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| Bane and the Bat struggle to avoid tears. |
««1/2 The Dark
Knight Rises. Written by Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan & David S.
Goyer. Directed by Christopher Nolan.
Been
away for a while, but only because I've been watching The Dark Knight Rises, the epic end of Christopher Nolan's Batman
trilogy that seems to go on about two weeks. Anybody who has been following
Nolan's career knows what I'm talking about: from his spare, practically perfect
Memento through The Prestige, Inception,
and his Dark Knight opuses, his work
has gotten increasingly overblown. Unlike much half-baked Hollywood product,
made with the aim of making a fast buck, Nolan's films are obsessively fussed
over, like the work of a sculptor who can't put down his chisel. That's not
necessarily a bad thing--Kubrick, for instance, gave the same impression. But Christopher
Nolan doesn't have the rigor of Kubrick. Lately, his films have become Rube
Goldberg machines, baroque constructs festooned with more ideas than they can
possibly work out. Dark Knight Rises
is only the latest--and most gaseously expansive--instance.
Number three is set eight years
after The Dark Knight ends. Batman
(Christian Bale) is an outlaw after selflessly taking the blame for the crimes of
Two-Face; Bruce Wayne has become a recluse rumored never to have foot-long
nails and piss in mason jars. He's pulled back into circulation by the arrival
of a new super-villain: a hulking, improbably well-spoken mercenary (Tom Hardy)
called Bane. Indeed, in The Road Warrior,
this character was called "Humungus" and was identical to Hardy's right
down to the squirty cranial arteries and delusions of grandeur. But we don't
come to Batman movies for originality, so never mind.
The Caped Crusader gets a frenemy
this time in the sleek form of Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). She's a cat burglar with
serious skills but no wealth to show for it--she's "in with the wrong
people" but the script never explains how (a problem with gambling on the
ponies, perhaps?). In fact, Hathaway plays the typical "girl gone bad in
the city", making all the wrong choices to keep ahead of the rent. That
she can rock a cat suit, and has played catty women in just about every movie
she's been in, makes casting her pretty much a "can't miss" enterprise.
Explaining how these costumes and
the other characters (Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard) fit
in to the two and three quarter hours of overstuffed plot is beyond the scope of
this little column. Alas, the script's complexity is too often its weakness. As
the thing hurtles onward, we wonder why Bane needs to shoot up the whole Gotham
City Stock Exchange just to make some fraudulent trades, when a memory stick in
the right USB jack would do just as well. We wonder why Bane feels compelled to
torture the city before blowing it up. We wonder but then forget, because the
thing is endless and there's always something new to puzzle about.
It is interesting how Nolan is
determined to make a superhero movie without ever admitting he's making a
superhero movie. Catwoman gets her cat ears here, except they're actually
night-vision specks that she happens to flip up on her head; the script by
Nolan (and his brother Jonathan) contains just enough police procedural argot
to give it a dash of Sidney Lumet-ish grit. He seems to want to have it both
ways, to reach for epic sweep with his feet dunked in urban decay. The
combination doesn't always work--the Wagnerian ruffles sometimes seem silly in
service of a guy in a bat suit. Sometimes you just want to tell Nolan to
relax--this is a comic book, not Götterdämmerung. There
isn't a single scene with Michael Caine's Alfred that doesn't end with the old
chap in tears.
One day dissertations will be
written about the influence of the current political atmosphere on superhero
movies, and vice versa. Nolan's villains are obviously inspired by the modern
suicide terrorist, who can't be deterred because he aspires to nothing but
destruction. Deeper down, though, the movies are about the scope and role of
government. Batman opposes Bane and The Joker, but he shares with them the
resources to out-gun and out-smart official authority--the privatization of
justice and crime. In the widest
sense, Nolan wants to get at our anxieties about this new world, this
"winner take all" society where ordinary individuals count for less
and less.
One nice thing about this Dark Knight is how it acknowledges that
the best superhero doesn't solve everyone's problems, but inspires the rest of
us to become heroes. In The Avengers,
the people of New York (Gotham City) just stood around and watched as the
Marvel Dream Team saved the world. Here, the final confrontation is a
collective affair, with Batman a little like William Wallace with better
equipment. It's just too bad this Wallace doesn't have a sense of humor.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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