfill a rote function… and that function is simply to mirror something else that already exists. There is no whimsy here, no sense of artistic exhilaration; hell, there’s barely even any cynical, pandering calculation. Nobody ever even bothered to ask why. The sequence, like the movie itself, takes for granted the idea that creation and simulacrum are indistinguishable, that the act of evoking is functionally identical to the act of creating. It is, in that sense, very nearly some kind of experimental postmodern gamble that content is completely meaningless in the face of context, challenging us to ask if meaning itself is purely a construct, a function of the viewer’s applied cultural baggage projected not onto the screen, but into our own internal landscape, where it can be given whatever meaning we find useful.

But I cannot concur. A pipe is an exceedingly useful tool, should I fancy a smoke. A painting of a pipe merely reminds me that I want to smoke. One is the inevitable outcome of human ingenuity and desire; the other is an advertisement. It’s why Magritte titled his famous painting The Treachery of Images. The evocation of “Pink Elephants,” and of 1941’s DUMBO more broadly, is equally treacherous here. The images of 2020’s DUMBO might conjure some vague nostalgia for the real thing, but they have no meaning of their own, and they were never meant to. Ceci n'est pas une DUMBO. Ceci n'est pas une film, even. It’s just a very long, very expensive callback. And not even a very entertaining one, at that.

That said, just looking at Dumbo’s awful CGI face for two hours conjured the most raw, primal horror I’ve felt for a movie in quite some time. This isn’t an uncanny valley, it’s the fucking uncanny Mariana Trench. DUMBO 2019 inspires very few emotions other than despairing tedium, but profound spiritual disquiet is a feeling, and if, as is sometimes postulated, the purpose of art is to draw a reaction from the viewer, I guess you could still say that ol’ Tim Burton managed to make some extremely potent art afterall, despite himself. Recommended for fans of ANGST and A SERBIAN FILM and anyone who wants to see just how much implacable, disturbing wrongness they can withstand. Otherwise, you’re better off forgetting this ever existed as quickly as possible. And fortunately, other than some lingering elephant-related nightmares, that shouldn’t be too hard at all.

* Good luck to the new-to-DUMBO kiddies trying to figure out why the plot stops dead for a few minutes to watch an elaborate bit of bubble-art while a snatch of unaccountably creepy music plays in the background. Viewers of the 1941 version will recognize this as a dismal, watered-down tribute to the "Pink Elephants" showstopper in the original, but without that bit of knowledge it must surely seem utterly inexplicable. In fact, it bears such an uncanny visual resemblance to the "Opera scene" in STAR WARS III: REVENGE OF THE SITH (elaborately dressed dignitaries in box seats having a fraught conversation while they half-watch an elaborate 3D bubble show in a darkened, circular amphitheater, with a similar color scheme) that I would not be surprised to learn that this is the more common interpretation of the scene being referenced (there is no way to interpret it as anything but a reference to something, because the movie focuses on it so insistently and yet it has no bearing on the plot or any other context of any kind) so it's simply a matter of whether most audiences will have any reference for it at all.

** I’m aware that Dumbo doesn’t speak in the original either, but having all the other animals speak gives us a clearer sense that these are, to some degree, anthropomorphized surrogates for humans with the kind of fully articulated, complex emotional lives you’d need in order to be, you know, the protagonist of a movie. Here, no such luck; sometimes the humans speculate on what Dumbo must want, but it’s genuinely up for debate if he has any fucking clue what’s happening to him, or any clear opinion about it. This is basically a slightly less sexy THE SHAPE OF WATER.

*** This is a particular shame on the part of Farrell, who actually has a shockingly passable track record of appearing in pointless remakes and giving excellent performances (see FRIGHT NIGHT, TOTAL RECALL, THE BEGUILED). Alas, his morose one-note (or less) blob of a character, combined with a somewhat labored Southern accent, defeats any effort he might be making .

**** It goes without saying that Hopper never painted anything remotely like the art deco futurism which comprises the latter half of the movie, but even the warmer earlier scenes don’t seem to fit at all with his style, except maybe in the sense of the movie’s unusual palette.

***** Psychotically long for an adaptation of DUMBO, but at least it manages to come in under two hours, which was not at all a sure thing given that some of these live-action remakes’ aggressive runtimes are now edging dangerous close to the 130 minute mark

ALSO, WHY NOT FOLLOW ME ON LETTERBOXD FOR EVEN MORE OPINIONS ON THINGS?

Spotlight

Spotlight (2015)

Dir. Tom McCarthy

Written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer

Starring, woah, all the peoples. Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Brian d’Arcy James, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, James Sheridan, Billy Crudup

Ah, the curse of success.

