Batman Begins, dir. Christopher Nolan (2005)
This Batman has a tough mission before he even begins: to overturn memories of his last film outing, the ludicrous, dayglo-panto travesty of Joel Schumacher’s 1997 Batman and Robin. It succeeds through two methods, which it meshes together from opposing poles into an astonishingly solid and convincing whole: mythic potency on one hand, and gritty realism on the other.
On the big, mythic level, Batman Begins dredges deep from both East and West. Batman is born of Gotham City, an archetypal not-quite New York in a time you can’t pin down. The Depression hit when Bruce Wayne was a boy – or a Depression, because the cars, the costumes and technology show that even his flashbacks aren’t taking place in the 1930s – but the city skims with silver monorails from a 1950s vision of the future. It’s Star Wars’ urban planet Coruscant, itself based on New York in the 1990s, crossed with Fritz Lang’s science fiction vision of Metropolis, based on New York in the 1920s, mixed with the classic Warners gangster films of the 1930s and a dose of 1970s Al Pacino conspiracy-cop drama. It’s a city that almost exists, that you’d kind of like to exist – a city-montage of the 20th century. And considering that Batman’s been running since 1939, his history constantly rejigged and “retconned” – geekspeak for retroactive continuity – so that an origin sequence which initially took place in the 1920s is now shifted to the 1980s – that’s exactly how it should be.
The Eastern mythology is brought back from Bruce Wayne’s self-imposed exile and sojourn in China, where he’s tutored by Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) into the ways of a secret order called the League of Shadows. Wayne’s training gives us sequences of samurai swordplay and ninja combat, and also, inevitably – through the dapper but deadly figure of his tutor Ducard, played by Liam Neeson – recalls George Lucas’ appropriation of samurai ritual and convention into the Jedi code. Wayne’s initiation, involving hallucinogenic trials of the mind as well as gladiatorial tests of the body, is a classic rite of passage: a pilgrimage from familiar home territory to a foreign shrine, and a comfortable life of privilege stripped and beaten down to mud-stained, half-naked anonymity before being built up again into something new and sent home, transformed.
Of course, Batman has sixty-six years of comic book history to draw on too, and the film is canny enough to use a lot of that existing mythos – a wise move, not because all cinema has to be as dutifully faithful to its source as Sin City, but because in sixty-six years there’s going to be a lot of rich invention already done for you. Whole scenes of the film are lifted from the work of Frank Miller, whose Dark Knight Returns was itself a revisionist reboot of the character in 1986 and whose sequel, Batman Year One, did the same starting-from-scratch job with the origin story.
The armoured Bat-tank was Miller’s invention, whereas the Eastern pilgrimage and self-discovery through drug trances were additions to the mythos by veteran DC comics scriptwriter Denny O’Neil. The Falcone mafia family, who effectively run Gotham in Nolan’s film, were key figures in Jeph Loeb’s Long Halloween saga, and the discussions between Wayne and Ducard about totems, symbols and their importance to building personae could almost be direct quotations from Bryan Talbot’s Batman story “Masks”. One key moment in Batman Begins even, surprisingly, pays tribute to Tim Burton’s movie of 1989; a generous homage to an earlier , flawed adaptation.
Nolan’s second big decision was to ground Batman Begins resolutely in realism. Everything we see has to be made plausible. So the costume is a prototype military uniform, shelved because it cost thousands of dollars for each soldier. The cowl is ordered from Japan and the ears from China to avoid suspicion, in batches of ten thousand so it looks like a bulk supply instead of an individual project – when the cowl proves to be brittle graphite, Wayne just has to order ten thousand more. Batman fakes flight through a gas-powered grapple gun and a reinforced pair of wings, like a hang-glider; and even so, he misjudges the first few times, tumbling and knocking himself against drainpipes and fire escapes. This Batman is a self-made vigilante in a grubby, grimy Gotham, and for a lot of the time the film comes off like a police procedural drama that just happens to feature one man in an armoured suit.
For at least an hour, there aren’t any masks or costumes at all. The only supervillain, the Scarecrow, is a minor pawn in larger criminal networks – his use of a fright-mask makes perfect sense and is explained as a Jungian archetype – and the CGI, as opposed to physical stuntwork, seems to be held back for hallucinatory scenes. The acting, too, is more sober and sombre than we’re used to from Batman movies. Gary Oldman delivers perhaps the most self-effacing and humble performance of his career, fitting into the tone and feel of the whole ensemble rather than scenery-chewing like Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face. The cast’s commitment to team playing, to creating a coherent fictional world instead of grandstanding and showboating, pays off with lovely, unforced moments of comedy, particularly in the easy banter between Michael Caine’s Alfred and Morgan Freeman as another old-timer on the Wayne payroll, Lucius Fox.
That this drive for realism comes off without resulting in tedious explanations or dragging the myth down into mundanity is a real coup. The crux is that the citizens of Gotham do view Batman as an icon, a monster, a myth – occasionally as a literal demon, when the Scarecrow’s toxins make Wayne appear as a fire-eyed elemental – but that we as audience, like those few characters who know his secret identity, are privy to the work, effort, planning, courage and sacrifice that goes into making the illusion look so easy. This tension between real man and mythical Batman leads to scenes reminiscent of Peter Parker’s angsty dilemmas with Mary-Jane Watson, as Wayne and his childhood sweetheart Rachel Dawes realise there are three people in their relationship, and that the war on crime leaves no room for romance. That a Batman film could ever, even for a second, be emotionally moving is another surprise. Of course, this doomed love and Wayne’s solo vigilantism excludes an element that many have considered a vital or at least fascinating part of the Batman mythos – the homoerotic aspect of his relationship with the Boy Wonder – but maybe Schumacher’s films included enough butt shots and double-entendres to satisfy those fans, for now. Rachel, in fact, would have made an interesting Robin herself.
Lastly, and a final surprise: this Batman is a film of ideas. Though the pace is punctuated with regular fistfights and GTA-style road racing, there are some powerful ironies lying like muscles beneath the skin of this action movie, flexing to unsettle the surface. It’s suggested, for instance, that young Bruce Wayne indirectly caused his own parents’ death; it’s shown clearly that the older Wayne saved the life of a villain who would go on to threaten his city. Even more subversively, the film ends with the speculation that Batman’s very existence actually gives birth to his deadliest adversaries: through a process of escalation, just as cops carrying semi-automatics push the hoodlums into buying automatic weapons, so the presence of a masked vigilante in Gotham prompts the appearance of a theatrical killer who leaves a Joker calling-card. Wayne made himself as a monster; Batman in turn makes monsters of his own, and then has to spend the rest of his career trying to stop them from destroying others. It’s a chilling idea for a summer superhero movie, and it’s a measure of this film’s ambition, intelligence and resonant power.
By Stillman