Same Bat-Time, Same Station

by Richard von Busack

A Zodiac-like killer is terrifying the worst city in the world: dread Gotham City, hopelessly corrupt and violent, inundated with torrents of greasy rain. This masked serial killer made the mayor his first target, and is working his way down. The press nicknames him “The Riddler” (Paul Dano) since he leaves cryptic clues, viral videos and greeting cards to the masked detective on his trail. He is, of course, the fearsome Batman (Robert Pattinson), secretly the traumatized orphaned millionaire Bruce Wayne.

Ponderous, and afraid to laugh at itself, The Batman is as rich in atmosphere as it is poor in pace. It’s a story of bloodlines–”I never had a chance,” The Riddler howls in anguish. In this telling, Bruce is doomed to life in his suit of armor for deeds that happened before he was born.

Matt Reeves is 55, so I’m assuming he was too young for the first great wave of Batmania in 1966, when the Adam West tv show debuted. The three-season long show was dismissed as corny and camp. But it was like nothing the children of those days had ever seen before on television, with its cast of heavy-hitting film noir all-stars, its phosphorescent colors, its brazen sexiness, and its Carol Reed-like Dutch angles. I think most childhoods of the era had a fissure: before and after Batman. (There is one little shot of fan-service in this new Bat-opera: we see a bust of Shakespeare in Bruce Wayne’s study, just like the one that concealed a button that opened the automatic doors to the Batpoles.)

I completely understand a lack of fascination with Batman, and I’ll never share it. Modern retellings are shadowed with pity and loss. My mother died horribly of cancer shortly before the release of Batman (1989). This movie-loving woman, who raised a movie-loving son, would have been a huge fan of Tim Burton’s approach. Watching and rewatching it was quite tough at the time…during that scene of Michael Keaton’s Peter Lorre-like Bruce Wayne leaving a pair of roses on the concrete of Crime Alley, at the spot where his parents had been shot.

The Wayne tragedy punches a hole in our national optimism. It laughs at our thoughts and prayers. It’s the one cultural place where gun-fanciers and would-be abolishers come together in a moment of pop grief. Which is why the double-shooting is staged sometimes baroquely, like religious iconography: Zack Snyder, in the titles of 2016’s Batman vs Superman, shows the slow-mo of a broken string of Martha White’s pearls scattering. Here Snyder copied panels from Frank Millers drawings of this primal comic book murder in graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns.

Not everyone cares about Batman. But anyone can understand a senseless, inexplicable loss that renders a survivor estranged, numb with horror, unable to be themselves anymore. That aspect of the story of Bruce Wayne and his dark companion can give weight to these tales of mystery. The best animated Batman film, 1993 Mask of the Phantasm, has a line by Dana Delany’s Andrea, pondering the strangeness Bruce Wayne: “Why does a man with so much money look like he wants to jump off a cliff?”

The Batman does without the Waynes’ murder, I think a first for a Batfilm. Instead it suffers the curse of today’s epics, ret-conning, changing the origin story in the hopes of new depths and surprise. The reveal is just another moment in The Batman that doesn’t carry the emotional impact it seeks. This forbidden past should have been something the detective discovered, the way we all learn something unsavory about our parents.

Our hero finds out that there was madness in his family– no surprise, considering what Bruce Wayne gets up to at night. But it’s all in a blurting-out by the villain, in the fashion of the Q-Anon ranter’s YouTube drop. A movie as long as The Batman ought to have found a better way to tell this backstory without what amounts to an info dump.

One respects the implication that the Bat gets much more information when he makes a social call as Bruce Wayne, than when he bursts into a gangland nightclub like a one-man tac squad. The crimelord Falcone (John Turturro) is involved in Bruce’s backstory. He’s the survivor after the spectacular fall of Gotham City’s previous overlord Boss Moroni. He’s rather avuncular when Bruce Wayne shows up, meeting this hermit kid who looks pale and frail, with his hair studiously combed in front of his eyes. Falcone explains Wayne’s past with a line purloined from Chinatown.

