Batman & Robin (1997)
Dir. Joel Schumacher
Written by Akiva Goldsman
Starring Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia
Silverstone
In which Joel Schumacher learns the meaning of
the word "Toyetic"
It's customary to begin any
contemporary review of BATMAN AND ROBIN by stressing how terrible the reviewer
thought it was when it came out, back in 1997. Alas, I cannot contribute to
this venerable tradition, because I never saw it until now. And I probably wouldn't
have seen it, except that my buddy Dan Prestwich was
apparently going through some kind of latent emotional crisis and decided to
undertake a thorough survey of modern Batman cinema. As his friend, I knew it
was irresponsible to let him attempt such a reckless folly on his own, and so I
bravely braced myself for BATMAN & ROBIN, a movie with a reputation so
dismal that simply adducing its name as a comparison point is basically
invoking Godwin's law.
But amazingly, everyone was
wrong! Far from the expected disaster, BATMAN & ROBIN turns out to be a
thoughtful and provocative high-water mark of modern pop art, crafted with the
refined care of an auteur versed in the Apparatus theories of
Althusser and Metz and steeped in the semiotics of nah, I'm just yanking your
chain. It does suck, obviously.
Still, 22 years of emphatic
and uncontested public consensus that this movie was absolute dogshit is about
the maximum possible level of expectation-lowering, and those low expectations
certainly made this a much more palatable experience that it would surely have
been in 1997. Being warned ahead of time about the garish ridiculousness, uber-campy
tone, relentless ice puns, and bat nipples doesn't quite prepare one,
emotionally, to be confronted by such things, but at least it allows a viewer
to approach it in the right state of mind. Back in 1997, people somehow seemed
to interpret its screeching archness as a mistake, some sort of malignant
perversion of its real intent. Watching today, that archness is obviously the
point, and can at least live or die on its own merits instead suffering in
comparison to some imaginary version of how a film titled "Batman &
Robin" should be.
Not that it's exactly any
great shakes even on its own merits. The jokes are intentional, but that
doesn't mean they're especially funny, and 125 minutes is a very, very
long time to stay amused by what is essentially one joke, that joke being
"haha, look at how campy this insanely expensive movie is."
Still, it's a joke that's at
least a little funny, and executed on a scale of Caligulan
extravagance such as the world may never see again. If the pleasures of the
story are slight (and they are slight to the point of being ephemeral), the
pleasures of the colossal, stylized sets, wild lighting, frantic mega-acting and
elaborate costumes are rather more intoxicating, at least for a while. Watching
Shumacher play around in the neon-poisoned, transmogrified ruins of Tim
Burton's austere modernist cityscape can occasionally even be a heady joy;
witness the sequence where Batman and Freeze enjoy a lengthy car chase across
the twisted body of one of Burton's colossal statues (now Schumacher-fied into
an aesthetic considerably more buff and nude). In moments like this, Schumacher's
complete lack of taste and restraint collide nicely with a comic book
sensibility of freewheeling, fanciful vigor, and the movie becomes
genuinely fun.
But those moments are pretty
fleeting. Though there's certainly more action here than in either of Burton's
morose modern gothics, very little of it is any good at all; it's mostly
upstaged by the overwhelming mis-e-scene or just lost in the choppy,
frantic editing (a grim portent of what was to come in the next decade). That
leaves the actors to carry most of the movie -- which is to say, that leaves
the villains to carry the movie, since after four separate Batman movies we
can't at this point reasonably expect the title characters to be the real focal
point of the film (though of the "Gough/Hingle quadrilogy," this is
the only film to meaningfully put Batman at the center of the narrative, not
that it matters much at this point).
Thankfully, if you're relying
on over-the-top charisma to anchor your movie, you could hardly do better than
Schwarzenegger and Thurman (plus guest star John Glover and the absurdly
over-muscled arms of wrestler Jeep Swanson). Schwarzenegger is as dialed-up as
everything else in the movie, but this was his natural element, and perhaps
even natural state, in 1997, playing into his strength for cheerful,
energetic caricatures. Thurman, doing some kind of wild Mid-Atlantic accent and
vamping it up like a coked-up Mae West, is easily the best thing in the movie
(she falls into a giant venus fly trap and yells "Curses!"), entertaining
on exactly the level the movie is shooting for, but without pulling so heavily
from the usual bag of tricks as Arnold is. Both are compulsively watchable in
almost any circumstances, and their combined enthusiasm and sheer frenetic
energy bolster the movie far past the point it ought, by all rights, to start
flagging. That doesn't get you quite to the end of that ridiculous 125
minutes, but it gets you much deeper into the runtime than you'd have any real
business expecting.
As for the heroes, Clooney
does an impressive job of looking only a little embarrassed and comfortably
exuding his usual cool. He does little to stand out, but it's a testament to
the actor's easy charisma that he manages to avoid entirely fading into the
background in the face of so many wildly dialed-up distractions. His co-stars
fare less well; O'Donnell is playing such an actively intolerable character
that no actor could have really expected to save the role, but he doesn't even
try. And Silverstone is giving one of the most spectacularly terrible
performances in the history of English-language cinema, delivering her lines as
if she's reading them phonetically, syllable-by-syllable, off a cue card that
she can barely focus her eyes on. She looks legitimately confused and disoriented,
like a hopeless drunk at a party desperately nodding along to pretend they
follow a confusing conversation that has gotten entirely away from them.
