Movie Review: The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight (2008)–***
Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker is both The Dark Knight‘s blessing and curse. Ledger’s tour-de-force performance as the sociopathic clown takes Batman cinema into uncharted territory, but the cult leader like spell he casts over the audience has a devastating effect. We don’t really want the other characters in the film to keep up with him. And no other actor could do it if they tried.
The Joker is the bringer of chaos. With no back story or profit-producing schemes, he is only there to turn everything in Gotham upside down and inside out. He robs mob banks to prove he’s crazy enough to do it and to take away the one silly thing—cash—that the petty crime families are after. With a vigilante in a bat suit taking down the ordinary criminals, it’s the Joker’s role to act as the counterweight.
But Gotham has a new hero in waiting, a white knight. The tough, fearless district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is prepared to take on those simple-minded mob bosses, with Batman (Christian Bale) playing no small part in the Gotham citizens’ belief that the streets will be clean someday. The crowd is quick to turn on Batman when the Joker starts a killing spree the likes of which Gotham has never seen. Every day that Batman doesn’t turn himself in, “people will die”, the Joker tells them. Judges, police officers, mayors, ordinary citizens. No one is safe from the Joker’s madness.
Of course, the Joker doesn’t want Batman to be unmasked. The Joker revels in being the yin to Batman’s yang. It’s the essence of his character. Every action this agent of chaos performs, his sincere commitment to unimaginable devastation, is so beyond the pale, we as an audience can’t help but develop a sort of Stockholm syndrome. We don’t necessarily want the destruction, but we begin to care about the villain much more than we do any of the heroes.
The Dark Knight could have been completely forgettable, or at least consumable, with a lesser Joker. We would then have been more inclined to appreciate the Bale Batman’s existential crisis and Dent’s psychological transformation into the supervillain Two-Face. If The Dark Knight has a flaw, it is this: the Joker is no counterweight. He’s a sandbag falling from a theater’s rafters, while the other characters are stage hands whose palms are burned as they try to grasp the rope.
I don’t recall a film with a single performance the stature of Ledger’s that didn’t have someone else to carry the film. Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates had Janet Lee and Vera Miles as the Crane sisters. Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter had Jodie Foster’s Clarice. There’s no one in The Dark Knight up to the challenge, maybe because so many of the characters still only connect as lighter comic book transplants.
The cinema of the 1970s offers the easiest comparisons to someone like the Joker with its Popeye Doyles and Travis Bickles. The films with these characters, however, have no intention of offering up any sort of hope with less reckless counterparts. They unsettle you intentionally and don’t allow you to feel anything else. When Gene Siskel said of The French Connection that he left the theater “looking for someone to throw up against the wall,” I knew the film made him mean it. The Dark Knight doesn’t ever reach that level.
It may not seem fair to compare The Dark Knight to some of the great films above. But unlike Batman Begins or Iron Man, The Dark Knight strives for cinematic greatness. Christopher Nolan’s inspired direction, the character-driven film music from Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, and of course, Ledger’s Joker all require that The Dark Knight be respected and appreciated for its movie-making, flaws and all, and not as just another comic book blockbuster. We’ll probably never encounter another superhero film like it. That more than anything else makes The Dark Knight worth seeing again and again.
The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Heath Ledger, directed by Christopher Nolan, is in theaters now.
Get Email Updates
