The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Batman returns

Dear diary

6:10 PM

Fear is a tool. When light hits the screen it's not just the movie's start, it's a warning. Only who's being warned-- the bad guys on the big screen or us sitting here? Maybe you, reading this? Confused now. 

Sat down to watch Matt Reeves' The Batman. A hundred and seventy-six minutes to go.

Need I remind you? NARRATIVE AND PLOT TWISTS TO BE DISCUSSED IN EXPLICIT DETAIL.

Moving on. 

6:20 PM

Thieves break windows, vandals spraypaint, band of whitefaced thugs menace hapless Asian. All pause to gaze up at bat signal, peer nervously into city's darker corners. "They think I'm hiding in the shadows," Batman (Robert Pattinson) intones. "But I am the shadows." He steps out as if from behind curtains; thug demands: "who the hell are you supposed to be?" Bat beats down thug, replies: "I'm vengeance."

Huh? Not what we're expecting. Sounds pretentious, even possibly outside thug's vocabulary ("Ben who?"). Worse, doesn't have the matter-of-fact cadence of Michael Keaton's "I'm Batman." Sequence lands with a thud. 

Understood-- two years in and young man still feeling his way through his crimefighting career, tho for the record, in Frank Miller's Batman: Year One (which this movie borrows from), he got his act together within eponymous timespan. 

Also: street violence on the rise; Asians being targeted; paramilitary group employing terror tactics. Allusions to recent headlines-- got it, not very clever bout it. 

Around 7:00 PM or so

So far: The Riddler (Paul Dano) doing a Se7en serial killer gig. Not a big fan of the Fincher movie, but I remember the best parts being the imaginatively staged and shot tableau of corpses posed as one of Seven Deadly Sins (this movie manages, at most, a severed thumb). Video messages diminish killer's mystique unlike in Fincher's movie, where the police walk through the crime scene as if through an art installation, trying to suss out meaning. Riddler's recorded howls more goofy than menacing.

Also, drug-dealing subplot alludes to a number of films: biggest drug bust in history (The French Connection); secret meetings and corruption in high places (All The President's Men); circles within circles within circles, evil upper class, creepy father-daughter relationship (Chinatown). I'm always of the opinion that if you're calling back to great classic films you better introduce some fresh twist to justify your theft, otherwise audience is left remembering how much better the original was. Adding mask and cape is not the answer. 

This Batman is said to do actual detective work. Well-- more surveillance and the occasional sweating of suspects than actual detecting. Doesn't try for Steve Moffat-style on-the-spot crime scene reading a la Sherlock Holmes (my personal vote for Greatest Fictional Detective), probably smart not to: if Pattinson and Benedict Cumberbatch ever faced off Pattinson would likely soil his batdiapers. 

Not just a question of talent: Moffat sells Holmes' deductive abilities by proposing that Holmes pays a high price for his near-autistic focus: he's socially inept and emotionally unstable, an insufferable prima donna who loves standing in the spotlight. Pattinson's WGFD doesn't sell his case much beyond endless moping and greasy hair over sleepy brow. Pretty, not persuasive. 

7-- 30? I'm only halfway through?

Reeves does well enough with noirish imagery,  makes inky shadows and deep unlit spaces especially menacing; when people come to blows he stays at medium distance and cuts sparingly, unlike some directors I can think off (*hack* *hack* Christopher Nolan *hack*). Car chase is disastrous, tho-- we see car's nose bouncing up and down and roaring not much else; we're never sure of spatial relationship between vehicles, if they're still racing down the wrong-way lane or not. Pursuit ends with big explosion, quelle surprise. According to production notes explosion and concluding stunt were done for real; might as well have them done digitally, they're so poorly framed and prepared for they zip past without much impact.

7:45. I think.

Burton in Batman had designing genius Anton Furst create Gothic nightmare 'scapes that evoke Fritz Lang, in Batman Returns had Bo Welch present Christmas Gotham as a vast Dickensian charnel house. Nolan brought it all crashing down to earth with actual locations in Chicago and Pittsburgh; Reeves shoots in Chicago, digitally adding '20s Art Deco style buildings. There's warmth to the retro details (the wood furnishings, the rotary phones, the mostly incandescent lighting) unlike Nolan's granite-and-steel Gotham, but little else lingers in memory.

7:50ish

Don't rich superheroes have security protocols with regards to letter bombs?

Cute how Batman likes to meet all his contacts on the same corner of that abandoned building-- like Woodward and Deep Throat faithfully keeping their appointments behind the same pillar in the same parking garage, in an attempt to bring down the President of the United States. Even Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz) is allowed to neck with Bruce there-- gets so crowded you feel the need for a guestbook, to keep track of who's who. Did Alfred ever visit?

8:00

O plot twist of sorts. Something to do with Selina. Not invested in the characters so the revelation flits past me like a-- you know. Out of hell. 

Character is no small issue; in Batman Returns when cat meets bat they're exchanging kicks and blows like old lovers; here five minutes have passed and you come to realize that the comic banter barely generates enough sexual heat to defrost pizza. What, Daniel Waters wasn't available for a rewrite? 

