by Nathaniel R
Why so serious? Yes, you're 10 years older on this anniversary of The Dark Knight's release and probably watching the world burn with significantly less glee than The Joker would but still. Lighten up! At least we have the movies! I was commissioned to write a piece about The Dark Knight's Oscar history elsewhere but I jotted down more film-centric notes during a recent rewatch and will now share them here.
This a chronological skip through the movie. It made such a cultural impact you surely remember its release and maybe even the circumstances in which you saw it. If so, do share in the comments. Ready? Let's press play...
This is the first shot of The Joker but we don't know it's him. Yet. We suspect, of course, given the composition of the frame. He's given more weight than the other guys wearing clown-masks. It's interesting that he's introduced in broad daylight whereas Batman only comes out at night. That's the opposite of how heroes and villains are coded. Four minutes later he gets his first closeup and his first line.
I believe whatever doesn't kill you makes you stranger."
It's surprisingly hokey line as first lines go, especially given the serious tone of the movie. But then again this entrance is scored with great seriousness (hi Hans Zimmer) and the closeup is so close and the makeup so blood-smear looking that it's clear we're not mean to laugh but to gasp.
I had 100% forgotten about this visual gag listing "Batman Suspects" in the police station.
The first shot of Batman is nearly ten minutes into the movie, making it clear whose movie this is: The Joker's! Though I have a few reservations about Nolan's Batman movies, I do love how vulnerable they make Batman. In his first scene he's thrown against a wall and it looks painful. And he also gets bit by a dog!
But then again, he's still got your typical superhero invulnerability, as in this shot that weirdly manages to be elegant and blunt simultaneously. (Wally Pfister was Oscar nominated for the cinematography). Dog bites can hurt him but landing on his feet on a movie car after falling from several stories up? No biggie.
The first time we see Bruce Wayne out of drag, we are reminded of the male gaze. The straight male gaze that is. Despite Bale's endless hours in the gym, Nolan's camera has no interest whatsoever in looking at his incredible physique. Bale actually turns his back to the camera to take off his shirt, and the reverse shot is Alfred (Michael Caine) averting his gaze for a moment before commenting on all the bruises. LOL! We get less than 1 second of Bale's body. And he's even shot from the cleavage up. This Batman's got rules: No guns. No nipples!
Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes - UPGRADE) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) enter the movie now and they're a couple and gorgeous together. They're zooming around in some other movie. It's a courtroom drama and police procedural with lots of fast-walking-down-hallways banter.
-You're crazy.
-No. No, I'm not.
The Joker's first dialogue heavy scene is kind of a marvel and I'm not talking about that pencil disappearing trick that the bros love so much in the movie. I'm talking about how Heath Ledger takes what is essentially a GIANT EXPOSITION SCENE and makes it absolutely sing; a million actors have played a character with an affected voice but Ledger's vocal tricks have a four octave operatic range. There are so many weird tics within the weird tics. Better yet are the moments that feel like unmasking, where you've gone from watching a living nightmare to lucid dreaming and you suddenly think you've spotted the actual man underneath the makeup. He's still insane, mind you, but this performance isn't tricks on top of tricks, it's a fullbodied character study of specific if unknowable pathologies. Unknowable to us that is. I'm convinced that Ledger had worked it all out done to the molecular structure.
The Joker is so fascinating that it's always a bit of a letdown to return to Batman scenes. Marvel Studios would do well to study this. Yes, they make better superhero movies than any other studio but they so rarely have understood that great villains are the magic trick to enduring genre movies. What would The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars be without the Wicked Witch and Darth Vader? Not the immortal classics they are!
That said, if we're going to have big long scenes of boys fiddling with their gadgets, it's good that Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are there to invest the scenes with some sly line readings. They're pros. But gawd this is a boy movie. So much cooing over weapons, gadgets, cars, and toys.
That trip to Hong Kong is filler for me, as is the silly ballet troupe as Bruce Wayne cover sidebar so let's skip ahead.