Now that this won Best Picture (beating out some very, very deserving competition) I suspect people will quickly start to turn against it as unambitious, as pedestrian, or, worse, as Oscar-baity “issue-of-the-week” pandering. It’s just the way of things, and the Oscars have not exactly helped themselves by cultivating such a rich history of boring, unimaginative monuments to predictable mediocrity slinking by under the guise of being “about” something. They chose DANCES WITH WOLVES over GOODFELLAS, you know. They gave best picture to A BEAUTIFUL MIND*, marking the exact last moment in history any human remembered A BEAUTIFUL MIND existed, outside the context of mentioning how lame the Oscars are. So it’s not surprising that people look at this --a simple, straightforward drama about a real-life tragedy and the heroic journalists that uncovered it-- and smelled a rat.

I guess that’s their prerogative, but they’re wrong. I actually really dug the hell out of this one. It’s just such a solid, fundamentally well-constructed movie that a lot of its strengths sneak by. It’s not showy. There aren’t really any big showstoppers or set pieces. Only one big yelling scene, and it’s a short one. Instead, it’s a classic example of a kind of film we mostly don’t get very much any more: a straightforward drama, well-written and well-assembled with a bunch of excellent actors, which is 100% confident that the story itself will be interesting enough to keep us engrossed without any kind of hook or postmodern trickery or stylistic gimmicks.

For me, anyway, it worked. I was absolutely absorbed for every single second of runtime. But the superficial simplicity makes it look so easy that I think a lot of folks underestimate the immense challenge the film sets for itself. Somehow it effectively articulates a huge structural problem (systemic abuse of children in the Boston Catholic church), the equally complex inner structure of the newspaper staff trying to expose the problem (the Boston Globe, whose “Spotlight” investigative team lends the film its name), a sprawling cast of Bostonians from every walk of city life (from victims to lawyers to power brokers), and an equally sprawling twisty-turny years-long investigation, and synthesizes all those disparate threads into a completely streamlined, digestible, and totally engrossing format, all without any obvious shortcuts or tepid exposition or reductive shorthand. By God, that’s something to admire.

It is about an “issue,” of course, and it certainly gives its central issue a worthy exploration. But that’s not all it is; in fact, I think it’s much more interesting as a drama-thriller-news-procedural full of interesting twists and turns which gradually lay bare not just the details of a tragedy, but how a whole system at every level conspired –mostly without actual malice– to facilitate and perpetuate that tragedy (including, unwittingly, the very people who eventually take the time to uncover it.) It’s the storytelling and the razor-sharp eye for detail which makes this an experience worth undertaking, not its function as journalism or muckraking. I take umbrage, then, at the implication that SPOTLIGHT is selling itself as an “issues movie,” which is to say it’s a work which exists to draw our attention and concern to a particular tragic issue and raise “awareness.” Because if that’s all it is, it’s pretty needless. This was one of the biggest news stories of this Millennium. I think it’s not much hyperbole to say that nearly everyone on Earth heard about this this particular story. I suspect you could go to rural villages in China, and if you asked them about Catholicism they’d bring it up. And it hasn’t faded with time; despite the events of this movie being over a decade old (and a lot of the events exposed being decades older than that) it’s still very much a part of our current discourse; hell, jokes about priest molestation have become so ubiquitous they’ve lost all meaning. There’s not a lot more “awareness” to raise, even about the particulars of the case.

So while the movie does concern itself with a true story, frankly, I think the movie would be just as strong –and hell, maybe even stronger, because it wouldn’t have the same baggage– if it was about a fictional event instead of a real one. Like The Wire --a comparison I do not make lightly--, the strength here is in the startlingly clarity with which it allows us to see both the large scale and the intimate scale, and how they’re connected. It’s so efficient at making these connections that you hardly even notice how much complicated information is crammed in there — but compare it to something like THE BIG SHORT (which spends most of its time having celebrities directly describe to the camera what we’re supposed to learn) and it should be immediately clear how remarkably strong director Tom  McCarthy’s (THE STATION AGENT) command of screenwriting, editing, and directing is. That takes real mastery to do, and appropriately there’s a strong nuts-and-bolts focus on fine-tuning the details here until they’re just right, ‘til the whole thing just sings, even when it has to do near-suicidal things like stop cold to acknowledge that 9/11 happened right in the middle of everything.