O yeah that all-important PG-13. An 'R' would mean millions less in the boxoffice, not to mention jeopardizing the lucrative Chinese market. Keep it clean, Selina.

Incidentally, on subplot: turns out Bruce's daddy isn't really corrupt, he just 'made a mistake' for the sake of his beloved. We're pulling punches here; we don't cross the clearly delineated line separating 'the good' from 'the bad' and 'the ugly'-- we just pretend we do.

8:15

Finally The Confrontation. Nice evocation of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, that most noir of artworks that inspired more filmmakers than you can list in one breath. Hopper's 24-hour diner is shot from a fresh angle with sinister figure sipping frothy cappuccino, but you recognize the dim lighting and grimy color palette.  

Paul Dano does good work with his deceptively doughy Not A Serial Killer cheeks and bugeyed intensity. When he starts shrieking however you think back to Kevin Spacey's John Doe who almost never raised his voice (the one time he does he catches your attention and for the rest of the picture never lets go). His Doe had the habit of staring past you at something standing close behind, the suggested details of which inspire in him such fervor and terror and awe you can't help but feel a chill trickle down your spine. 

Riddler's ciphers recall another Fincher film, Zodiac. That serial-killer procedural however-- Fincher's hands-down masterpiece-- had a real sense of inexorable everyday life grinding down killer and cops alike, lending an air of pointlessness to it all. 

Batman's vigilante crusade-- as does Arthur Fleck's in Todd Philip's Joker-- borrow heavily from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, difference being Scorsese is a great filmmaker, Reeves a talented one, and Philips the dude who did The Hangover movies. Scorsese has expressed disdain for the genre; have yet to see a film that definitively proves him wrong. 

The steel shutters rising between Dano and Pattinson pay homage of course to the steel shutters rising and falling between Toshiro Mifune and Tsotomu Yamazaki in Akira Kurosawa's High and Low-- there as here the takeaway message is of two men of vastly differing financial circumstances, drawn together to assume their place on either side of the same coin; but where Dano spells out their equivalence in painstakingly obvious words Kurosawa merely suggests it, through an eerie superimposition of Mifune's reflection on Yamazaki's face.  

As for Chinatown-- John Turturro's Carmine Falcone against John Huston's Noah Cross? O please. 

8:20

Wait this isn't over yet?

8:25

Big explosions. Always with the big explosions. "We haven't used up our pyro budget yet! Go back and write thirty more minutes into your movie!"

8:30 

See, Riddler has the smarts to use explosives but when finishing off Gotham's political elite has to settle for snipers? Where'd they come from? How's he paying them? Did he at least teach them how to shoot?

The guy was so focused-- directing Batman's every move, carefully selecting his targets, pulling puppet strings like a master. Suddenly he throws up his hand and decides to wipe out everyone in charge? Desperate attempt at epic finish, anyone?

8:35

At last the movie's moral scheme is fully unveiled, along with the reason Pattinson whispers "I'm vengeance." Final crisis forces hero to rise above himself, from mere avenger to true crusader, become the note of hope in sea of despair, etc., etc., with emergency flare literally leading the rich and powerful to safety (not sure that last detail makes for appropriate optics, not that anyone will care). Cute symbolic imagery, spelled out slowly and carefully so audience can understand. 

8:40

A word on realism-- people sing hosannahs over the movie's grittiness, noting how much 'darker' this is over what Tim Burton created back in 1989 (and perfected in 1992). I don't see improved I see reduced, from the sophisticated mix of horror and comedy (Dickensian pathos thanks to Danny DeVito, erotic byplay thanks to Michelle Peiffer) in Returns to the thud and blunder (not to mention longwinded pretentiousness) of Nolan's trilogy, down to this near-indecipherable gloom (I predict 2025's Batman movie will be a strip of black sandpaper four hours long). Comedy doesn't always soften horror; sometimes it intensifies it, sharpens the flavor the way salt sharpens caramel, or lemon sharpens broth. If one's idea of 'better' only means darker and grittier and more realistic-- well golly gee I guess this one's for you. 

8:45

Again with the long monologues. Nolan ended The Dark Knight with a monologue too, handing to us the obligatory moral lesson for the reaction paper we need to write when we get home. 

I like Burton's approach back in 1989-- someone reads Batman's speech to the general public and it turns out to be a crashing bore; Burton's camera glides restlessly away, buoyed by Danny Elfman's doomy romantic score, rising till it discovers Batman atop the high roofs of Gotham, a (newly repaired?) church bell tolling in the distance. Fade to black; more doomy Elfman to ease you out the theater (in comparison Michael Giacchino's music, paced to Pattinson's deliberate armor-plated stride, sounds deadly monotonous).

8:50

Bat and cat part ways. Pizza fully defrosted now, crust soggy as overcooked spaghetti. 

9:00 PM

Finally. Now to go home and watch something more entertaining, like Lav Diaz's History of Ha.

First published in Businessworld 3.11.22