Not that good acting was ever going to save --or even have any place in-- the outrageously exaggerated, senselessly overstuffed hodge-podge of neon and blacklight kitsch that is certainly the movie's true star. Despite the presence of actors and a script which, while dumb*, is in every way more coherent and straightforward than either of Burton's films, there is room for only one marquee star here, and that is production designer Barbara Ling (most recently of ONCE UPON A TIME IN... HOLLYWOOD), who dominates everything else to the degree that it's barely even worth mentioning anything as minor as a "plot." And just as in Burton's films, this is simultaneously the film's raison d'etre, its greatest success, and its ultimate undoing. With everything --the acting, the dialogue, the costumes, even the fucking scenery-- turned to its loudest, broadest pitch at all times, exhaustion sets in around the final 30 minutes. All the yelling eventually just fades into white noise, and what was once at least charmingly colorful and outrageous becomes kind of a drag. Which is, honestly, hardly surprising; it's actually more surprising how long the movie is able to consistently generate some level of modest pleasure than it is that it eventually flames out.
It's still a long way from
actively good, of course, but as huge-budget debacles of this scale go, it's
mostly an amusing and unique enough bit of pop-art fluff that it's hard to
understand the vitriol it generated at the time. It's of interest purely as an
exotic cultural artifact, but modern anthropologists interested in this
evolutionary dead end of the Hollywood blockbusters are likely to find it a
less painful thing to endure than its reputation might lead one
to believe.
Only one last thing remains to
be said, and it remains my hottest, most dangerous take in what is otherwise a
fairly safe review. There is one scene, and only one scene, which managed to
surprise me, in this movie which features not just dancers costumed like apes,
but pink apes (and, of course, two of them, because BATMAN &
ROBIN would certainly never stop at just one). It is perhaps the film's least
characteristic scene, a scene which has no neon light whatsoever, no campy
costumes, no ice puns, no ape suits of any kind. It is merely this: Batman's
beloved butler Alfred (Michael Gough, Hammer's THE HORROR OF DRACULA) has taken
ill, and Bruce Wayne stops by to check on him. And Bruce simply, directly,
tells the old man he loves him.
They both know this, of
course, but the gentle pleasure of Alfred's reaction, combined with the
straightforward, unselfconscious sincerity of Bruce's delivery had the
completely unexpected effect of slipping directly past my shell of ironic
detachment and somehow making me feel a tiny twinge of real emotion, in this movie
of all fool places. It's nothing major, and it has exactly zero to do with
anything else in the movie (Alfred's illness barely even registers as a
subplot). But it's genuinely sweet. It speaks to a different kind of movie that
could have been, something which needn't have been less silly, which needn't
have been anything like the oppressively, laboriously serious Nolan movies
which would follow, but could have been a little more sincere. Comic
books are for kids, but that doesn't mean that their simple,
primary-colored emotions are shallow and easily dismissed. Quite the contrary,
in fact. As modern comic book movies have increasingly settled into either the
flippant (Marvel) or the ponderous (DC), this one little scene is a nice
reminder that sometimes a direct approach is the best approach. You don't have
to pretend this isn't a ridiculous concept to treat its essential, primal
emotions seriously. It's the very ridiculousness of our emotions that lends
them so well to abstract, simplistic fiction like a Batman story.
Anyway, outside that one
scene, BATMAN & ROBIN comes absolutely nowhere close to doing that, which
ultimately leaves it a wholly shallow, superficial thing. But as far as
shallow, superficial things go, there's a lot of goofy, neat stuff on the
surface to gawk at, and you could do a whole hell of a lot worse.
*
While pointing out plot holes in BATMAN & ROBIN is beneath the dignity of a
serious commentator, I do have to point out one particularly batty (ha! take
that, Schwarzenegger!) detail I found rather charming: our heroes are told by
Freeze (and apparently believe without question) that once a person is frozen,
they have 11 minutes to unfreeze them safely. So naturally, the climax involves
the city being frozen, and then it's a race against time to save the citizens
of Gotham. And of course, that race against time is embodied by a literal
countdown (or, in an unusual twist on this sort of thing, in this case a
semi-confusing count up) on a digital clock. But fortunately our
heroes arrive at Freeze's lair and wreck his machine, stopping the clock with
only seconds to spare. But here's the thing; they only stop the clock, they
don't actually unfreeze anyone until after a lengthy action sequence. Are they
aware that time doesn't stop just because the second hand on a clock stops
ticking? Anyway, it turns out I guess Freeze undersold how long you could
safely stay frozen, because like 30 minutes later everyone still seems
OK.
While I have you down here, I also want to point out that
before she decides to destroy the city or whatever, Poison Ivy actually comes
to Bruce with a plan to green up his enterprise --which I hasten to add,
actually was funding the villainous mad scientist who tried to
kill her and was cooking up 'roided out super-soldiers for the highest bidder--
and he just brushes her off by smugly saying that everyone on Earth will die if
they give up diesel. What the fuck, Bruce? I feel like we can try a little
harder than that. Seems awful convenient for the insanely rich guy
with the billion-dollar industrial empire that there's literally nothing we can
possibly do for the environment and it would be stupid to even try.
