CULTURE All the things a Batman movie should do By George Elkind
Veering from the false realism of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and the more earnest fantasias of Zack Snyder’s work, Matt Reeves’s The Batman moves toward a looser and better-humored fantasy space in its treatment of its title figure. With a script that seizes upon even the lowest-hanging sorts of camp morsels — a Catwoman (a game Zoë Kravitz) who makes “nine lives” quips and lingers over the phrase “the Cat and the Bat” — this iteration feels comfortable admitting a level of cheese into its system that olan co. could never have stomached, at least not consciously. The result is une pectedly welcome, a comic book movie that feels buoyed by a mi ture of humility and fidelity to its cartoon origins, and which stumbles only when it grasps at being more. s a figure for he can’t really be considered the same “character” in the old literary sense, across so many decades and re-castings — Batman has served as a canvas, usually, for whatever its creators need him to be, whether for commercial or personally driven reasons. Whether a super cop, a compulsive child-adopter and family man, a James Bond-style superspy, or technocratic control freak, the man (and that part’s important) has risen to an impossible range of occasions under an even greater variety of circumstances, ideologies, and times. ndefatigable, paternalistic, and discontented as he remains across creative treatments, longstanding commercial success and a core chameleonic nature have allowed him to be to some e tent whatever his creators might like him to be. On the screen or page, in their efforts to build a hero for their respective times and tastes, these artists often reveal stuff they might not wish to always a risk in making even the most mildly e pressive forms of art. With atman, a bit improbably, film artists often seem to get more license than one might e pect and show themselves accordingly. As Reeves renders him, Robert Pattinson’s ruce Wayne is a hapha ard, scrappy vigilante activist, e orci ing his own pains by in icting them he hopes constructively on others. Still wrecked over losing his parents
Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattison play familiar characters in The Batman.
at a young age, he’s built a reputation as a sort of urban legend, inspiring fears in the city’s criminal element, which he stirs by surprising crooks where he’s able “ can’t be everywhere at once,” he remarks), something he tells himself will help tamp down crime. riven largely by ghostly projections and a kind of stunted empathy specifically a desire to prevent others from e periencing the sorts of losses he’s felt himself — he operates less from a place of logic than of defiant, reactionary, and broadly directed anger, and is worn thin constantly as a result. Working in the run-up to a contentious mayoral election as his e travagant holdings wither from misuse and neglect, his eyes, along with those of effrey Wright’s ommissioner Gordon (“a good cop,” Batman continually insists) are trained for much of the film’s duration on the corrupt streaks running through Gotham
28 March 2-8, 2022 | metrotimes.com
ity’s governing forces. His rivals’ villains more on this later are fi ed upon the same. While not uite an underdog, Pattinson’s more slender detective feels miles from the rippling, blunt instruments en eck and histian Bale each made of themselves for the title role. When he fights, it’s usually against small packs of untrained brutes and amateurs, with the element of surprise and a web of shadows at his back, allowing him to dispatch them with not e treme advantages in training and e uipment. As rendered by Reeves, cinematographer Greig Fraser (also of Dune and Zero Dark Thirty), and production designer James Chinlund, Gotham proves an ideal stomping ground for this, eternally but attractively hazy and underlit. ess industrial a city than a post-Gilded Age one, the city’s a maze of looming, baroque, and e travagant relics spaces which feel
WARNER BROS/COURTESY EVERETT C
The Batman Rated: PG-13 Run time: 176 minutes less useful in remedying the city’s ills than in serving as haunted temples to wealthy civic leaders from some better past. hooting its darkened, rain soaked surfaces in hazy shallow focus while deploying scant and mostly practical forms of light (both Edward Hopper and idley cott are clear in uences , raser and eeves seem less concerned with making their graffiti encrusted cityscape credible or familiar than making it evocative and absorbing. nd why shouldn’t they The best comics are made up of fine and rarely realistic drawings, and more filmic work could aspire, given the e pense involved, to something like those virtues. The film’s villain shares its crew