What with Christopher Nolan’s sure-to-be-a-masterpiece The Dark Knight mere days away, it seemed like as good a time as any to reflect on the storied cinematic history of Batman, remembering those good old days when comic book movies were a rarity and the good ones were treasured like solid gold.
The Man in the Cowl: Michael Keaton, fresh from collaborating with Burton in Beetlejuice, in the middle of his brief fling with stardom.
The Villain: The Joker, AKA Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson).
The Plot: While trying to prove that he isn’t a threat to what little decency is left in the depraved Gotham City, Batman must fight the mob-hitman-turned-psychotic-deformed-clown who wishes to spread disorder for its own sake.
What Went Right: Oh, Jack. Sure, you’ve had a rough go of it these last 15 years – your typical hamminess single-handedly ruined The Departed for me – but when you’re on fire, you’re on fire. And there haven’t been many places in the man’s career where “doing a Jack” fit the role better than his demented take on the most notorious of all Batman’s foes. It’s easy to forget that the Joker is supposed to be a surpassingly frightening madman, and to be sure, a lot of Nicholson’s $60 million performance is a bit sillier than insane, but the insanity is there, and it’s delicious.
Also worth mentioning is Anton Furst’s much-lauded design, rendering Gotham neither as a real city nor a comic book variation thereon, but a frightening industrial nightmare of girders and Expressionist angles, blacks and greys every which way you look. Not only does the film like dynamite on its own terms, but it served a role in the development of the summer mega-blockbuster that I think is typically ignored: unmistakably a Burton film, it was as far as I can tell the first giant smash hit outside of Spielberg where you could tell that the director was pumping a great deal of his own personality into the proceedings. And that has borne fruit in the amazing run of modern-day blockbusters, where even the bad ones tend to feel like the work of an auteur. Good directors don’t just make good tentpole movies, they make characteristically good tentpole movies, and I do think we have Burton’s success and Warner’s gamble to thank for that trend.
Danny Elfman’s score, meanwhile, is a treat, especially his main theme, which remains one of the great motifs for any movie hero.
What Went Wrong: Mostly, scenarist and co-screenwriter Sam Hamm, who clearly doesn’t get – or doesn’t give a damn about – what makes Batman Batman. It’s easy to focus on the unfortunate choice to give the Joker a distinctly non-canonical origin story, but at least we can forgive that on the grounds that the resultant Joker/Batman parallels make for a fine movie qua movies.
No, where he and Warren Skaaren (and the notoriously comic-indifferent Burton) really drop the ball is showing who Batman is. Especially, who he is relative to Bruce Wayne; not only does the film stumble in demonstrating the simple fact that they are the same man, assuming perhaps that the audience isn’t that stupid (in which the film is at least a step up from the expostiontastic Superman), it never really draws any picture of what drives a multi-millionaire to don a fetish suit and fight crime. Keaton’s performance doesn’t help matters, as he establishes the tradition that an actor will be a good Bruce Wayne or a good Batman, but not both – he is a good Batman, while his Wayne is just an addled but decent fella with no real personality – and in the end we have simply no sense of who this man is, and why he’s so terrifically unconcerned when his butler brings a lady into the Batcave just to be peevish.
Speaking of which: Kim Basinger is a disaster as photojournalist Vicki Vale. She’s just not that good of an actress, and her role is terribly underwritten with little or no motivation (how much better that she had a moment at the end like Rachel’s in Batman Begins!), and Vicki is nothing more than a cipher who exists just to be kidnapped and set up the climax. But at least she serves a purpose, unlike Robert Wuhl as her reporter buddy Alexander Knox; a perfunctory character played with Wuhl’s customary asshatishness.
Since I ended with Elfman in the “good” column, let me end the “bad” column with the out-of-place Prince songs, wedged into the film to give it some absolutely needless music video clips.
The Man in the Cowl: Still Keaton.
The Villains: Remember that lovely, lilting tagline, “The Bat. The Cat. The Penguin”? They’re played by Danny DeVito (Penguin) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Catwoman).
The Plot: During the Christmas season, villainous department store owner Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) convinces sewer-dwelling outcast Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot to run for Mayor and authorize a shady power plant deal. Meanwhile, Schreck tosses his meek secretary Selina Kyle out of a tall window, but she’s brought back from death by the something something of cats, and turns herself into a kitten with a whip and the world’s tightest leather suit to avenge her gender and her new species. The Dark Knight stops all this as Bruce and Selina unknowingly fall in love.
What Went Right: Jack may have given one of his greatest performances as one of the greatest screen supervillains ever, but he’s outdone on both counts by the majestic, mesmerising Michelle Pfeiffer, at her career peak in what remains the single finest performance of a baddie in any comic book movie (look for that to change on Friday). Besides the great shift she makes from mousy Kyle to the inordinately sexy Catwoman, she delivers the innuendo-laden dialogue Daniel Waters wrote for her with some of the most orgasmic line-readings in all of the cinema: a personal favorite is “I don’t know about you, Miss Kitty, but I feel so much yummier.” Not to mention that she looks amazing in a catsuit. She’s absolutely purrfect.
