The First Sequel

About a month ago, I became curious to see how Tim Burton's Batman would compare in 2008 to The Dark Knight. Batman fell short of the expectations that hazily recalled childhood viewings had set for it, but I remained confident that its sequel, Batman Returns, also by Tim Burton, would have the haunting, phantasmagorical darkness that I'd remembered of Burton's movies.

Indeed, Batman Returns surpasses its predecessor. Burton, who was not yet 29 when Batman was released, had entered the best stage of his career by 1992, fresh off Edward Scissorhands, with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Ed Wood soon to come. Batman Returns feels more like a Burton movie than Batman did. The 1989 film, with Joker's razzle-dazzle and an assortment of superhero gadgets, played like a summer blockbuster, and it has aged like one. In Batman Returns, the set pieces are stranger, the characters are more anguished, and the mood is more somber. Its Gotham is a wintry ghost city. The trees have been frozen into twisted ice sculptures, and baroque, uninhabitable towers jut into the sky. The metropolis seems less populated than it was in Batman; the locales favored here are the sewers, an abandoned zoo, and streets covered in white, where the Batmobile makes first tracks.

The production design in Batman Returns is excellent, as long as one can get into the peculiar Gothic unreality of its aesthetic. The sets are full of lovely constructions, but all of them look synthetic. With exquisite models and rich backdrops, Batman Returns appears to have been shot on an enhanced dream version of an old studio lot, where fake snow always falls. Yet it is less dated than Batman is: Batman Returns is the product of its director, not of its decade. The vision here is distinctly Burton's, and we caught only brief glimpses of it in Batman.

This world appeals to me, but it is a visual creation, helped by Danny Elfman's score. The screenplay by Daniel Waters is actually worse than the Batman script by Sam Hamm (who gets a story credit here) and Warren Skaaren. Waters seems incapable of writing a natural exchange between his characters; the dialogue is littered with non sequiturs and pithy witlessness. Every conversation is stilted and somehow inscrutable, as if Burton had hired a new writer to pen each line, and he had only a vague idea of what had come before it.

Waters also has trouble forging compelling paths for his characters, though the movie begins well. In the opening sequence, the wealthy mother and father of a deformed infant drop their baby in a river, where he, in his bassinet, floats away, and the guilty parents run home. The river carries the child beneath the city, where a pack of penguins discovers him and raises him as one of their own. This baby becomes the Penguin (Danny DeVito), a hideous, embittered brooder bent on revenge against the world that banished him.

In the present, a corporate fat cat named Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) has hatched a plot to drain Gotham City's electrical power. When his timid secretary, Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), gets wind of it, he pushes her out of a window. She falls many floors, hits the ground, and lies motionless. Cats emerge from a nearby alley and lick her back to life, resurrecting her as a feline femme fatale named Catwoman.

Meanwhile, the Penguin launches a mayoral bid, having blackmailed Shreck into backing his campaign, which Batman attempts to thwart. Selina Kyle begins a romance with Bruce Wayne, but she ends up working with the Penguin in an effort to kill Batman, though her motivations as a supervillainess are not entirely clear. The love affair doesn't work out, but it probably should have: These leather-clad basket cases seem destined for each other.

Each of the two primary villains shows promise, but neither lives up to his or her potential. The Penguin's tormented ghastliness is damped by the movie's dopey, implausible political satire, which removes him from the underground lair where he's at his best. Selina Kyle's story begins almost as a parody of an old movie (she's Bette Davis in The Man Who Came to Dinner), where she plays a beleaguered working girl who lives in a crummy apartment and wears glasses that lamely attempt to cover Pfeiffer's movie star glamor. But she doesn't find a nice, honest guy to rescue her from the single life. Instead, she finds a new personality for herself, and we're anxious to see what she'll do with it, but in the end she doesn't do much. Burton hints that she'll reappear in a sequel, and perhaps the character would have taken shape there, but I don't think Halle Berry's Catwoman was what he had in mind.

Michael Keaton reprises his role as Bruce Wayne, who remains more intelligent and intriguing than he became under Val Kilmer and George Clooney, but again he lacks those meaty scenes that would flesh out his eccentricities into an identifiable personality. He functions mostly as a supporting character in each of the two major plotlines.

If Burton had found the right screenwriter, he would have really gotten it right, but the studio handed the franchise to Joel Schumacher for the third and fourth installments after viewers complained about Burton's morbidity. Burton stayed on as a producer, and it's easy to see how his engaging strangeness gave way to disastrous grotesquery in the hands of a clumsier director. One cannot imagine Burton himself making Batman Forever or Batman & Robin.

