The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Dir. Christopher Nolan
Written: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan
Starring
Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman,
Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph “Commissioner” Gordon-Levitt,
Matthew Modine, Aidan Gillen, and pretty much everyone else.
One thing everyone seems to be able to agree on. This is a big
movie. Everything about it is big. Big cast. Big ambitions. Big scope.
Big spectacle. Big budget. Big explosions. Big expectations. Being a
sequel to BIG. Being an acronym for “Batman is Great.” Big balls. Big
baldy. Big business.
But the more I think about it, the thing that I like best about the
movie is one of its smallest scenes. It takes place between Christian
Bale’s Bruce Wayne (out of costume, wearing a plain tee-shirt) and his
butler and caretaker, Michael Caine’s Alfred. They talk for a few
minutes in a sparsely decorated stairway about whether or not Wayne can
go on being Batman without eventually being killed. Alfred begs Bruce to
give it up, tells him he’s certain to be killed if he continues; that
he can’t stand by and watch Bruce throw his life away. Bruce hangs back
in the shadows, knowing Alfred is right, knowing that by continuing on
this course he’s going to lose the few people he still has any human
connection to at all. And knowing he’s going to do it anyway.
In a movie which features a nuclear time bomb, a gigantic heavily-armed
hovercraft, the wholesale destruction of a stadium, a gigantic Cecil B.
DeMille-style hand-to-hand battle with a cast of hundreds, and a grown
man in a rubber bat suit, that scene sticks with me. Caine and Bale
don’t make any grand speeches. Bale barely says a word. The whole thing
is virtually irrelevant to the plot. But there’s something real there.
Something passes between these two excellent actors, in this small
scene, which is deeply touching and deeply true. They’re talking about
whether one of the two of them (I won’t spoil who) is going to put on a
cape and drive a motorcycle to punch a supervillain who lives in the
Gotham City sewers. But they’re not really talking about that; they’re
talking about whether it’s worth living in the world anymore. Alfred is
laying out his soul, begging the person he cares about to care about
himself enough to at least give life an honest attempt. There’s
something deeply heartbreaking about the way Alfred so nakedly begs, and
the way you can see both that Bruce’s heart is breaking and yet that
there’s so little of a person left there that he can’t respond in kind.
It’s very small. But it’s real.
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| Looks like someone needs a hug |
I mention this, because most of this movie isn’t real. The BIG is
mostly bluster, an attempt to overwhelm with sheer mass. An attempt to
meet the ridiculous expectations by giving us too much to process,
flummoxing our sense and making us confuse exhaustion with satisfaction.
In fact, this is an extremely silly film which ultimately buckles from
the ridiculous weight it insists upon carrying. It never quite generates
enough mass to entirely disappear into its own black hole, but it’s
inarguably top-heavy. It’s a movie full of big ideas which never really
venture past the surface; a movie which is deeply grim but mostly over
ridiculous things. The movie is basically a gothy teenager, thinking
it’s the first one ever to discover that life is meaningless and people
are jerks.
But the weird thing is, it’s directed by Christopher Nolan. So the
serious parts are actually done so well that they’re legitimately
arresting. And that makes the underlying ridiculousness seem all the
more inexplicable.
We’re introduced to Mr. Wayne eight years after the events of THE DARK
KNIGHT. Apparently, his unnecessary plan to publicly blame himself for
an event which no one else witnessed and could have had almost any
explanation worked better than I thought it would, because thanks to
Harvey’s heroic death they passed a bunch of draconian laws which have
prevented parole for convicts associated with organized crime and hence
the city is safe and Batman is no longer needed. Fortunately everyone
convicted under these laws was definitely guilty and had nothing more to
contribute to society or culture, so it’s OK that they threw away the
key and everyone is happy and in fact celebrates the awkwardly-named
“Harvey Dent Day” every year at Wayne manor.
Wayne,
though, is not at the party, having become an eccentric recluse with a
cane and a big beard who sort of squats in one unfinished wing of the
gigantic rebuilt mansion, presumably dividing his time between throwing
away his family fortune on quixotic clean energy projects and carefully
saving and categorizing jars of his own urine. He’s lured out of this
idyllic existence, as so many of us are, by being robbed by Anne
Hathaway. Having already seen her costumed as a maid, he correctly
surmises that she must also own a skin-tight leather catsuit, and so our
intrepid hero ventures out into the world to follow up on these
important leads, in the process discovering that there’s a lot more
going on outside the mansion than just cocktail parties for dead DAs and
long expository monologues delivered by Gary Oldman. For instance,
there’s also a shirtless Darth Vader living in the sewer, and at some
point Morgan Freeman invented flying cars but for some reason never told
anyone.