Yeah, I just went there, and you can’t make me take it back.
Moving right along: Bo Welch, in his third and final collaboration with Burton, replaces Furst as designer, and perhaps emboldened by the positive response to the Gothic excess of the original, he goes completely nuts in turning Gotham into a demented land of set design gone amok. The difference, to my mind, is simple: Batman was a giant studio film that Tim Burton directed, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton film with a giant studio budget. That distinction makes a world of difference in bumping the second film’s look all the way toward the director’s famously idiosyncratic vision, right at the time that he was making his most distinctive films.
And that spreads to everything else: the character design (most obviously the Penguin, though what other filmmaker could have produced that Max Schreck?), and subtler things like the camerawork and even Elfman’s score (including a quote from the not-yet-released Nightmare Before Christmas) have a much stronger Burtonian tang than they did in the first movie.
What Went Wrong: A lot of tiny things, but the one that bothers me most: Batman takes his sweet time Returning. Of the first 30 minutes of the film, Batman/Bruce Wayne is on screen for less than three. Burton’s sympathies as a storyteller clearly lie with the Penguin (here and in the first film, I’ve always thought that this was strange: Batman seems like a natural Burton-esque outsider), and having to give both villains their own origin story eats up a lot of time here, in a film that already seems to be much more about the individual beats of the narrative than its overall arc.
Splitting its focus between three figures means that Returns is an embryonic example of a sin that would not only torpedo the franchise, but still occasionally plagues the modern comic book movie: Too Many Villains Syndrome. When a film picks up too many bad guys, something has to give somewhere, and it’s rare for the film not to suffer as a result. Remember how wandering and flabby Spider-Man 3 was compared to the first two? There’s also X-Men: The Last Stand, which has the reverse problem: Too Many Heroes, or at least a strong focus on the wrong heroes. Admittedly, Returns handles its dual villains better than either of its successors would, but the plot takes a looong time to come together. And even when it does, the treatment of the Penguin is often scattershot.
Keaton, in the meantime, has not noticeably improved his Bruce Wayne, though his Batman remains brooding and intense.
The Man in the Cowl: Noted crazyperson Val Kilmer, on the backside of his era of stardom.
The Villains: Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones), formerly Gotham DA Harvey Dent, scarred and gone crazy with a split personality; bitter Wayne Industries researcher Edward Nygma, out for revenge and calling himself the Riddler (Jim Carrey).
The Plot: As Two-Face plots his revenge against Batman, who he blames for his accident, the Riddler plots to destroy Bruce Wayne with the help of his brainwave-sucking helmet. Meanwhile, the amorous psychologist Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) falls in love with both Batman and Wayne, while the Dark Knight trains a new sidekick in the form of orphaned circus acrobat Dick “Robin” Grayson (Chris O’Donnell).
What Went Right: Though Schumacher is often given a lot of shit for the neon excesses of his Gotham, after Burton’s crazy German nightmare, it’s hard to say that it doesn’t look like a comic book; it just doesn’t look like the same comic book. Sort of a Blade Runner feel by way of anime and the then-unpublished Transmetropolitan comic series.
Kilmer’s Batman, meanwhile, though not as strong as Keaton’s (and suffering, like Keaton, from a boring milquetoast Bruce Wayne) is not nearly as bad as history remembers it. He also manages to play the love story with a great deal more credibility than Keaton did in the first Batman.
Also, the film plays Robin’s origin story as well as it possibly could, given that Robin isn’t really a very good character.
What Went Wrong: Nipples. On the Bat suit.
Plus, a really dire case, not only of Too Many Villains, but of Extremely Crappy Villains. It’s not just bad that Two-Face, one of the greatest Batman antagonists, is given a tossed-off origin flashback while the Riddler – a lousy villain who was only ever remotely good in the Batman TV show, where his lameness fit the campy tone – is origined in loving detail, and that when the two team up, mostly because the film requires that they do so, the Riddler is made very much the focus. No, it’s that the screenwriters, including the vile Akiva Goldsman, have crafted the characters to be lazy retreads of the Joker: give his propensity for laughing and being maniacal to Two-Face, give his warped sense of humor to the Riddler, call it a day. And that gives Jones and Carrey absolutely nothing to work with, leading to the worst performance of Jones’s career, and for Carrey… remember how completely terrible he was back in the early and mid-’90s? I hadn’t, until I rewatched this film.
Casting Carrey and introducing Robin tips the film’s hand, really: it’s taking its cues from the Adam West show, and not the infinitely darker Burton films/post-Frank Miller comics. But the show needed the enforced cheapness of 1960s television to make its camp work, whereas Forever is a summer tentpole. The goofy tone and big budget clash badly, though not half as badly as they would in just two years…
Chase Meridian is a completely wasted character (thank God for Kidman that she had To Die For around the same time, else I really do think that this film would have set her career back years), trapped in a terribly unsuccessful attempt at digging into the Batman/Bruce duality that the Burton films ignored. I appreciate that the attempt was made, sure, but it’s cringingly bad.
