Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.
So, man, I was feeling utterly at sea getting ready to start my review of The Prestige. Like I was just staring at the screen, having no idea how to even say what I wanted to say. And now here I am again, doing the same thing with The Dark Knight, a movie that I feel completely unable to talk about. So, okay, look, let’s do this, just as a way to get the words flowing. What ISN’T perfect about this movie? Well, let’s see, the action this time around is much improved from the Batman Begins action sequences; I mean, look, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But that whole sonar sequence at the construction site. That is a bad action sequence. I was hoping, having not seen this movie for a few years, that it would work for me this time since it is like the one thing that isn’t absolutely brilliant about this movie, but, no, unfortunately, it is what it is: not good. So, am I totally in the tank for this movie? Oh, no, not at all; I think there’s a solid two to three minutes that isn’t perfect. And I do feel Maggie Gyllenhaal is somewhat miscast as Rachel Dawes; she’s a better actress overall than Katie Holmes is, by far, but for this part, I still kind of feel like Holmes was really perfect casting and she really nailed it. It’s hardly a problem that it’s Gyllenhaal; she’s never bad. But I wish Holmes was back, honestly.
Beyond that, I guess I could just say everything else is exactly what it needs to be and more in order for this movie to function as both grand entertainment and a thoughtful work of art. I mean, just to start at the bottom level of the movie, the script is fantastic. The Nolans find a way into the Joker that feels absolutely of a piece with his mythos and yet utterly fresh and genuinely terrifying. The script is of a piece with The Prestige in that it’s stuffed to the brim with thematic material; The Dark Knight is a movie about moral spectrums & moral lines, about escalation and about tragedy. It’s a movie that features several of Nolan’s favorite conflict devices, the triangle: there’s Batman/The Mob/Joker; Batman/Gordon/Harvey; Batman/Joker/Harvey; Bruce/Rachel/Harvey . . . in all of these dramatic stand-offs, each player or group of players have an actual philosophy, an actual belief about the way the world works and should work and those philosophies are what drive their actions and those actions are what drive the plot. This is a movie where, even as the plot takes a lot of detours that a lot of movies would have shortcutted around (that trip to China, for instance), nothing in the plot happens only because it needs to. Every plot development flows out of an action taken by a character, an action that feels absolutely right because of the character that’s taken it. Character does drive destiny in some key ways here and that’s central to the tragic arc of this film.
When I first saw this movie, I was expecting it to feature the Joker and set-up Harvey’s transition into Two-Face for the third movie in the series. When I saw that wasn’t what they were going for, that they were going to try to do Harvey’s entire arc in this movie, I was worried that I was going to feel that the character of Two-Face was cheated. And it’s an old canard that the quality of a comic book movie sinks in an inverse relationship with the number of villains it features. But I’m darned if I think they could have done Harvey/Two-Face better in his own movie than they did here where he’s part of the larger ensemble. The movie has a lot to say about heroism and sacrifice and Harvey’s journey is central to the inescapable tragedy of The Dark Knight, a dark mirror of Bruce’s own journey: a man of privilege remade through tragedy into a dark shadow-self, but a shadow-self even darker than Bruce’s.
All of which, I suppose leads us into the performances because you can’t talk about that final face-off between Bruce, Gordon and Harvey without talking about the performances which are astonishing. And, of course, you can’t talk about the performances without talking about Ledger. I’m still just so absolutely delighted, if that’s a good way to say it, with Ledger’s performance as the Joker that I can’t help but out myself as a pre-film Ledger skeptic. I just hadn’t seen that much of his stuff and what I had seen, I hadn’t been that impressed with; but even granting that he was a good actor, I just thought he wasn’t a good physical match for what I thought the Joker could be. And, you know, it is so rarely that I am proved wrong in a POSITIVE way that I just still carry the absolute joy of realizing, about a minute after he strolled into the mob boss meeting that he was going to be amazing. And he really is. I was just listening to a podcast about The Prestige and one of the hosts said that The Prestige was such a good movie that he didn’t find it annoying that the first line was “Are you watching closely?” and I totally know what he means. I would say that’s analoguous to something in The Dark Knight, which is that the Joker, at one point says, “I am an agent of chaos.” And, you know, in a lesser movie with a lesser performance, I would find it really annoying that the character in the movie that was an agent of chaos just flat out said they were an agent of chaos. That’s a kind of on-the-nose writing I typically dislike; but Ledger’s performance, and the way the character is written as well, absolutely earn that moment. So that’s how good Ledger is: so good I don’t mind him saying, “I am an agent of chaos.” It’s just a perfectly calibrated performance and there’s not a moment that doesn’t feel absolutely right or better than right. I feel like it might just be the most beloved great performance in cinema history and I say that because this is a movie that’s been seen by a LOT of people who aren’t always into loving performances, but they all love Ledger’s performance here. So I think the best thing to say about this performance is that, in my opinion, after thirteen years of think pieces and reviews and blogs and internet videos, this performance has still not been over-praised.
