You said this wasn’t about thrill seeking.
It’s not.
What would you call that?
Damn good television.
To some degree, up to this point, every film in Christopher Nolan’s career has kind of been him entering a new phase, starting with the no-budget school, moving into the indie crowd, then into the mid-budget studio picture . . . but there’s no looking back now because with Batman Begins, Nolan has arrived in the realm of the blockbuster and for all the varied tones and styles of the movies to come he has, with the possible exception of The Prestige, made exclusively films that sit most comfortably in the blockbuster genre, if it is a genre. This isn’t all to the good; but neither is it all to the bad. Nolan’s blockbusters have been anything but consistent in terms of quality, so there’s plenty of good and bad to go around. But for now, let’s talk about Batman Begins which starts off this new phase of Nolan’s career in a way that’s quite good.
I wasn’t in love with this movie when it came out and I feel like I’ve only seen it maybe a total of two times over the past fifteen years, so I was excited to revisit it. And I think I responded much more positively to it because I suppose I underrated its biggest strength at the time. That strength is, to put it simply, just how competently and seriously everyone involved is taking this thing. Yeah, we had Batman Forever and Batman & Robin in the past, so I appreciated that this movie was a corrective from that, but I also kind of felt that it didn’t do enough to really push itself toward excellence. There’s some validity to that complaint, I think, but fifteen years of being bludgeoned by increasingly melodramatic, and in the case of Zack Snyder downright operatic, comic book movies really made this serious, relatively dark, character driven and surprisingly small scale movie feel like a breath of fresh air. I mean, we’ve spent fifteen years talking about how Nolan’s take on Batman was “realistic,” so I won’t go into it, but, if you haven’t seen Batman Begins in a few years, you’ve probably forgotten just how well it works. I mean, no spoilers for future reviews, but by The Dark Knight Rises, the scale of this trilogy had gotten off the charts and the realism had been dialed down substantially. Remember those leg braces? Or the motorcycle chase that went on for literal hours? Rises was not really a realistic movie at all and that’s before you get into the guy who fixes a broken spine with the power of his fist and a harness made of bed sheets. But I’ve said too much already. But Batman Begins is the real deal; it feels surprisingly believable.
But it’s also an incredibly entertaining movie. The script is smart and even thematic. And while a lot of people lump the Dark Knight trilogy together as being an area of Nolan’s filmography that doesn’t really deal with his fascination with time, the first forty-five minutes or so of this movie are, in fact, told out of chronological order in a pretty sophisticated way. And this begins the phase of Nolan’s career where his films start to become true ensemble pieces. As I talked about a bit in my Insomnia review, I find it interesting that Following, Memento & Insomnia all basically revolve around a dramatic triangle. Those three films all really only have three important characters each, if you know what I mean. There are other characters, but they’re of less importance. This movie starts Nolan’s fascination with building the perfect ensemble and I have to say this is a really good one all the way down to the ground (with one exception which I think will surprise you when I talk about it in a minute; it’s not the traditional choice for “odd man out” in this cast).
Bale is really excellent in what is essentially a three-part role (hmm, yet another dramatic triangle): he has to play the real Bruce Wayne, a serious, smart and driven guy; the fake Bruce Wayne, a shallow, materialistic idiot; and the Batman, the legend, of course. He really nails them all; I think his scenes as the comic relief Bruce Wayne are pretty underrated. Michael Caine & Morgan Freeman are good solid support as his dual mentors. Gary Oldman really gives one of his most underrated performances as Jim Gordon; the portrayal of Gordon in this trilogy remains one of its greatest pleasures. Gordon’s a rich and interesting character and he just had never really been done right in an adaptation until this movie. It’s one of Oldman’s most down-to-earth and even naturalistic performances, but he brings a serious amount of heart and humanity to the role. And Cillian Murphy, an actor I was totally unfamiliar with at the time, absolutely steals every scene he’s in as the unbalanced Jonathan Crane/Scarecrow. He’s really wonderful and Nolan gets some good mileage out of his fear toxin in terms of surrounding him with creepy imagery. I think my favorite has to be the bat literally crawling out of his mouth during his first confrontation with Batman. The rest of the cast is full of talented people all the way to the ground, including Ken Watanabe and a criminally underused Rutger Hauer. Side-note: is there any other kind of Rutger Hauer? I mean, have any movies other than Blade Runner and The Hitcher even come close to utilizing the depths of his talents? And since I’m watching Nolan’s films in order, this movie also gives you a glimpse of Nolan paying back his friends for helping him back in the no-budget days; Jeremy Theobald, Lucy Russell and John Nolan, all of whom were in Following, show up in tiny roles.
