Film: The Batman

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.

WARNER BROS/COURTESY EVERETT C

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 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

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

heads’ taste for theatrical trails of crumbs, staging elaborate games of murder to lead his pursuers around by the nose. As the Riddler, Paul Dano’s tricks hail from the playbook established in stuff like Zodiac and Se7en, though the film’s 1 rating (surely a studio mandate) constrains how far these or the film’s scant car nal elements can go, partially blunt ing both with a kid glove handling. eeves and crew make something of the iddler’s mood board approach to killing anyway, which seizes largely upon outing corrupt and hypocritical doings by public figures, largely ow ing through the domain of the Pen guin a sufficient olin arrell buried in prosthetics) in the form of his vaguely seedy druggy se y ceberg ounge. rowing over tabloid photo graphs and leaked tapes, the Penguin, a self starting sadist wielding duct tape and a phone camera as principle weapons from behind a sack cloth mask, provides a good enough engine for the film that tends not to under line its politics, even as they aren’t so hard to glean. oming off a little kinky, maybe ueer, and eventually as right wing, his complaints — about corrupt, selfish, and hypocritical oli garchs, of rampant inequality, and of rampant self dealing are the sort of

As Reeves renders him, Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is a haphazard, scrappy vigilante activist, exorcizing his own pains by inflicting them — he hopes constructively — on others.

obvious stuff you can nod your head at; they’re simple facts of life.

The perverse trouble, though, is that a film’s villains often present its heroes with a problem to solve and in attempting to theorize solutions, The Batman presents sources of cor ruption as limited, assailable, and possible to root out. n reality, as most of us should know, they are sys temic, and thus persistent, because they’re so diffuse in source. harm reduction approach is as good as the iddler or atman’s anti corruption work could really ever get, but neither they nor eeves and his scripters seem to grasp that it’s the summit of what they might be able to achieve. As the Riddler sketches out a circle of corrupt figures in city leader ship at present, as well as various cherished figures from otham’s past — enclosing both Pattinson’s Wayne and his dear, good olice ommis sioner ordon they suggest at intervals the notion that with better cops, a more thoughtful billionaire, and a sweeter mayor and DA, they might be able to fi things in some big way. Such thinking is a rich per son’s progressivism, one which in courting power — loses sight of what power does, and the film attempts to couple these childlike notions with criti ues of a broken windows sounding but scarcely visible renewal program that’s at the center of the backgrounded mayoral campaign. A realer class consciousness could have been better wrestled with by giving ravit ’s atwoman, who’s a close but less well heeled foil to Wayne in her endeavors, more space to demon strate both her mode of working and a better individuated point of view. ortunately, the film’s most naive politics tend to recede in the time spent viewing, only muddying things severely in its final act. They’re by and large eclipsed by the film’s scenario, its figuration of its well played char acters, and its many admirable formal aspects — which suggest a fantastical world shaded by more appropriate levels of cynicism than does the oc casionally boneheaded script. While it’s possible, though ’m not con vinced, that the stubborn optimism of its writing leavens The Batman, making it more pleasurable than it really had to be, suspect its virtues lie (along with the aspects mentioned above in the humility and sense of play it could use still a little more of. n spite of this, it’s surprisingly lively, attractive, and good humored. While ’d be the last to ask for more movies uite like this given the glut of big budget superhero stuff we’ve all been drowning in for years can’t deny my pleasure anyway in catching one that feels made a bit more modestly, and that’s attractive, fun, and finely acted on top. While it may sound like faint praise, it feels e ceptional to say this considering the climate of Holly wood at present: The Batman mostly does the things it ought to.