The rest of the cast is also very good. Probably best among the non-Ledger ensemble is Gary Oldman who genuinely gives one of his best performances in this movie; it’s not showy, but it’s profoundly human and it’s his best performance of the trilogy. You can see how much the Joker scares him, but how determined he is to do what needs to be done. And, in that final scene, he just brings it, from the very first moment to that final, amazing monologue. Bale is trilogy-best in this one too; he reacts differently to the Joker than Gordon does, though I think he’s just as frightened in some ways. He reacts with rage and in the interrogation scene, Nolan and Bale tap into an often overlooked aspect of Batman: just how frightening he is. And in that scene, he’s not lurking in the shadows or suddenly disappearing into the darkness. He’s just a guy in the suit in a fully lit room in a police station and it’s a testimony to just how much effort has been put into these movies that it isn’t immediately laughable. The suit doesn’t look terrible and Bale’s intensity is through the roof in that scene and he’s genuinely terrifying. Aaron Eckhart is excellent, exuding a Redford-esque energy as the white knight of this movie. His part is probably honestly the hardest and not just because he has the biggest arc of the movie. Playing the squeaky clean crusader without being cheesy or unbelievable is always harder than playing the flawed anti-hero or the evil villain, but Eckhart makes Harvey believable, tapping into his insecurities and showing us the uncertainty behind the confident exterior. If we don’t buy Harvey’s tragic downfall, the movie falls apart; but we do, because it’s well-written and wonderfully performed. Freeman and Caine are both as excellent as we’ve come to expect. Caine is particularly wonderful, with his most complex part in the trilogy and his best acting of the trilogy. Like Oldman, Caine unfortunately slips into the realm of the hammy in Dark Knight Rises; Caine’s probably acting MORE and HARDER in Rises, but he’s better here. And it’s worth mentioning that this is the first time I can remember noticing David Dastmalchian, an actor I’ve grown to really love as a quirky character actor, in a small role as one of the Joker’s henchmen.
But before I wrap up, I gotta talk about the visuals of this movie. This was, in many ways, Nolan’s most visually well-done movie up to that point and there’s a lot to that. This was, if memory serves, the first movie where Nolan really used the IMAX cameras and they produced some downright stunning stuff, right from that opening robbery sequence. He’s improved at the action side of things from Batman Begins as well; the action in Batman Begins wasn’t terrible and it wasn’t the way it was because Nolan was a bad director, but because he had a vision I don’t think worked particularly well. Here, the action is more compelling and shot with an eye toward iconic poses and moves. The first time we see Batman in action, in the parking garage, signals that this is going to be a movie with a lot better action and it lives up to that, particularly in a sequence that is still one of the best choreographed, edited and executed sequences of Nolan’s career, that astounding semi chase. It’s one of the great action sequences of all time in my opinion, all bathed in that amber light of the night-time city, slowly building tension and ramping up the intensity. It eschews a lot of the lazy tricks used to make a sequence exciting. It goes for quite a while with no music at all; and the editing is slowly paced – it’s not cutting every 0.72 seconds in effort to get your heart rate up. It’s all the visuals, the sound-design and the atmosphere. The music finally does come in, so I might as well take a second here to detour into the score which is an absolute masterpiece. I’m not always a fan of Zimmer, not even a fan of all of Zimmer’s scores for Nolan, but this one is a knock-out, a twitchy, unsettling set of music that gets everything exactly right. But back to the semi chase. I mean, it really is amazing. I also love the way it keeps climaxing; you feel like it’s hit the moment it was building toward because it has more than one jaw-drop moment. The moment when the helicopter gets taken down is a holy **** moment, but then the sequence unveils the Batpod and THAT moment is a moment when you just about jump out of your seat and the way the Batpod is shot is edge of your seat action filmmaking. And then the sequence ACTUALLY climaxes by FLIPPING A ************* SEMI TRUCK and since this is Nolan, you know they ******* did it for real and it’s amazing. And then things ramp down perfectly with the “hit me” confrontation between Batman & the Joker and then it ends with absolute perfection, the reveal of Gordon with “We got you, you son of a bitch.” It’s a truly perfect sequence right in the middle of this movie and it also perfectly sets up the interrogation scene, another really astonishingly brilliant scene.
I guess I’ll just wrap up by briefly looking at this movie in a little bit of context, which is to say in context of a truly astonishing run of great movies by Nolan. Over eight years, Nolan released five absolutely excellent films and I’ll put that run up there as one of the all time great runs for a director: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight. That’s pretty crazy. But Nolan pulled another trick off here, a trick somewhat specifically on me, I think. I talked about finding Batman Begins the weakest, though still very good, film in that run and feeling that I’d rather Nolan did his own more original conceptual stuff instead of Batman movies. The Prestige really solidified that opinion. But with The Dark Knight, Nolan proved to me that his “franchise” films really could be absolute masterpieces and next up we have Inception, a movie that proved to me that Nolan’s “original” films could, well, let’s just say not be masterpieces and leave it there for now. Regardless, The Dark Knight really is the perfect example of what a blockbuster movie can be. When I talk about wanting blockbusters that are also smart, savvy, thoughtful and thematically rich, I guess it really is still The Dark Knight I’m talking about. Other blockbusters have pulled off similar things, but this movie is just truly special in my opinion. So when people say you have to sacrifice artistic integrity and smart writing in order to get butts in seats, well, no. No, you really don’t and The Dark Knight is Exhibit A in the case for crowd-pleasing, massively entertaining blockbusters that are also well-crafted, wonderful works of art. 4 stars.
tl;dr – movie is both a crowd-pleasing blockbuster and a rich, emotionally devastating tragedy; still a breathtaking masterpiece, boasting great performances, great writing and great direction. 4 stars.