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A dark yin yang

Batman is more than the Joker's foil
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 6th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
What happens when you turn a frown upside down. Heath Ledger's final great performance as the Joker.
The Dark Knight


Directed by Christopher Nolan
With Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy
Christopher Nolan’s second Batman film appropriately deals with the two-sided. There is Two-Face, the former Gotham City District Attorney Harvey Dent, whose janiform face is equally divided between masculine beauty and a flayed, pulsating horror. This scar-faced villain also enjoys playing the angel of chance, giving potential victims the benefit of fate from the toss of a two-headed coin (he’s the original Anton Chigurh). But most striking is the yin-yang unity of opposites Nolan has created between the cape crusader and the archest of villains, the Joker.
Students of Gothamology will also note the opposing tone set by Nolan’s Batman to those of the Tim Burton-Joel Schumacher franchise. A crack cinematic psychologist, Nolan tends more toward content than style, preferring character studies to studies in design. That’s not to say that the Burton-Schumacher films didn’t have substance, though it was often lost in the Gothic campery, or that Nolan’s film is bereft of scenography, although its crafted with a cool Modernism that doesn’t upstage the story.
The Gotham City of The Dark Knight is crime-ridden, though the lawlessness is mob-controlled, giving the anarchy limits. The rising law star, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), is making dents in the mafia capos’ empires, but the kingpins continue on, smugly assured of their positions of power. Then one of their banks is knocked over — by clowns.
Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale returning in the role) longs to pack his cape and mask away and allow someone to become an “exposed face” of virtue for the city. He thinks he sees in the rise of Dent the very person that Gotham needs. Though feeling very territorial over his childhood friend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who has become Dent’s lover, Wayne is easily won over by the blond, rugged-jawed DA. But then the clowns are sent in.
A self-professed agent of chaos, the Joker (Heath Ledger) arrives in the city to turn it into a three-ringed hell. He has no plans, as he doesn’t have time for such things. He’s simply motivated by violently capricious impulses. His truculent whimsy is best characterized by the knife-sliced grin that’s been carved onto his face. What passes as smiles are really produced by muscle spasms, as the villain continually fights against leaking saliva.
Having taken their money, the Joker now takes on the mob to create his own mammoth gang. As successful as Dent has been in collaring mobsters, this latest turn of events will require Wayne suiting up. And, in the Joker, he will really have met his match.
The Dark Knight is a fierce, philosophical battle between two obsessive outsiders (the Joker tells Batman that he is just as much a freak) who are soon joined by a third — the dual-faced Dent. Opposing and attracting, the three men have too many similarities. The transformed Dent becomes the face of both good and evil, as his earlier crusading self was held, even by Wayne, to be Batman’s complete opposite — the “white knight” versus the “dark” vigilante. But then he becomes as masked as Batman and the Joker, a creature at war with himself. “I believe whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you … stranger,” the Joker admits to a mobster. That’s certainly true of the once implacably virtuous Dent, with the occasionally drab Eckhart in his finest role yet.
This extreme duality is a substantial theme, and one that Nolan carries off effortlessly. Still, the film is at its greatest when Batman and the Joker pair off. “You complete me,” the Joker states to Batman, though it’s really Ledger’s performance that completes Bale’s. The one flaw in The Dark Knight (other than its blaring score) is that one needs to have seen Nolan’s Batman Begins to get a good sense of Bale’s character, which isn’t given much room to expand here. It falls to the Joker to give Wayne any further psychological complexity.
The killing joke is the villain’s: “You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness,” the Joker tells Batman, “and I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” Would that were possible. The Dark Knight really is the late Ledger’s film, from his first entrance in his melting white pancake, patchy kohl and wound-rouged lips. It’s depravity as shock pantomime, with Ledger’s movements finely honed to a performance art. He has some of the menacing posturing of Malcom McDowell’s Alex in A Clockwork Orange, with a twitchiness that seems adopted from some silent comedian.
 There are strong performances from the returning Michael Caine (as Alfred), Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman and an unrecognizable Eric Roberts as a mob boss. Gyllenhaal is a welcome replacement for Katie Holmes, while there are nice cameos from Cillian Murphy (back as Scarecrow from Batman Begins) and Senator Patrick Leahy (a real-life Batman expert, it seems).
Nolan’s first Batman outing set a high bar, which this second has matched. Like any good film and its sequel, they complete each other.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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