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Elvis Mitchell asked Jon Favreau if, as a director of superhero movies that take themselves seriously both in their attempts to be about something, and their desire to entertain, he took his lead from Tim Burton and Chris Nolan, the directors of Batman and Batman Begins. Favreau said “What? No. No, not really. No, those guys are real directors. I’m just screwing around.” He meant, “I’m a writer and an actor and a director, I’m a dilettante,” but I thought “Now come on Jon. Iron Man is not the product of someone ‘just screwing around.’”

Well, compared to The Dark Knight…yeah, actually. Favreau is just screwing around.

Speaking critically about movies, which is something I enjoy, necessarily begins with the experience of the critic. People who don’t know what a critic’s job is think you’re supposed to be unbiased. Nothing could be further from the truth. Moviegoing is an intensely personal experience. You couldn’t subtract what you bring to it if you wanted to. Therefore, in this specific instance, I feel compelled to begin by recounting my experience seeing this movie.

After D&D this evening, in which my friend Jim killed the entire party, we decided to see if we could get in to one of the midnight showings of The Dark Knight. I checked online and found that the 18 theater omniplex across the street from my house was showing the movie on four screens at 12:01. I’d never seen a theater with a special midnight showing the day before opening night in more than one screen. I had been convinced it would be sold out, the news was reporting that hundreds of theaters in New York and L.A. are already sold out through the entire weekend.

Had I not seen the movie playing in 4 screens at midnight, we’d have not even tried to get in. But 4 screens is a lot for a midnight showing on a Thursday night, so we risked it.

Well that was stupid, it initially appeared. When we arrived at the theater, the parking lot was full, and lines of cars were still streaming in. “This means it’s sold out,” I said. “I’ve never seen it packed like this in 25 years, including Christmas shoppers,” it being a theater at a mall. Still, 4 screens. That’s 600 – 1,000 people. Let’s give it a shot.

It was not sold out. It was not sold out because it was showing on 12 screens. “We want tickets to whichever showing is the least sold out,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” the nice lady said. “You can go into any theater you want, doesn’t matter, there’s plenty of seats.” Uh-huh.

We ended up having to go back to the parking lot for a minute after we bought our tix. When we came back, they’d opened 2 more theaters. They were dynamically adding 12:01 showings as more people bought tix. I have never seen anything like this. Not for anything. I’ve seen dozens of movies at midnight showings including all three Lord of the Rings films, and I’ve never seen anything like this. It was like being at a Rush show. There were thousands of people there, and this is an obscure theater in Orange County. We checked every single theater inside the place and they were all packed. Every screen was packed and there were still hundreds of people in line. We had to sit in the second row.

Why were all these people here? Some, many, were wearing Batman paraphernalia. Obviously huge fans of the comics. Some, certainly, because the movie has gotten unprecedented buzz. Some, I think, must have been motivated by the desire to see the much-hyped final performance of Heath Ledger.

I can see no other explanation for the horde of people at a movie theater my friends and I choose because it’s normally barren. We’re looking at a perfect storm. All these factors, feeding into what I think we can legitimately refer to as a cultural phenomenon.

This team of people, also largely responsible for The Prestige, are at the top of their game. They’re the best ensemble of actors and writers and talent and craft working in movies at the moment.

You know what the movie is about. Batman and The Joker. Two Face. Jim Gordon. And the struggle for Gotham City.

That’s the insight that makes Nolan’s Batman so compelling. We like it when people poke fun at the Batman character, about how ridiculously driven he is to do these absurd things just because his parents died in front of him and he hasn’t found a way to work through that.

But that’s not what Nolan’s Batman is about. No reference, not one, to Bruce Wayne’s parents. Instead, this is a man driven to save a city. To save Gotham. That’s what motivates him, not his parents death, not some abstract desire for Justice. He wants to save the city.

The Joker wants to destroy it. Batman thinks Harvey Dent is the hero the city needs, and maybe The Batman can retire, but The Joker changes all that and the city demonstrates that maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t need either of them. Maybe it can do it on its own.

Nolan creates drama by putting a triumverate of good men together, and then lets The Joker loose on the entire thing. I had never been afraid of Batman before Batman Begins. But Christian Bale showed me that Batman could be a deeply fucked-up and scarey thing. I have never been afraid of The Joker either…until now.

The Joker succeeds at what he does for one reason, aptly stated in the film. He has no rules. Everyone else does, even the Mafia. But he does not. And he thrives on destroying things, and forcing people to do awful things to themselves and each other, just to prove how awful and chaotic everyone is. On paper this may sound a little thin, a little academic. Believe me, in execution, it is not.