The Batman is nervous, as it probably should be, about the politics of what Bruce Wayne is doing. The quite good Zoe Kravitz is Selina, a lithe cat burglar never really ID’d as Catwoman. She speaks of the “White privileged assholes” that made Gotham City what it is. Let the angry fanboys complain about the wokeness. Christopher Nolan had Michael Caine’s Alfred in 2005’s Batman Begins explain that the caverns beneath Wayne Manor had once been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Thus we had a solid example of how lawbreaking can serve a greater good.

The films are on safest grounds when they show us, instead of telling, that Gotham got that bad through decades of upper-class crime.

This is the most gothic Gotham we’ve seen. Reeves shot in Liverpool and Scotland, in edifices bristling with pinnacles and crockets and gables and architectural features I’d need to crack my copy of From Abacus to Zeus to name. The last scene has a pair of motorcyclists wheeling through Glasgow’s Necropolis, a road lined in the ancient Roman manner with monuments to the dead. On the Gotham skyline is a familiar local building, the Oakland Tribune tower (it’s Venetian, not Gothic, but it looks suitably old and strange).

The city is a maze of rattling elevated trains, death trap subways, and fire escapes, like the one Selina pirouettes upon and pounces out into the streets.

This is a city of walls and windows that basically only have decorative functions. I’m not a fan of Power of the Dog, but Jane Campion made an earlier film, 2003’s In the Cut, that demonstrated how buildings leaked in tough NYC neighborhoods, letting in noise, light and strangers.

The batcave is actually a disused subway platform, approached by dripping urban tunnels; the ride to them is accompanied by the ominous ding-dong of Michael Giachinno’s score, based on the Em/C-G switch of chords in the movies’ theme, “Something in the Way’ by Nirvana.

Opposing this terrible rat’s warren of a city is the promises of ‘renewal’. Like Spielberg’s West Side Story, which intelligently makes Robert Moses the villain, Gotham City has the kind of developers who push people out. There is an AOC-like reformer mayor, Bella Reál (Jayme Lawson) but the picture isn’t very interested in her.

We know why Gotham is dreadful. But what lures us back to this place? Nostalgia for the malignant energy cities had before they were emptied by AirBNB. The badness contrasts today’s sad echoing squalor, of streets of chain franchises that echo each other like the running backdrop in a cheap Hanna-Barbera cartoon. These Bat movies recall the era when cities were the kind of place that made you want to stay out all night and do bad things.

Gotham has a drug epidemic going— it’s apparently been going for some time. There’s something called ‘drops’ that you apply to your cornea like Visine. The effect must be heavily tranquilizing–there isn’t a manic style in this city.

If The Batman is frequently clumsy, Reeves is good at visual rhymes. Batman’s newest gadget is a contact lens camera/interface that allows surveillance and identifying suspects. Like the ‘drop-heads’ of Gotham, he too is applying something to his own eyes. (Selina gets the lens-cameras too, when she works with Batman. The lenses must be irritating since it makes both the Cat and the Bats’ eyeshadow run.)

The same rhyme scheme occurs in The Batman’s beginning, where we can’t tell if the hero or the villain is narrating, in talking about the quality of the night, and the importance of selecting villains. The Riddler’s notebooks are full of ciphers. Batman keeps his own ink and pen diary of his night adventures, which we see headlined: “Gotham City Project”. (Oh no, more trust fund art!)

As Bruce Wayne, Pattinson is lost and abject, a recluse. But as the Bat, Pattinson has mojo. He’s a most aesthetically appealing Batman. The pretty Selina teases him a little, sassing him: “C’mon, ‘Vengeance.’ When she strokes his helmet, he lowers his head like a horse being petted.

