I wanted to love Bat­man: The Dark Knight. Direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan (also cowriter with brother Jonathan) and star Chris­t­ian Bale have long proved them­selves thought­ful, seri­ous film­mak­ers, but if they have one com­mon flaw it might be a ter­mi­nal defi­ciency of lev­ity. The Dark Knight inar­guably has all the hall­marks of qual­ity, intel­li­gence, and craft, but it makes a mis­cal­cu­la­tion in tone. Aspir­ing to the cin­e­matic heights of epic crime melo­dra­mas like Heat and The God­fa­ther Part II, The Dark Knight over­shoots the lim­its of its source mate­r­ial and becomes oppres­sively grim and depress­ing. One of the film’s mar­ket­ing taglines was The Joker’s catch­phrase “Why so seri­ous?”, a ques­tion it should have taken to heart itself. Bat­man is, after all, a dude who dresses up in a rub­ber bat suit with pointy ears.

The Dark Knight takes its name from the sem­i­nal 1980s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns by comics auteur Frank Miller, but is not an adap­ta­tion. At this point, an adap­ta­tion would be redun­dant any­way, as Miller’s gen­eral tone and inter­pre­ta­tion of the char­ac­ter as an obsessed, psy­chotic loner has informed every Bat­man film so far. Spider-Man 2 remains, for me, the only film adap­ta­tion of a comic book super­hero prop­erty to strike the right bal­ance between comics’ height­ened real­ity and cinema’s more grounded literalness.

Pick a card…

This Dork Reporter grew up with Tim Burton’s two orig­i­nal Bat­man films, which took the char­ac­ter “seri­ously” inso­far as giv­ing him a rea­son­ably plau­si­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal moti­va­tion. But they also plopped the char­ac­ter down in an obvi­ously fan­tas­ti­cal par­al­lel uni­verse in which such things as rocket-powered pen­guins and death by laugh­ter (lit­er­ally) were plau­si­ble. In con­trast, the two Nolan / Bale films drain all the wit and whimsy from the core Bat­man mythos, and place him in a decay­ing, cor­rupt, crime-ridden city straight out of 1940s pulp noir nov­els. Liv­ing in modern-day New York City, it’s almost impos­si­ble for this Dork Reporter to imag­ine Russ­ian and Ital­ian orga­nized crime fam­i­lies being so pow­er­ful as to com­man­deer five big city banks for money laun­der­ing pur­poses, and yet that is a key plot point in the sup­pos­edly seri­ous and real­is­tic The Dark Knight. Indeed, any viewer of The Wire and The Sopra­nos will know that what con­tem­po­rary orga­nized crime fam­i­lies are capa­ble of is far more mun­dane. Comic book fans will real­ize this is the same mis­take often made in post-80s comic books: mis­tak­ing bloody mur­der and may­hem for “real­ism.” If The Dark Knight wanted to be taken so seri­ously, it could have begun by tweak­ing its depic­tion of the con­tem­po­rary real world.

Inter­net rumor has it that Chris­t­ian Bale is the star of this picture

Every emo­tion, moti­va­tion, and plot point is pushed to such an absurd degree of pre­ten­tious grav­ity and self-seriousness that it almost becomes comic. The pre­cise moment where the film irrev­o­ca­bly lost me is the scene in which the griev­ously dis­fig­ured Har­vey Dent (Aaron Eck­hart) bel­lows at Detec­tive Gor­don (Gary Old­man) from his hos­pi­tal bed, com­mand­ing him to speak his old deroga­tory nick­name gleaned from years of work­ing inter­nal affairs cases: Two-Face. The per­for­mances were so exag­ger­at­edly despair­ing and melo­dra­matic that I frankly started to laugh.

What lit­tle delib­er­ate humor there is is mis­placed and awk­ward. As before, there is some lev­ity to be mined from Bruce Wayne’s delib­er­ate pre­tense to aim­less trust-fund wastrel. Most of Alfred’s reli­ably dry dia­logue amuses, mostly thanks to Michael Caine’s superla­tive abil­ity to com­mand the audience’s atten­tions and sym­pa­thies. But other stabs at humor mis­fire; dur­ing The Joker’s extended siege on Har­vey Dent’s motor­cade, one of the secu­rity guards pro­vides a run­ning com­men­tary on the pro­ceed­ings, as if the audi­ence needed any ver­bal cue that an about-to-be col­li­sion with a tum­bling heli­copter is a bad thing indeed. The action, while spec­tac­u­lar, is nev­er­the­less mostly plau­si­ble, save for Bat­man and Rachel (Mag­gie Gyllenhaal)‘s fall of some 20 sto­ries from Wayne’s pent­house apart­ment onto the roof of a car. How is it even remotely believ­able that they could sur­vive with­out a scratch? I doubt such a plot device would pass muster in a vin­tage Bat­man comic book.

An out­take from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice

The per­for­mances are good all around, but The Dark Knight could very well be sub­ti­tled the Heath Ledger and Aaron Eck­hart Show. Chris­t­ian Bale, the osten­si­ble star of the pro­ceed­ings, is given lit­tle to do. I assume his hoarse Bat­man voice is meant, in story terms, to pre­vent him from being rec­og­nized as Bruce Wayne while also mak­ing him sound more scary. Instead, he seems asth­matic and out of breath. Mor­gan Free­man sum­mons his reli­able grav­i­tas to plays Batman’s supremely capa­ble beard, Lucius Fox, the nom­i­nal head of Wayne Indus­tries. Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal is a huge improve­ment over Katie Holmes. Although just as young and styl­ish, it is slightly eas­ier to sus­pect dis­be­lief that she could be a top Dis­trict Attor­ney. Gary Old­man pro­vides another exam­ple of his abil­ity to sub­sume his phys­i­cal appear­ance behind makeup and props (as in Han­ni­bal and Drac­ula), but here he is all cud­dly fatherly warmth and right­eous but fair vengeance (basi­cally a retread of his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Sir­ius Black in the Harry Pot­ter films).

Hey, there’s a female pres­ence in this movie?

Set­ting aside the nos­tal­gia and good­will sur­round­ing his pre­ma­ture death, Heath Ledger is indeed amaz­ing. Even if he hadn’t died shortly after com­plet­ing the role, his per­for­mance as The Joker would likely be remem­bered along­side other clas­sic cin­ema night­mares: Anthony Hop­kins as Han­ni­bal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Robert Mitchum as Harry Pow­ell in The Night of the Hunter, and Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Se7en. One of the best aspects of the char­ac­ter is the clear empha­sis that he’s not in the least bit inter­ested in the tra­di­tional past­times of Batman’s col­or­ful rogues’ gallery. Rather, his aim is to foment anar­chy, even self-aware enough to ask “Do I look like a man with a plan?” He does occa­sion­ally let rip with a mani­a­cal laugh on a par with the great Jok­ers of the past (no less all-time great scenery chew­ers than Jack Nichol­son and Cesar Romero, but most of the time he’s creepi­est when not even smil­ing. One nice idea that isn’t fully devel­oped is that this Joker doesn’t have the stan­dard comic book “secret ori­gin.” This Joker tells two very dif­fer­ent sto­ries explain­ing how he became both phys­i­cally and men­tally scarred. It’s pos­si­ble he may not even remem­ber how he became the way he is, but even if he does, does it mat­ter? Which is all the more scary.

Must Read: The New Yorker review by David Denby

Offi­cial movie site: thedarkknight.warnerbros.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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