Nolan uses the shots and the sets themselves to create drama. You watch a movie like…Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang for instance and you see a movie with no real visual style. That’s very common in a movie directed by a writer. Chris Nolan does not have this problem. He’s operating on the same level as Michael Mann, I think. Though not yet Ridley Scott.

The first act is filled with a very particular kind of shot. Huge wide-angle long shots, always of a very specific type of room. Rooms that are incredibly wide, empty, but not any taller than a normal room. Creating this vacuous sense of space, openness. Vulnerability. Boardrooms, research facilities, penthouses, underground laboratories. The same kind of room, shot the same way each time. A double horizon. Twin vanishing points, one in the ceiling, one on the floor.

By the time we get to Act Three, everything’s closed in, narrow streets, alleys, corridors, everything’s dark. A deliberate motion from a wide, limitless expanse creating a feeling of exposure and vulnerability in the viewer, to claustrophobia by the end. A trick to create tension. A very effective trick. Purely visual.

Nolan also uses light in a way we’ve not seen before in a Batman movie. He shows us Gotham in the daytime. In the bright daytime. And he shows us the Joker destroying all of it. Nolan is not afraid to turn the lights on, turn them up, and show off how well he’s crafted everything. These characters don’t have to hide in the shadow. Watching The Joker destroying Gotham in the daytime is truly frightening. Terrifying. This is a kind of terrorism that made me almost nauseous. Gotham doesn’t look like a fantasy or SF city, as it did in the Burton movies or their follow-ups. It looks like any major American city, and The Joker annihilates it.

Dent calls The Joker a terrorist at one point, and he is. He’s not a supervillain, he’s a terrorist madman. He’s Hannibal Lecter except instead of killing and eating a person, The Joker is going to kill and eat the city.

Nolan repeatedly compares The Joker to the shark in Jaws. Someone with no past, no motivation, who just appears on screen to wreak mayhem. We do not care where the shark came from. We never wonder why it’s doing what it’s doing. Someone asked Nolan “you want to leave a sense of mystery about the character” and he very politely said “actually the exact opposite. I never want the audience to wonder for a second where this guy came from. If they do, it humanizes him. And he’s not human.”

The Joker says “I am a force of chaos,” and he absolutely is. He says “I’m not the guy, I’m just a dog who loves to chase cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one!!” And he’s lying AND telling the truth. He IS the guy, he IS the mastermind AND he’s the dog running after the car. At the end of the movie, when he says to Batman “I think you and I should do this forever,” I was weirdly reminded of Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn at the end of The Lion In Winter when she says “Let’s never die, let’s live forever” and he shouts with glee, “Do you think there’s any CHANCE of it!?” These two perfect enemies, locked in an eternal struggle. I never thought The Joker was a good bad guy before this. I thought the idea of Batman and The Joker being opposites was trite and hackneyed. Something forced together to match and explain a tradition that doesn’t benefit from explanation. But here, I was wrong. The Joker is the perfect foil for Batman.

He cannot be beaten, he loves being hurt, he loves watching people love to hurt him. He is smart and ruthless and when he did “the thing with the pencil” the kid sitting next to me said “that is the coolest thing I have ever seen in a movie.”

The audience LOVED The Joker, he got a laugh almost every time he was on screen, even when he was doing something horrible, even when the audience was gasping and saying “oh my god.” Look at what this man has wrought, what this actor has done. He’s created the ultimate movie villain. This cannot be topped. It’s the perfect synergy between subject matter, actor, writer, director, and execution.

On paper, the scene where The Joker basically drives Dent insane would not have worked for me. I’d not have believed it. Like many of the scenes in Iron Man I’d have said “the audience will never go for this.” But due to the note perfect execution on Ledger’s part, and the hard work they did establishing how much on the edge Dent was, I completely bought it.

I never thought “Man, Christian Bale is a good actor,” in this movie. Even though I do think that, and have ever since Empire of the Sun. And I never thought anything BUT “Man Heath Ledger is a good actor” the stupidest observation possible. But really it’s Aaron Eckhart who’s going to be the most overshadowed. He’s turning in an incredible performance here with an amazing range and it’s just his dumb luck it’s in the movie with the single best performance of the year, hands down.

