Further thoughts on The Dark Knight
Well, as good as it is, it’s better on a second viewing. I went on a double-date with a screenwriter pal and our wives. Screenwriter joked, “I liked the first three movies, but the last two I thought were a little too much.” By which he meant, there is enough plot in The Dark Knight to fuel five summer blockbusters. No one could possibly walk out of this movie and complain they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. It seems like every fifteen minutes or so there is one blockbuster sequence or other that would have been the climax to any other movie, but The Dark Knight just keeps going and going and going, more surprises up its sleeve, more betrayals and double-crosses, more reveals and reversals. It makes The Departed look somnolent, it makes Heat look like a comic book and it makes Tim Burton’s Batman look like Leslie Martinson’s Batman.
My wife is something of a plot-nazi. Often, we go see some well-turned-out spectacle or other and I sit through the whole thing with a big goofy grin on my face, wondering at all the color and texture, and afterward I’ll turn to my wife and say “Well, what did you think?” and regardless of whatever pleasures the movie has to offer, she’ll zero in on one fault in the plot that ruins the entire narrative and the movie’s pleasures will immediately evaporate. For The Dark Knight, she had exactly one question on the way back to the parking garage. That question answered (it regarded how the Joker was financing his operation), she declared that the plot was air-tight. So you can take that as a strong recommendation: Todd Alcott’s wife finds the plot of The Dark Knight air-tight.
Heath Ledger’s performance on a first viewing I foolishly just kind of accepted as a given, but on a second viewing I’m fully confident that this is a bad-guy performance to stand alongside Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Javier Bardem in No Country, and Robert DeNiro (or Mitchum) in Cape Fear. Ledger’s Joker is grand and simple, bigger-than-life and frighteningly real, full of bold choices and yet detailed and human. I think it’s safe to say that it’ll be hard to watch Caeser Romero in the part for a while. Ledger’s Joker is both so mesmerizing that you can’t look away, and yet so horrifying that you feel you have to, for fear of catching his eye. Whatever is wrong with him, you know you don’t want to catch it.
A full analysis will have to wait for the DVD release probably, but one of the things that struck me on a second viewing was the sheer number of echoes, parallels and mirror-scenes, one character doing something that is then answered or repeated by another character in a different context. For instance, I was admiring the way Bruce Wayne was able to dismantle a shotgun while not looking at it, and then remembered that Harvey Dent does the same thing with a handgun earlier on. There are dozens of little moments like this but I prefer to keep this spoiler-free for now.
Some have responded to the complexity of The Dark Knight‘s plot by saying it is an ensemble drama. I myself felt pretty strongly that it had three protagonists. On a second viewing, let me just say: make no mistake, The Dark Knight has one protagonist and it is Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne, through his decision to end crime in Gotham City, creates a situation where, as Alfred puts it, the worried gangsters of Gotham turn to a man they don’t fully understand. That is, if Bruce Wayne did not create the Joker, hecreated the situation where the Joker could flourish. He set the plot of The Dark Knight in motion. His actions inspired the Joker to his mayhem, and inspired Harvey Dent to be Super DA, to be the man who would do, legally, what Batman can only do illegally. Everything that happens in the movie leads back to Bruce Wayne’s actions, his attempts to make Gotham City a better place to live. The Joker is his chief antagonist and Harvey Dent is his friend, the man who symbolizes the Gotham he wants the city to be — everything the Joker wants to happen to Gotham, happens to Harvey.
A note on Harvey: Two-Face is my favorite Batman villain, and without giving anything away, let me just say that the treatment of his character in The Dark Knight is the most full-bodied, complex, sympathetic, heartbreaking and horrifying we are likely to see in a generation. My only real sadness about The Dark Knight is that I would like to see a whole movie just about Harvey Dent. My wife, who is familiar with Two-Face through Tommy Lee Jones’s screaming, cackling camp-fest in Batman Forever and Bruce Timm’s thoroughly horrifying interpretation on the Batman Animated show, had forgotten that Harvey Dent is Two-Face, and, during The Dark Knight found herself thinking “I like this Harvey Dent character, he’s interesting and new, I wonder where this is going.” And then, upon realizing who he was, and what modern movie-making technology is capable of, spent a good portion of the movie in a state of sickened dread.