Batman Forever

 

Batman Forever (1995)

Dir. Joel Schumacher

Written by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchlet, Akiva Goldsman

Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, Chris O’Donnell

 

In which America sanctions a surprising amount of buffoonery.

You’ll notice I did something unusual in watching these 20^th-century Batman movies: I watched both pairs (the Burton duology and the related-but-distinct Schumacher duology) in reverse order, starting with the later film and then checking out the earlier one. This was somewhat happenstance, but it turned out to be an interesting way to view them: the rap on both duologies is that they each began with a somewhat staid first movie, while the second became a near-parodic catalog of the respective directors’ personal fetishes, to their detriment. Watching in reverse order, with the full expression of auteurial excess already on display, we can perceive more clearly what is absent from the first movie, rather than focus on the continuities between them.

 

All of which makes it kinda hilarious, in retrospect, that people loved BATMAN FOREVER when it came out and hated BATMAN & ROBIN two years later, because I can't help but notice that they're basically the exact same fucking thing. Same neon hellscapes, same duo of furiously over-acting villains, same incessant campy corniness, same nightmarish overproduction. Hell, even the Bat-nipples, so strenuously derided by the time BATMAN & ROBIN rolled around, were already clearly in evidence.* Everything people claimed to hate in the sequel was already omnipresent here.

 

There is one key difference, though: while BATMAN & ROBIN was obviously written as a comedy, FOREVER seems to have been written more or less earnestly... it's just played for comedy. Relentlessly so. As Ebert’s contemporary review remarked, “there was a feeling after ‘Batman Returns’… that the series had grown too dark and gloomy,” and one feels the movie self-consciously course-correcting in nearly every scene. Nothing is allowed to play out without being immediately undercut by some desperate mugging, even when there’s nothing even resembling a joke in the script… which is most of the time! BATMAN & ROBIN had terrible, corny jokes, but at least they were, unmistakably, jokes. FOREVER seems to have become a comedy more out of anxiety over being perceived as too serious than out of any apparent plan to be funny per se, but the result is that regardless of the actual story, nearly everything that happens is presented as if it was funny.

 

And this is a huge problem, because the only person who is ever even remotely funny is psychotic bat fetishist Nicole Kidman, who's playing her daffy character 100% straight, and seems to be the only person who isn’t aware of the buffoonery playing out around her. But this is at most a mild grace note, and is almost immediately drowned out by the maniacally overacting villains, in the form of the unlikely duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Of the two, Carrey sucks up the most of the film’s attention; he is pitched at a frequency that can only be described as "the brown note," and is absolutely inescapable here, constitutionally unable to resist screaming and doing a weird voice and doing a wacky dance and running through sixteen different facial expressions and striking a comic pose and throwing in some kind of dumb joke, all while wearing an outfit that would make Cher blush. It's screeching, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard anti-entertainment, and it sucks up every single molecule of oxygen in the film, stopping the film dead in its tracks every time he's on-screen, which is constantly. Meanwhile Jones is so monotonous in his over-the-topness that he basically vanishes into the background, which is a pretty fitting description of the entire movie. If everything is turned up to 11, nothing is.**

 

A Batman movie is gonna live or die on its villains, and so FOREVER was doomed before it even began. But there's one other major problem on top of all that: I feel weird saying this, but for a movie so histrionic, its main problem is that nothing very interesting happens. The movie has many elaborate sets (MVP Barbara Ling of BATMAN & ROBIN infamy is doing basically the same thing here, just on a slightly smaller scale) but it has amazingly few set pieces. I’m not convinced that Batman himself does even a little bit more superheroing than he does in the infamous low-action Burton duology. It’s an oddly inert story, yet pitched at a manic tone – a mismatch that makes the whole thing feel like huge engine which is constantly revving but never drives anywhere. BATMAN & ROBIN, for all its many flaws, at least uses its garish silliness to do fun stuff. FOREVER just kind of sits there, yelling at you. 

 

So how to explain, then, the general positive response this one got at the time? Looking back, it’s a real head trip to see apparently sane people like Ebert treating this more or less as a normal movie, pointing out themes and motifs and stuff as if any of that mattered even a little bit, commenting that “Schumacher makes a generally successful effort to lighten the material” and (incorrectly) that there are “lots of laughs for the Riddler.” Everybody seems to have just accepted on faith that this was basically a normal Batman movie with a slightly lighter tone, rather than a weird camp parody which makes the 60’s Adam West Batman look solemn and dignified by comparison. I can only conclude that the mainstream still didn’t have an entirely clear idea of what camp was, or a solid idea about what a comic book movie should be – and so they simply took the script and the marketing department’s word for it that this was basically a serious Batman film with a little bit of silliness to lighten the mood. Its sequel made the mistake of assuming the audience was in on the joke, which apparently they were not, and did not appreciate being enlightened (perhaps because of the unavoidable implication that if they missed it the first time, the joke was on them). It seems crazy, but I don't have another explanation. We forget, sometimes, to what a shocking extent an audience can simply be told what to think of art, even when there’s a mountain of contradictory evidence sitting right there in front of their eyes.

 

Still, the degree to which you can tell an audience what to think has a lot to do with time and place. If you're going to gaslight them, you need to keep gaslighting them, and the subsequent sequel kinda blew it by owning up to its own silliness. Which means that in retrospect, people taking this movie seriously seem outright insane, and people enjoying it seem misguided to the point of outright fraud. Needless to say, BATMAN & ROBIN is not a good movie either, but it at least has the benefit of being entirely one thing. FOREVER, trapped between a script with no jokes and a tone so bracingly shrill that it can only play as comedy, doesn’t even have that solid foundation to fall back on. It’s all but unwatchable, a bizarre pileup of contradictory corporate notes, frantic and flop-sweating without ever producing any actual energy or momentum.*** The only appropriate response to a such a monster is the response Jones apparently had to his insufferably mugging co-star: “I hate you. I really don’t like you… I cannot sanction your buffoonery.”

 

* Schumacher later grumbled, “The bodies of the suits come from Ancient Greek Statues, which display perfect bodies. They are anatomically correct.”

100% medically accurate

 

** The heroes vanish into the background so completely that they're not even worth mentioning, except that at one point Robin does his laundry using karate. And even that isn't quite able to reach the level of sublime dumbness that it should, thanks to its manic, disruptive editing.

 

*** Interestingly, there is a fabled SnyderCut-esque “Schumacher Cut” which is reported to be less campy and more serious, potentially actually delving a little into the script’s fleeting lip service about Batman’s psychology (which intrigued Ebert enough that he opened his review by addressing it!). It’d be interesting to see, and basically anything with less Carrey and O’Connell could only be an improvement, but the essential problem that the film simply lacks incident and momentum seems unsolvable to me. We’ll see #ReleaseTheSchumacherCutIGuess         

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)