Lastly, do you know what, besides Jim Carrey, really sucked in 1995? CGI effects. I mean, really sucked bad. I forgot about that.
The Man in the Cowl: George Clooney, striving to make the jump from TV to movies.
The Villains: Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the one-time medical scientist Victor Fries, whose body and emotions turned to ice in a cryo-freezing accident; Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), who was Pamela Isley before a psychotic colleague killed her after exposing her to a super-serum that turned her into a half-plant; Ivy’s giant supersoldier henchman Bane (Jeep Swenson).
The Plot: Mr. Freeze wants to turn Gotham – nay, the world! – into an ice cube, unless he can get the money he needs to save his cryogenically-suspended wife, on the brink of death; Poison Ivy wants to destroy all animals and turn the world into a haven for plant life. The plant lady and the man who turns everything into sub-zero ice join up in a very well-thought-out plan. Meanwhile, Batman and Robin (O’Donnell) get to feuding, while the dying Alfred’s (Michael Gough, in his fourth turn as the character) niece Barbara (Alicia Silverstone) shows up for no goddamn reason except to arbitrarily become Batgirl.
What Went Right: Its failure at the box office ensured that Joel Schumacher would never be given another Batman film to fuck-up; indeed, that Batman would be shelved until someone with a clear vision came along to save him.
What Went Wrong: My lord, it’s like asking what makes the ocean wet. How about the profound fakeness of all the sets, full of ice that looks just like plastic? Clooney’s terrible inability to find his role? I’d hoped that knowing as I now do that he was deliberately playing a “gay Batman” might have made it a touch more interesting, but it doesn’t. His Wayne is better than his Batman, which is a switch, but both are pretty terrible.
Here we’ve got the two worst villains in the series: Freeze makes “cold” puns in something like 85% of his dialogue, while the crazy and sexy Poison Ivy is marred by having chaotic motivations that lead to the single worst performance of Thurman’s career. “Single worst performance of the career” can apply to a couple other people here, too, including Silverstone, whose career isn’t exactly bursting with brilliant performances. The fact that I had to use IMDb to recap the plot is a sign that something went wrong; all I could remember – and I just rewatched the fucking thing last weekend – was “a whole lotta fight scenes, including that awful bit where Batman and Robin survive a free-fall from the upper atmosphere.”
Mostly, that’s the problem in a nutshell: endless unmotivated fight scenes and a TV-show-inspired goofy tone that always errs on the side of shrill. God, I hate Joel Schumacher.
HOLY BAT-BONUS!
The Man in the Cowl: The notorious, beloved Adam West.
The Villains: The pompous, waddling master of fowl play, the Penguin (Burgess Meredith); the devilish clown prince of crime, the Joker (Cesar Romero); the creator of criminal conundrums, the Riddler (Frank Gorshin). Gosh, and the Catwoman (Lee Meriwether)!
The Plot: The four trickiest super-criminals in Gotham kidnap a scientist and his dehydration ray, for unknown ends, but as Batman and Robin (Burt Ward) know too well, their minimum objective must be…the entire world.
What Happened: Words like “good” and “bad” are tricky things to use in regard to this movie, which was based on the campiest television program then known to American broadcast history (and which once featured Liberace in a story, thus creating the campiest thing ever produced in the history of the world). It’s not really possible to judge it on the same terms we can judge the Warner series of films. It’s not even very easy to judge it in comparison to its origins; it’s basically twice as long as the normal two-part serials on a TV show not noted for its wild fluctuations in quality.
That said, there are some things that can be said both for and against it. Its sense of humor is well in place, including what has long been my favorite single West-era gag in “shark repellent Bat-spray.” The Riddler’s riddles aren’t as warped as they were in the best of times, but it’s still very agreeable to watch such silliness as:
GORDON: “What weighs six ounces, sits in a tree and is very dangerous?”
ROBIN: “A sparrow with a machine gun!”
GORDON: “Yes, of course.”
Odd as it is to say about a film where the villains’ plot is so completely irrelevant, the film suffers a bit from Too Many Villains: Romero’s Joker is given virtually nothing to do (they make up for it by giving Meredith some of the best lines he ever delivered as the Penguin). Then, there’s the tricky matter of Meriwether’s Catwoman: fine on her own right, but even 42 years later, it’s hard not to compare her to Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt and find her lacking. Gorshin’s Riddler is, as usual, Gorshin’s Riddler; the only place in the character’s 60-year history where he was worth a damn.
At 105 minutes, is the film a bit long? Yes. If you think of it as four episodes (and it’s conveniently structured almost to the minute for you to think of it that way), the fourth is pretty much disposable next to the first three. But for what it is – namely, the only convenient way to see any of West’s Batman while the series sits around in Rights Hell – it’s pretty hard to say anything against it.
Besides, out of the five films we’ve just looked at, it has by far the strongest emphasis on Batman rather than the villains. Is it just me, or does that seem a bit weird?