Eckhart deftly plays an astonishingly wide range of emotion and motivation through this movie. But it is, of course, Ledger’s performance we all came to see. It’s mad inspired genius, but notice what Eckhart is doing. Unlike anyone else in the movie, he’s really going through a transformation. The hardest thing for an actor to convey.

When Heath Ledger died, I was one of those people who was really choked up. I loved his work. I was looking forward to lots more from him. I thought, for a long time, “I’m not going to be able to see this movie without thinking of him all through it.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I never saw Ledger. I never saw him. It’s The Joker. It’s The Joker’s movie and it’s just too bad for the poor sons of bitches like Christian Bale and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman who have to hang around in the background like extras. If it wasn’t a Batman movie and it hadn’t been hyped, I bet you $5 you’d not have known who the actor was playing this part, he’s that immersed in the role. This is the performance of a lifetime, a hell of a way to be remembered. He was lost to us too early, but not before turning in the kind of performance that thousands of actors toil their entire lives without getting the chance to commit to film.

I’m going to spoil a little bit of the movie for you. Probably, the writers thought it would be very informative, a very keen insight into The Joker’s character to have the guy explain his background three different times in three completely different ways so the audience knows this guy is always fucking with everyone. But they didn’t count on how communicative Ledger’s performance would be. The first time I heard him explain how he got the way he is, I saw him roll his eyes, cast about for his next piece of inspiration and I thought “oh my god, he’s making all this up as he goes. This isn’t his backstory, there IS no backstory. THAT’S the backstory!” He’s not insane. He even SAYS “I’m not insane” and I believed him! If he were insane, he’d be easy to pidgheonhole and understand. Don’t believe me? Note that Batman explains away one of Joker’s henchmen by pointing out he’s a paranoid schizophrenic from a mental hospital. And we instantly know what bucket to put him in. File him away. The Joker has no bucket. I’ve never SEEN anything like this, except Hannibal Lecter. He’s just always fucking with absolutely everyone, all the time.

There’s a shot, a mesmerizing, mind-blowing shot with The Joker upside-down, and a long conversation between him and The Batman and my breath was taken away by how they turned this inverted, upside-down shot, in which under normal circumstances anyone would look unnatural, and made it The Joker’s. He’s floating, carefree, free of gravity, free of restraint, smiling, cackling. The world literally turned upside down for him and he’s completely in his element. It’s an amazing piece of work.

I tell you how well crafted this movie is. I often thought “Oh, I know what they’re going to do.” I knew, for instance, that…people weren’t who we thought they were in the final climactic battle. I’ve seen movies, I know how things work. I remember the end of Stalag 17.

But many times the filmmakers convinced me I was wrong. They bust their ass with writing and characterization and acting until I’ve completely talked myself out of it, and then they do it anyway. The BASTARDS. They are completely fucking with me at every stage. The scene with Tiny Lister? I though “Oh he’s going to do so-and-so.” But then he gives this speech, this very convincing speech, very well-though out and I thought “oh, shit. No he’s not, he going to do the opposite. I can’t fucking believe it.” And then they prove me wrong, after I talked myself out of being right.

This movie is filled with so many twists…so many awful things happen. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so completely lost at sea with a movie that in all other respects should have no surprises. We should know the good guys win, we might even know that sacrifices must be made, but holy shit.

That being said…sigh.

I can’t…look, it’s still ME right? I can’t honestly say it’s a flawless movie. Just as with the first movie, I think they were not convinced enough of the merit of their premise. The writers got very wrapped up in the dichotomy between Dent and Wayne. The Joker and Batman, and eventually Two Face and both of them. We spend too much time with people speaking in this very flowery prose about What Gotham Needs and Who The Batman Is. It got a little panicky. As though the folks behind the camera were thinking “Does this make sense? And if it makes sense, will the audience get it? I dunno, let’s say it again but this time in a different way.”

I got that same impression from the first movie and the explanation about what the League of Shadows was all about. An idea that works great as an idea. Something you come up with brainstorming with your writing partner. And you’re both utterly convinced it will work but when you put it on paper it feels too abstract. But you really believed in it, so you just explain it again and again and hope it all adds up to “this is cool.” In both instances, I think less would have been more.

That being said, this is still the best movie I’ve seen this year. In years. It’s amazing. Maybe I’ll take back my sole criticism once I watch the DVD. I often feel like Michael Mann’s movies have these habitually weak endings, then I watch them with the director commentary and him explaining what’s going on in HIS head as he’s directing it and I think “holy shit this is the best ending ever!” Best to give Chris Nolan the benefit of the doubt.

I reckon he’s earned it.

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