And, oh, gotta point out, Victor Zsasz is in this movie! How did I forget that? I’m always saying I want that character done right in a movie but I’d forgotten he was actually in the Nolan-verse. AND this is actually a great set-up, because we see that he’s a violent thug, but then he gets transferred to Arkham and, while this happens off-screen, we can assume that he gets experimented on by Crane which could basically be his origin: an amoral psychopath, prone to violence, who then gets his crazy amped up to a thousand by Crane’s fear toxin. Okay, Zsasz sidebar over; let’s get to the controversy because this movie isn’t perfect.
Let me make a couple of controversial statements about the cast. Number one, Katie Holmes is good. She’s not a tremendous actress, okay? But I think she’s perfectly cast here and I still think, as I did when the movie first came out, that the backlash against her is unfair. She is, to some degree, one of the lesser players in the cast; she’s not really on the level of just about anybody else in the cast when it comes to raw skill as a performer. But, as I said, she’s perfectly cast as Rachel and, as big a fan of Maggie Gyllenhaal as I am, I think she’s actually kind of miscast in The Dark Knight. Nolan should have stuck with Holmes in my opinion. So who is the odd man out in terms of not giving a great performance? Well, I didn’t mention him in the above paragraph, so you might be ready for this: Liam Neeson is not particularly good here. I think he’s okay in the early parts of the film as Ducard. There’s a hint of viciousness in the character that he pulls off, but it also plays to Neeson’s strengths at portraying mentors. But there’s probably a reason Neeson hasn’t played more villains. He’s just not very convincing once the mask comes off and it’s revealed that he’s Ra’s al Ghul himself.
This is a problem with the League of Shadows overall in this movie. We’re supposed to buy that they’re this ancient organization that has been manipulating world politics for centuries, but they just don’t come across that way. By the time you get to the end of the movie, they just feel like bog-standard thugs. There’s something interesting about giving Ra’s and the League a big moral ideology, but when Liam Neeson starts waxing on about how they were there at the fall of Rome, you’re just like, “Oh, **** off, you were not.” Initially we’re supposed to buy them as these powerful ninjas, but on closer inspection, those black outfits were clearly purchased at an army surplus store in a mini-mall like three weeks ago, you know what I mean? If I wanted to give Nolan and his co-writer David Goyer the benefit of the doubt, I could argue that this is intentional. I mean, if the last five years have taught us anything it’s that most hate groups try to cloak themselves as if they’re following some sort of epic ideology when really it’s just a con artist leading a bunch of cosplayers. I suppose the presentation of the League here is kind of realistic in that way. But, while the script is good, even thematically so, I don’t think it’s that sophisticated.
There are a few other short-comings here. I don’t mind the choice of fighting styles for Batman here; it’s propulsive and hard-hitting. But the filming style doesn’t work. I know that Nolan said that he wanted us to see Batman in action the way his enemies would see him, but it doesn’t really work. It just makes the fight scenes feel clumsy. And while big name composers come along with Nolan’s graduation to the blockbuster arena, the score is overall very bland; having Zimmer and Newton Howard basically split the movie scoring duties is an interesting experiment, but it doesn’t work and they end up both putting in some of their least interesting work. I mean, when Zimmer’s bad, he’s at least usually bad in an interesting way; he’s rarely this boring.
But overall, I ended up really loving Batman Begins this time. It has a few flaws and, when it came out, I thought, rightly, that it was inferior to both Memento and Insomnia, so I was disappointed that a really interesting writer-director was getting shunted off into the arena of the comic book. Nolan would prove me wrong in two ways, by getting quickly back to doing his own thing and by proving just how good a comic book movie could be. So maybe that hindsight has something to do with my overall better feeling toward this movie now. Anyway, it’s not a perfect movie, but it’s well paced, beautifully made, smartly written and features a cast that’s a pleasure to watch. Nolan had a phenomenally good run of movies at one point and, without spoiling where in the run we are, I will say that this is the weakest of the movies in that run. But, you know what? It’s still darn great. 4 stars.
tl;dr – a fantastic ensemble populates a well-made, serious take on Batman and fifteen years later, it’s aged incredibly well, by the standards of the new comic book cinema. 4 stars.