Batman here is a sophomore Bat, two years on the job, and not always recognized. On a subway, a gang of clown-white faced thugs are trying to initiate a prospect by picking a stranger for the “knock-out game”. Batman emerges from the darkness, his boots thudding like the cowboy going alone into the dangerous saloon. The gang kids titter at him–”Wouldya look at this guy?” After they’ve been subdued, their would be victim, an Asian kid, collapses on the ground, begging Batman: “Please don’t hurt me.”

Also deft was the discomfiture of a group of cops at a murder scene, at this weird almost-mute figure in black permitted to study the evidence along side them. “Goddamned freak,” one cop murmurs.

Batman hasn’t learned everything yet, and that might explain why this movie makes the violence thicker and less graceful. When Batman escapes from a police station, and gets to the roof, he makes a gasp when he sees how high up he is. He fails to stick his landing after a short glide from the tower, crashing to the sidewalk in a very painful-looking stunt.

The Bat we know and love would have been able to save a victim from one of the Riddler’s death traps. And he would have picked up clues faster–a helpful cop has to tip Batman off to the actual function of a key murder weapon.

Dano’s Riddler has morbid riddles–”What happens to a liar after he’s dead?” is the best one, and he’s dressed like the geek in Pulp Fiction, only with $99 glasses. When shelled from this costume, Dano has some pathos, with his cute, damaged smile, girlish laughter and soft features. One feels so protective of him that we ignore questions. This guy was a forensic accountant. As they say, there’s no accounting for taste and no taste for accounting. But forensic accountants make beaucoup bucks, which they merit for their highly important and difficult job. One of the terrible things about Gotham City is that it certainly retards a person’s development.

The Penguin, an underboss, doesn’t have the fragrance the character has had over the years. (Recall how Stafford Repp’s Chief O’Hara used to describe him: “That pompous, waddling bird of crime!”) “Oz” Cobblepot has the closest thing to funny lines in the movie, as when describes the soon to be Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and his masked partner as “Good cop, bat cop.” In the same scene, Oz irritably corrects Our Hero on the gender of a Spanish noun. (This too is a clue that a more mature Batman would have got.)

As The Penguin, Colin Farrell is wrapped in plenty of latex, making him look like a leper who’d been in a bad knife fight. He has an Al Capone accent. It may be the worst decision to make a big actor unrecognizable since what was done to Al Pacino in Dick Tracy.

In what’s probably a nod to the few times The Penguin stole the Batmobile, the Penguin leads his foe on a helldriver chase down a freeway, which is edited for impact instead of fun. There is some pleasure in the famous supercar announcing itself. It’s hidden in a packed parking lot, when the jumbo-jet shriek starts to rise. I’m all for the idea that the Batmobile ought to sound scary, like the Jericho trumpets the Germans put on their bombers during the weltkrieg.

The emotional side of The Batman tries to break through the frigid style, and every now and then it does. There isn’t such a breakthrough when Alfred gets hospitalized: that’s just awkward. (He’s Andy Sirkis in a part apparently modeled on the quite good Sean Pertwee in tv’s Gotham: more Cockney battler than posh butler.)

The movie just has too much gravity, too much landed blows in the name of realism–this despite bravura scenes, like the feat of lighting a fight in total darkness with bursts of automatic weapon fire. And unlike the far superior The Dark Knight (2008) it’s not about something–Nolan’s film was a study of reaction and overreaction, the escalation of destruction, and the American way of swatting a fly with a sledgehammer.

Certainly The Batman was a technical feat of some magnitude. One recalls Elmore Leonard’s advice to the beginning scriptwriter: “Don’t start with the words, ‘Exterior: Rain’”… on the grounds that you’ve already ramped up the budget. The finale is quite a spectacle, a Katrina-style crisis, topped with a bullet-filled skirmish staged on a tottering scoreboard in Gotham’s version of Madison Square Garden.

This is when Batman has to becomes a rescuer instead of avenger. Here’s where The Batman needed to work the hardest. And yet it didn’t have time to do what, despite the long running time, what it needed to do…to remove the element of compulsion from this tormented hero, and make him a benign sinister figure, like Frankenstein’s monster, a friend to frightened children.