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cHRISTIAN BALE AS BATMAN

HEATH LEDGER AS THE JOKER

Christopher Nolan is a director of depth and dazzle.  Why would he trade in making such brilliant independent features as “Memento” for the Batman franchise, except for the money?

          He may be trying to take Batman someplace.  Having explored his origins in “Batman Begins”, Christopher Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan Nolan are now wrestling with how Batman confronts the evil that he’s submerged in every day without being maimed by it.

          Christian Bale’s lean saturnine Bruce Wayne, the millionare behind the Bat mask, seems ready to retire.  He tells his childhood sweetheart Rachel, given wry integrity by Maggie Gyllenhal, that the city needs a defender with a face and he thinks he’s found that face in the chiseled features of hard-driving District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who is also his rival for Rachel.

           A face of another caliber belongs to that master criminal, The Joker.  Although his make-up isn’t grisly nor does his face look mutilated like Dent’s at the film’s end, the late Heath Ledger creates a character who never knew what good was.  He hooks us with mannerisms, a darting snake-like tongue, twitching lips, furious eyes, a hulking body.  It’s the monsters’ movie, as Dent’s torments transform him from White Knight to death-dealing Black Prince.

Bale could be aced off the screen by Ledger and Eckhart but he’s such a riveting actor that in his too-rare appearances he wrenches us back to absorption in this weary warrior, who is eventually worn down to a lethal sword’s edge by The Joker’s tricks.  The Joker giggles gleefully as Batman gives him the violent beating that, to coin a cliché “hurts him more than it does me.”  It really does.

          Gary Oldman gives Inspector Gordon an understated decency and Eric Roberts plays Salvatore Maroni, the mob boss, with an off-hand world-weary authority that takes corruption for granted.   Morgan Freeman as inventor Lucius Fox finally reaches his walk-out point without losing his cool.  There’s a glimpse of Cillian Murphy, the Scarecrow, but so brief and undeveloped you’re not sure he was really there.  Nestor Carbonell as a striking Latino or Italian Mayor named Antonio nods by implication to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.  And let’s never forget Michael Caine’s magisterial Alfred, the Butler, the closest thing to a father figure this movie and this Batman have.

Though there are themes underscored late in the day, a good 30-45 minutes could be lopped off the front of the movie and never be missed.  This is not a sculptured story. It’s an irrepressible mélange of dark violent scene studies shot by cinematographer Wally Pfister to the drumming music of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.

          The Joker is not after money.  In fact, he burns the pyramid of dollars he’s heisted from the city’s banks.  He wants to remake the world in his own image, starting with Harvey Dent, and he almost succeeds.

          The face imagery, masks for Batman, mutilation for The Joker and Dent, beyond their comic-book drama, make this a movie about face in the Oriental sense.  If you lose face there, you are destroyed.  Face is honor.  It’s who you are.

          Then there are the two ferryboats whose passengers have to choose which of them sinks.  Although The Joker loses here, the movie is so busy it doesn’t have the impact it should.  The indefinite ending has no impact, either. 

          There doesn’t have to be a tidy ending or even a point.  We’d settle for a quip or a question.  Christian Bale and Batman have earned more than action sequences and pervasive corruption.  Even so, this film battles its way to become an intriguing addition to the Nolan/Batman canon.