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| Best Fetlife meetup ever. |
This slowly leads us into an enjoyably convoluted plot which involves
pretty much every single element and character from the previous two
films, plus Matthew Modine because fuck it, he wandered onto the set.
Things are blown up, ever more characters are introduced, missiles are
fired, motorcycles are ridden, punches are thrown, laborious metaphors
are constructed. It’s a pretty well constructed -- if hilariously
overbuilt-- story. The mystery is engaging, the spectacle is impressive,
the characters are colorful, numerous, and well-acted. It even
remembers to have some fun every now and again (mostly thanks to Anne
Hathaway’s quippy Selina Kyle).
But
it’s hard to deny that in the end, it’s simply too big for it’s own
good. It’s a whole miniseries crammed into a frantic 165 minutes where a
whole fucking lot happens, but not much sinks in. It’s almost a cliffs
notes of a movie. The abridged DARK KNIGHT RISES. It feels like a movie
version of a novel too beloved by fans to allow anything to be excised.
The result is a movie with almost no narrative slack, but no real
narrative impact, either. A plot checklist with a whole fucking lot of
checks. It’s crafty and gripping while you’re watching, but as soon as
it’s over you find yourself thinking about the plot holes instead of the
characters. Because stuffing three films’ worth of plots into a single
film doesn’t really give you time to do anything satisfying with the
characters. They’re always occupied frantically moving the plot forward,
and never seem to have time to be affected by it. And consequently the
audience can never be much affected by it.
By
my count, there are no less than eight major characters --four of them
totally new-- competing for time and relevance throughout the film’s 165
minutes with not only each other, but also what seems like dozens of
minor characters, setpieces, expository flashbacks, and explosions.
Nolan knows he has to find something for all of them to do, and with
each new story that gets added, the gigantic ball of plot becomes more
tangled and unwieldy. The result is that every character gets the bare
outline of an arc, but no more. Every character gets a setup, one or two
scenes of conflict, and then a resolution. But that’s simply not enough
to really convey meaningful growth. Even Wayne himself barely has a
character arc here. We learn, because the film outright tells us, that
he has to learn to fear again in order to “rise” -- fair enough, it’s a
good setup that addresses both the reason he became Batman to begin with
and the reason he can’t care enough about his own life to exist without
Batman. But how, exactly, does this change come about? At the start of
the final act, he just announces that he now has something to fear, and
that does the trick. Any kind of meaningful change has to happen off
camera -- there’s no time for it. The movie just settles for telling us it’s happened. And that, my friends, makes for somewhat superficial and unsatisfying storytelling.
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| Bane Kitty is really fucking hard to understand. |
The
film is no better with the philosophical issues that it raises. It
starts off by tantalizing us with the dynamic between poor Selina Kyle
and obscenely wealthy Bruce Wayne. What right does he have, she asks, to
take so much while others have so little? Good question. Too bad it
never comes up again. Likewise, Tom Hardy’s Bane character takes over
the city with a long speech about oppression, and proposes that he’s
going to free Gotham’s citizens to make their own choices regardless of
their past or the leadership. But then he, um, doesn’t. Just like PROMETHEUS a few months ago --and for that matter, the two previous
Nolan Batman films-- the film is bold enough to ask some ballsy
questions, but then acts confused and changes the subject when you ask
for an answer, or at least a discussion.
"We
throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a
lot of interesting questions in the air, but that's simply a backdrop
for the story. What we're really trying to do is show the cracks of
society, show the conflicts that somebody would try to wedge open. We're
going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is
supporting and not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things."
This
seems to me to read as Nolan acknowledging that his films deliberately
raise issues they have no interest in meaningfully addressing, and
basically arguing there is no reason to seriously consider these issues
in the context of the film. If that’s true, it’s a real shame, because
of course these very issues are the most interesting thing about this
whole trilogy. To read that quote, you would think Nolan just wants us
to watch his trilogy as a series of action movies about a guy in a
batsuit fighting supervillains. But of course, that’s always been the
weakest element in them.
Alas,
it remains the case here as well. I foolishly (and apparently against
the director’s wishes) got invested in the symbolism and themes, but I
guess the important thing is the action, right? Problem is, there’s not a
whole lot of action setpieces, and when they happen their quality is
all over the place. There’s nothing to match the stunning truck chase
from THE DARK KNIGHT, but the action is generally more comprehensible
than it has been in the last two films. So you can tell what’s
happening, but that just raises a new problem: it’s all surprisingly low
on imagination. Bane has a couple nice setpieces, including a
reasonably well-choreographed motorcycle chase and that Stadium
explosion you’ve already seen in the trailers, but that’s honestly as
memorable as the action gets. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that the
basic conflict is essentially a remake of BEGINS: A plot by the League
O’ Shadows (LOS, FYI) to blow up the city with a big bomb travelling
around the city on a vehicle. The bulk of the rest of the action
sequences involve Bane and Batman clumsily slugging at each other, or
Batman flying an absurd, apparently invulnerable flying saucer and
shooting missiles at people on the ground. This is a guy who was trained
by ninjas? In retrospect, I almost liked it better when it was edited
so I couldn’t tell what was going on. Wally Pfister still stubbornly
refuses to shoot anything that has the least bit of atmosphere in it, so
now that he has to hold the camera still in broad daylight, you can
really tell what monotonous slugfests most Batman fights are. And how
silly that suit looks on a grown man. They could spend 250 million on
this movie but didn’t bother to train Bale so he looks like he can
actually fight?* And then want to tell me that there’s no point in
thinking about anything else in the film? What does that even leave?
