ABE GOLDFARB REVIEWS "THE DARK KNIGHT"

By Abe Goldfarb

Pack up, assholes.  You're done.  You, you, you and you.  Also that guy.  You can stay.  Just kidding, get out.  We're calling it a fucking day.  The Dark Knight is here, and it's going to kick your ass, cure cancer and make love to your woman (or man, I honestly don't care) like you never could.  Did you think this was a pretty good summer for movies?  Enjoyed yourIron Man?  Thought Wall-E was pretty amazing?  Adored the batshit artistry of Hellboy II?  Had a good time with Indiana Jones?

            BATMAN DOESN'T CARE.

            Christopher Nolan, I will wax your car.  I will walk your dogs.  I will clean your palatial estate with a toothbrush.  You have kicked my dick in so hard that it's emerged from my asshole.  Watching your movie, I had a retrograde tantric ejaculation every ten minutes.  Seriously.  Actually, fuck you.  Fuck you for making it this good.  You've ruined the rest of the year.  There could be ninja movies.  There could be movies with pirates, say, or dragons.  There could be a movie coming out called Abe Goldfarb, I Will Give You a Spanking, an Evening of Spectacular Lovemaking and a Plate of Fresh Cooked Dumplings that featured ninjas, pirates, dragons and swordfights, and I'd consider going to see The Dark Knight again instead.  It's a goddamn disgrace.  And you've set the bar so high there's no WAY the third movie in the series won't be a letdown.  Of course, you'll probably knock that one out of the park as well, so fuck you in advance for making a fool out of me.

            But enough of such pleasantries.  Let's talk about WHY The Dark Knight is not only the best film of the year thus far, but also the best superhero movie ever made.  Whisper it: It's not a superhero movie.  The Dark Knight is an urban epic that happens to feature a knifed-up psycho in clown makeup and a really depressed guy in a bat suit.  That Nolan (working from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan) manages to take this idea from faintly absurd to utterly, operatically gripping is only one of his achievements.  From top to tail, Nolan has approached this as a FILM, not a blockbuster delivery device, and come up trumps on every count.  The widescreen photography?  Stunning.  The dialogue?  Occasionally over-literal, but never less than literate.  The cast?  Perfect, to a man.  The score?  Gut-wrenchingly right.  The action?  Clear as day and thrillingly spare.  The sense of place?  Complete.  And yet none of this uniform quality-sheen seems fussy or strained. Christopher Nolan is a craftsman who might have found success in old Hollywood; almost no one working in the West has his versatility and seemingly no-sweat technique.

            Aah, perhaps that's the key.  With this film, Nolan shows the same indifference to genre and formula that the best Chinese, South Korean and Japanese directors do, and, indeed, The Dark Knight features an extended adventure in Hong Kong that showcases the city to its finest cinematic advantage in years.  Nolan doesn't care, particularly, that a movie like this is supposed to feature superfights, Manichean good/evil dynamics and endings in which order is restored.  He wants to mix it up, come up with something at once craftily old-fashioned and blazingly new.

            The easiest pitch, of course, is "Heat  in tights", and it's not a million miles removed from the truth.  The film is treated, in many ways, as a 70's style crime melodrama.  At the end of Batman Begins (at the time totally awesome and now clearly a warm-up), Gotham PD's Jim Gordon warned of escalation.  Now that Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, solid as a rock) has begun to clean up the streets with his retro-fascist ass-kicking, the mafia turns to a man who promises an end to all things Batman: The Joker (played by an unknown named Heath Ledger).  With a renegade vigilante on the side of right and a disfigured maniac as his antagonist, the stage is set for one of your all-time unstoppable force-immovable object deals.  Between them falls Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, taking a role that might read as underdeveloped and knocking it out of the park as usual), the new D.A. with a liberal sheen, a taste for justice and a striking way of adhering to due process.  In Dent, Wayne sees Gotham's shining future.  The Joker sees an opportunity to send Gotham straight to the hell it deserves.

            The Dark Knight  is, more or less, two and a half hours of that dynamic playing out in increasingly nerve-shredding variations.  Nolan keeps upping the ante, introducing a scrap of hope and then dashing it as we realize that good intentions are what the Joker eats for breakfast.  So often, we go to films to be surprised, to be immersed in a world where anything is possible.  Nolan takes that as an invitation to amp the dread up to face-melting levels.  The Joker's schemes, which drive the film, are geared to not only confound but scar and ruin their victims.  Sophie's Choice doesn't cover it.  Time and again, characters are asked to make impossible moral decisions, and punishment is quick to follow.  A curious sensation sets in around the mid-point, when the film launches into a dazzling sequence of vehicular mayhem: free-fall, exhilarating and tingly.