Then again, one also cannot imagine him making The Dark Knight. Nolan is a better action director; his movies have a muscularity that Burton's do not. The Dark Knight, with its damaged, malignant villain, even preserves some of the weirdness of Batman Returns, but this time the weirdness touches our reality; it does not take place entirely in its director's fantasies.

Burton isn't really meant for blockbusters. His Planet of the Apes and Mars Attacks! showed that. He's best in an atmosphere of charming, unassuming oddness. For Halloween, I recommend The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Comments

[Timid]

I disagree that Nolan's "weirdness touches our reality" any more so than Burton's. The striking aesthetic of Burton's Gotham City is timeless, it's ugly urban America at any age. The quirkiness of his characters always presents as an understandable response to a crazy, ugly world. As great as THE DARK KNIGHT is, I find Nolan's characters mostly voids. This can work, as it does to astounding effect with Heath Ledger's frightening Joker, but others who populate Nolan's Gotham are less scary and mysterious than vacuous and dull (I'm thinking mostly of Harvey Dent and Rachel Dawes). The most important contrast, to me, is between the two Bruce Waynes.

Keaton's Bruce is a misfit, awkward in the light of day and only at home wearing a bat costume fighting crime. Surely he's a more believable Bruce Wayne than Bale's spiteful ladies man who becomes a grunting menace at night. Bale's character is a child who wants to kick the world's ass. I guess I can buy the Bale character, but it's obvious which one I like better and which one seems in touch with "our reality".

Beyond that defense of the Burton films, I can't argue much with your assessment of BATMAN RETURNS. It builds a lot of momentum early on and never goes anywhere. More could have been done with the two villains. Catwoman's misandry and Penguin's rage are palpable, but then not much happens with either.

[Brett Yates]

I don't think Burton's world actually is meant to look like urban America. It's too obviously a soundstage. His Gotham City is the dream of a moviegoer who has watched too much German Expressionism and film noir; it's half fantasy, half nightmare. It recalls the cheap 1940s crime picture that I watched last night, Crime Doctor's Warning, more than it does any city I know. Burton's Gotham City is a visionary's take on the artificiality of an old Hollywood studio. It's one of the best sets ever built, but I don't think it attempts to persuade anyone that it's not a set.

There's less cinephilia in The Dark Knight's Gotham. It was shot in Chicago, and it takes place right now, without the ghost of F.W. Murnau. For an action movie, that may be better; urban America, especially with the threat of large-scale violence looming, has a faster pulse than Burton's Gothic dreamland.

Rachel Dawes and Harvey Dent are utterly vacuous, but this makes The Dark Knight seem more authentic. In Batman Returns, everyone is an eccentric; everyone is a player in a lurid Gothic fairy tale. Dawes and Dent have a real-world blandness that keeps The Dark Knight grounded. Aren't most successful people this boring? I don't agree, however, that The Dark Knight's Joker is a void. The movie doesn't explain what's inside him, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing there.

I like Keaton's Bruce Wayne, but I don't think he's more believable than Christian Bale's. It's a little hard to imagine Keaton as a fighter. He doesn't look like one, and his Bruce Wayne doesn't act like one. Yes, he's a misfit, but I think he'd cope more likely by becoming a filmmaker than by becoming a vigilante. You summed up Bale's persona pretty well, but I don't know what's particularly implausible about it.

[Timid]

You're right, the Bale character is not altogether implausible, which is why I changed my argument midway through to say merely that I think Keaton's Batman/Bruce is the much more appealing character. I just don't care for or about our Dark Knight, and it was about the only thing that hurt the movie for me. I do think the vague backstory of Keaton's Bruce Wayne (played out in a dark alley not forty feet from where Elliot Ness and his Untouchables were busting up a speakeasy, one imagines) is more believable, somehow, than the groan-inducing amalgamation of Eastern philosophies and coming of age we witness in BATMAN BEGINS, and that taints my feeling about the Bale character. Really, that's no fault attributable to anything we see contained in the world of TDK.

I did mean to mention the Gothic inspiration of Burton's Gotham City. Indeed there is an artificiality to the set, and the influences are apparent. "Timeless" was the wrong word for me to use to describe it, although there is a bit of that effect. The America I see in Gotham City is actually a glamorized Northern city after white flight but before urban renewal. It's a place where decent people shouldn't live. I won't belabor the point because I'm equally accepting of your account of Gotham as a fairy tale setting. In either account, it's more alive to me than the almost Chicago Gotham of TDK.

[Timid]

Haha, I should have put quotation marks around "decent people shouldn't live". It's a Joker line from BATMAN, not my opinion of cities following white flight.

[Brett Yates]

That's a relief! I was about to prepare a pretty lengthy lecture in response to that comment.

I also really like Burton's city; it's a more memorable and imaginative setting than Nolan's Chicago/Gotham. I'm just not sure it's the right setting for the Batman franchise.