Aiding McCarthy, of course, is a ridiculous dream cast of pretty much every distinguished actor working right now (they even have an uncredited Richard Jenkins cameo, that’s how committed they were to getting everyone) led by a rock-solid Michael Keaton, but with plenty of room for everyone to shine. Mark Ruffalo gets probably the showiest role as something of a twitchy oddball, but I could spend all day rattling off terrific little details about everyone here. I love the way Rachel McAdams somehow conveys her complete spiritual exhaustion entirely through her eyes. Her character is a total pro, a cool cat, someone who is not going to get rattled or let you see how deeply this is getting to her, even in the scene where she admits it aloud. But you already know, because you can see it in those deep, haunted eyes. And then there’s Stanley Tucci’s pugnacious, cynical idealist lawyer who can’t stop fighting even though he’s long ago given up any hope of actual justice. And John Slattery's curiously petulant editor, who maybe would prefer not to know, despite his professional cooperation. And Billy Crudup and James Sheridan as complicated assholes who are definitely part of the problem but probably don’t see themselves that way. And maybe most of all, an effortlessly spellbinding Liev Schreiber as the quiet, seemingly nonchalant new editor who calmly decides his paper is going to tear down one of the most powerful institutions in the world. They all communicate so much subtle detail about their characters, mostly without ever saying a word out loud. In a movie this loaded with plot, there is not a lot of time for languid emotion, but there’s so much texture in each of these roles that there’s no need to pause for it, it’s both obvious and unobtrusive in every single scene who these people are and how they deal with the horror show they’re unmasking.

It’s this sort of rigorous, unflashy attention to detail which makes a film inherently cinematic. I’ve read reviews that criticize the film as “bland.” To me, that represents an almost insultingly narrow view of what film should be. I love highly stylized, visually expressive cinema, of course, but while film is primarily a visual medium, it’s also a terrific narrative medium –and that’s what the focus is here. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi shot THE GREY, he shot BLACK MASS. He knows his way around visual fireworks when he wants them. Here, McCarthy elects for a simple visual aesthetic, probably more than anything to avoid distracting from –or abstracting– the great complexity of plot. That’s an artistic choice, not a flaw. This is unapologetically set in the real world, the mundane one which we all inhabit. Is it really not enough just to have an interesting story, well told? Is it less ambitious a work of art for its focus on acting and storytelling rather than cinematic razzmatazz? Is it less interesting because it’s depicting a real event? I don’t think so. I simply refuse to believe we’re incapable of finding a story fundamentally gripping without a flashy enough package. Honestly I walked out of this one positively aglow with the magic of cinema. It really bums me out to hear people dismiss it under the assumption that it’s one of those cynical big-screen Lifetime Movies that wants to grab unearned Serious Artist cred just by recycling a real-life tragedy. I mean, I hate those too. But I don’t think this is one. I think this is closer to the movie it understandably get compared to a lot: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN. Yes, it happens to tell a true story which is still very much a part of the zeitgeist, but more than that it’s also a great, timeless example of top-notch writing, acting, and directing.

There’s no overstating this: It takes an enormous amount of discipline to make a film like this work so well, and yet it’s so unflashy that I actually think, regardless of the awards it’s been winning, that McCarthy isn’t getting enough credit for his work here. There’s a presumption of maturity at the center of this film, a consistent refusal to hand-hold and spoon-feed the audience, and a quiet confidence in its staid, direct storytelling, which simply feels too rare these days to ignore. Is it better than FURY ROAD, or THE REVENANT?** Eh, I don’t know; I’ll almost certainly return to those before I watch this again. But is it really a competition? They’re different, and they’re all great. Despite the ripped-from-the-headlines (ten years ago) subject matter, SPOTLIGHT has a timeless quality which may actually give it some life beyond the usual hyped-and-forgotten Oscar-bait cycle. At the very least, I think it deserves it. Plus, McCarthy made THE COBBLER this year. The fucking COBBLER. There’s something wonderfully appealing to me about the idea that McCarthy made both the uncontested worst film of 2015 and --just maybe-- the best.

(I do wish it had a better name, though. I get why it’s called SPOTLIGHT, but that’s a little generic.)

*In an admittedly miserable year for movies which included MONKEYBONE, PEARL HARBOR, GHOSTS OF MARS, JURASSIC PARK III, and fucking FREDDY GOT FINGERED for God’ sake. But there were plenty of better options, including A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, THE SCORE, THE OTHERS, TRAINING DAY, MONSTERS INC, ROYAL TENENBAUMS, LoR:FotR, BLACK HAWK DOWN, GHOST WORLD, MEMENTO, THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, OCEAN’S 11, SESSION 9, WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER. I never saw IN THE BEDROOM, maybe that’s good too. I guess MOULIN ROUGE, too, at least it’s unique. Some real strengths there. I dunno if I want to call any of those an all-time classic, but any of them would have been a better choice than fuckin’ BEAUTIFUL MIND, obviously. Actually the genuine best movie that year might have been the little-seen Keanu Reeves Little League Baseball dramedy HARDBALL. Jesus, what the fuck were we doing with ourselves back in 2001?

Outside America, incidentally, the year went much better. AMELIE came out that year. And THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, KAIRO (PULSE), FULLTIME KILLER, INTACTO, SPIRITED AWAY, and THE TAILOR OF PANAMA . But none of those would have been eligible for best picture.

** Yes, I know you all hate THE REVENANT. Whatever.