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| Doves flying = symbolism. John Woo proved it. |
Turns
out it leaves just one thing: a long, complicated, overwrought drama
overrun by characters looking for a resolution. But as it happens, this
is the film’s secret weapon. Consider this: You know how in action films
there is always a whiny girlfriend, who wants our hero to stop being so
awesome and give up his code and settle down for a life of placid
domesticity? They always gotta do that, it’s just sort of part of the
formula at this point. I guess they put it in there as an empty gesture
towards not glorifying antisocial vigilante violence, but come on, you
know what we want to see -- some god damned irresponsible sociopathic
violence. A bad thing in real life, but a good thing in the movies. OK,
here the girlfriend is played by Michael Caine, but come on, you’re not
actually supposed to agree with him. It’s just an empty gesture. They
gotta say it so they don’t get sued if some asshole gets the wrong idea
and turns vigilante.** Right?
Which
brings us back to that scene I was talking about at the start of this
review. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like a throwaway gesture here. It feels
like an earnest plea by someone who is probably right. And I found
myself sort of halfway hoping that Bruce would reconsider. I found
myself halfway hoping that Batman could really never show up. In a
Batman movie. Right about that time, I realized that for all its
bluster, superficiality, and silliness, there is something fundamental
in this Batman trilogy that works. Nolan, graced with a stunning dream
cast of most of the best actors alive and working right now, has crafted
an epic drama under the guise of making superhero action movies. Now,
it’s a consistently silly, sometimes hilariously ludicrous drama. But
the actors sell the heck out of it, the scope is breathtaking, and the
dialogue is snappy and ingratiating. By the end, you realize you care
about what happens to these Gotham City ninnies. When the movie plays
rough with them, you root for them to recover and worry that they won’t
be able to. When they start succeeding, you cheer for them. Most simply,
when they talk, you listen.
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| Now let's do the WHEN HARRY MET SALLY ending! |
There
are plenty of things to complain about here. Yes, Bane’s plan is the
exact same stupid plan that already didn’t work for Ras Al-Ghul in
BATMAN BEGINS, and yes, it’s foiled the exact same way. And yes, plenty
of shit here doesn’t make a lot of sense, a little sense, or
occasionally even a lick of sense. The action can be clumsy and
uninvolving. The drama can be thinly sketched and lazy. The themes can
be muddled and superficial. And depending on your level of experience
with reality, you may find it impossible to reconcile a complex,
ensemble psychological drama with a guy wearing rubber bat ears and a
cape. All these things are valid complaints.
But
even given those factors, there is something giddy and compelling about
the level of seriousness the film takes with its characters and its
world. For all its unearned pretensions of depth and portent, there’s
an earnest care for the people at the heart of this silly drama. Few
people get the opportunity to put $ 250 million into a dense, Dickensian
drama about fear, hope, and redemption, so in the rare event that it
comes along you gotta sort of appreciate it. Comic books, at their
heart, are as much soap operas as they are action movies -- laboriously
overbuilt collages of colorful characters and shamelessly overwrought
drama wandering about their ever-more-complex, ever-shifting world with
listless plots which struggle for new territory, get lost in the motley
minutiae, wander back, and forget where they started. RISES, for all
it’s overreaching, in some ways represents the best of this ridiculous
but endearing variety of American storytelling. The surface may be all
false flash, but its heart is as resolutely, stalwartly geeky as it
deserves to be. For a movie this self-consciously devoted to being BIG,
it’s nice to know that the little things still make the most difference.
Plus, Batman flies a flying saucer. As they say in the funny pages,
Fin.
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| Barely, and only because Selina Kyle talks briefly but slightly over 30 seconds to her female neighbor/sidekick. |
*Turns
out Bale studied a form of Mixed Martial Arts called the Keysi fighting
method, as I probably should have assumed he would. But like most MMA
fighting styles, it looks like real fighting instead of choreographed
movie fighting, which is to say, it’s boring and clumsy to watch.
**Not interested in talking about that subject, please feel free to discuss on other sites, but not here.