            Ledger's performance is, by now, legend.  I won't attempt any pop-psychology of the tasteless ilk that's sprung up around it ("He played a maniac and destroyed himself!" wah wah wah).  What I will say is that it's work so blazingly alive that any morbidity surrounding the reality of it is moot.  It would make sense to call it unlike anything Ledger had ever managed, but frankly, it's unlike anything I've ever seen ANYONE manage.  The sick-puppy zeal of the thing has to be seen to be believed.  And every time Nolan and Ledger tease us with a rationale, an explanation, anything to make sense of this deranged bad angel, they immediately obfuscate.  A syphilitic, rotting vaudevillian with a death wish, this Joker is the finest ever depicted (though Mark Hamill, of course, maintains his spot in the pantheon).  Talk of an Oscar is pointless, and to lament future work lost is to miss out on celebrating what's here.  This is just great acting, and a villain to hang a thousand nightmares on.

            The politics, as ever with Batman, are an interesting and sometimes infuriating muddle.  The film could function as either a portrait of moral failure in maintaining rule of law, or a tacit admission that stuff like wiretapping, while dicey, is...you know...kind of okay sometimes.  This isn't a weak compromise, but Nolan's acknowledgement that the truth, to quote Oscar Wilde, is rarely pure and never simple.  Even when an act of rule-bending seems to be in the service of the greater good, Nolan never forgets the chill of it, or that it's rule-bending that put Gotham in the shit to begin with.  As Alfred sagely advises Master Wayne, "You crossed the line first, sir."

            Why does the darkness of this film sit well with me when Wanted's hollow nihilism rankled?  Because The Dark Knight takes place in a world where hope hasn't hung up its hat and closed shop.  The end of the film may point to an even darker turn in the threequel to come, but Nolan doesn't believe that the citizens of Gotham are a lost cause.  In the film's biggest surprise, without giving too much away, an act of potential sacrifice is carried out by a most unlikely character.  In a weaker film, the sudden introduction of a character to resolve a major conflict would seem a cop-out, but here, laden with ethnic and social implications, it's more like a grace note.  Nolan's city is redeemed by the essential goodness of its people.  While it may be hard to puzzle out the film's Left-Right leanings, there's no question that a humanist is at the helm.

            Go see it.  Then see it again.  Then see it in IMAX.  The Dark Knight  is the cat's pajamas, a majestic experience, an honest-to-Mohammed, buttfucking masterpiece.  How they top this, I'll never guess.  But in the meantime I'll just go see it again to watch mainstream genre filmmaking at its most ambitious, rigorous and gorgeous.

            Oh, and I'd fuck Michael Caine.

Comments

[Lee, the Brother]

abe, i love you.

[Bilal]

Great review. I love that the most potent conflicts in this movie are internal...the questions of lines being crossed and the sort of person you choose to be to deal with strife and turmoil.

The overarching question of the movie is not about whether or not Batman can defeat the Joker, it's about whether or not he can ever stop being Batman. The Joker's victory, even in the face of his defeat, is that he effectively closes off that possibility. He doesn't just proclaim that he and Batman are alike, he actually forces Batman--through one character's death and another character's ruin--into becoming a man with only one real identity, just like him.

[RLewis]

Wow, what a great f*#king review. Picked me right up. The film world is truly lucky. Makes me wonder why we don't have folks who write theater reviews like this. Now I'm sad.

[Abe Goldfarb]

I think you're right, Bilal. One of the best things about Dark Knight is that it's a summer smash hit concerned entirely with questions of personal morality, both huge and intimate. Also, I love that it ends with its entire central cast in some form of failure and defeat. Sacrifice is paid lip-service in countless blockbusters, but here it's the whole shebang.

For another film this summer that shakes free of blockbuster tropes, might I suggest, without catching too much hurt, Hancock? It's too short (a seriously uncommon complaint in this season) and has a handful of flaws, but I got more straight pleasure from it than almost anything this summer. It's Smith's most un-charming lead role (and thus most compelling), director Peter Berg makes some very unexpected choices, and on a tonal level, it just FEELS different. Maybe its uniqueness makes me overstate its quality. Anyway, it's shockingly underrated.

Also, of course, Hellboy II is still out there, and it's a face full of Del Toro goodness without a shred of cliche.

[Joshua James]

Just saw this today. IMAX.

Abe, we're in total agreement.

Love the excitement and most of all, the human quandry of moral choices (love, LOVE Tiny Lister as the convict making a surprising choice near the end, you know what I'm talking about) and love the excitement that it all seems REAL.

That's what I really liked. For the most part (maybe the face, though) little CGI and it what it did have didn't read CGI - it played real, the punches and crashes looked real.

The only thing I can compare it to was when I saw Terminator 2 in theatres, summer of 91. I saw it 2 or 3 times in the theater, and the excitement I felt, with the audience, was the same . . . we couldn't believe how real it looked, how exciting it was and and deep the moral issues hit home with us. T2 was a great picture, still is. MOre than a sci-fi adventure. A fable about humanity.

DARK KNIGHT is more than a comic book movie, it's a hero's fable about dark human choices, I loved it.

Okay, I'll stop gushing.

[Steve]

Haha, this is just nuts all the way - it was a great read. Good thing I wasn't drinking any milk at the time or else it would have been spewing from my mouth :)

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[cheap jerseys]

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