You look nervous.
One of the great tragedies of losing Ledger so young beyond the obvious of what an incredible actor he was and how many grand performances he might have given was that we didn't really get a sense of what he could do onscreen with actresses. In all of his best performances (Brokeback Mountain, The Dark Knight, and I'd add his very brief role in Monster's Ball) he's paired with male actors. Though his intimidation of Rachel is a one-sided scene (she has almost no dialogue) I still cherish it for putting Ledger in the same frame as a formidable actress.
And speaking of actresses...
Nolan has just never been good with them. It's not just that his movies are exclusively about men and men fill 90% of the roles, even within the ensembles, but when a woman does show up it's uncomfortable. She's either about to die or already dead. He definitely can't do romantic scenes. Note that in The Dark Knight's only physically intimate moment, he moves almost immediately to a longshot.
Gyllenhaal tries to give Rachel a personality and point of view but the movie is only interested in whether she belongs to Harvey or to Bruce and how important that distinction is to both men. (Yes, I'm aware that there are two exceptions to this sucky female characters rule: Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises and Moss in Memento but in both cases I give all the credit to the actress herself because we've seen the evidence!)
But Nolan is a good director of men and all of them deliver here.
This movie was a major breakthrough for actor David Dastmalchian, who is a terrific guy offscreen (and a friend of TFE) and his big scene with Aaron Eckhart is fire. He cycles through so many livewire emotions in split seconds, while also still selling 'schizophrenic who actually knows nothing about what he's gotten himself into with the Joker.'
Dastmalchian is mostly cast as sinister or disturbed men, we're guessing due the black hair and angular face, but we'd love to see him play a sweet guy one of these years. At least he gets to play a good guy in his comic role in the Ant-Man movies.
When the Joker is captured (on purpose) and "interviewed" by Batman, his laughter as Batman hits him is not entirely a surprise (at this point in the film) but still alarming. Though this is a singular creation one performance it does remind me of slightly (ever so slightly) is Brad Pitt's underrated work in Fight Club (1999), particularly the masochistic madness in the "you don't know where I've been" scene.
I'm embarrassed to confess this but because Nolan is never invested in his women, I find the tragedy of the loss of Aaron Eckhart's beauty (ohnoooooo...the chemicals on his face. We know what that will lead do!) more upsetting than Rachel going ka-boom. But then I loooove me some Aaron Eckhart (even if I don't really understand what's become of his career.)
That hospital scene between Harvey and The Joker -- "Hiiii." and "I don't want there to be any bad feelings between us" is gallows humor at its finest.
It literally can't be true that Ledger improvised the bit with the faulty explosive while in his nurse's costume (you can't improv a practical fx scene) but the success of his performance is that it all feels so spontaneous that it feels like you're watching it live, when idiosyncratic beats might happen.
Okay.
There's no sense pretending otherwise though I know this is blasphemy to some: I find that The Dark Knight is frontloaded, or, no, middle loaded. After the hospital scene I always begin to lose interest.
The last act's grand reach for meaning with its muddled statement about privacy and human nature and the communal good versus survival and surveillance and I forget what else ... even though I'm skimming again as I type this... is a bore.
The biggest statement this movie could ever make is in the moments spent watching Ledger crafting an immortal screen villain. The rest is anti-climax. And even The Joker's final scene is anti-climax. There he is having captured Batman and he's about to tell us yet another false memory about how he got those scars and Batman goes and interrupts him with heroics and throwing him off a building. Boo. Who else wanted to hear another tall tale?
Finally, jumping backwards for the finish. This is the defining moment and image of the film. It happens about two/thirds of the way into the picture, and it's over in 4 seconds.
It's placement in the editing, the sound mix dropping out the diegetic noise, the color, the fully realized character. It's both a perfect cinematic moment and a fitting tribute to Heath Ledger, whose time on movie screens was short but glorious.
The Joker's ecstatic abandon, lost in this very moment, is not unlike our own whenever a movie lifts off into greatness.