The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan, director of “The Dark Knight,” has a deep respect for actors. He gets spirited work out of them in individual scenes, trusting them to tease out subtle fissures and complex emotions. And yes, he does wonders with the late Heath Ledger, whose virtuoso Joker is a chillingly committed sociopath, sublimely sure of himself. Shooting in unadorned close-ups, Nolan allows Ledger’s energy to jolt the theater. If only the director could put as much faith in his audience. Ledger, Bale, Caine, Freeman, Oldman, Gyllenhaal and the rest of Nolan’s A-plus-list cast are acting into a vacuum. As a dramatist, Nolan proves both inept and pedantic, more interested in ruminating on the nature of heroism than in building tension or escalating conflict. “The Dark Knight” is talky and tedious, a frenzied string of anticlimaxes. Nolan can’t establish his themes through action, so he bloviates. The sick bond between Batman and the Joker, teased out so elegantly by Tim Burton in his 1989 “Batman,” exists in “The Dark Knight” only because the Joker says it does – repeatedly. And the final confrontation between these near-mythic adversaries is flat and nonsensical. As in his overrated “Batman Begins,” Nolan brings no visual imagination to Gotham City. It’s amazing to me that such a popular franchise is being shepherded by a filmmaker so dead to the expressive possibilities of the medium. His take on Batman isn’t dark; it’s just dim.
LISTEN: The Dark Knight
They should have just called the movie The Joker Show since the title character got the crappiest lines of the whole cast. What annoys me the most about this Batman series is the Batman voice… it’s just ridiculous. I think that the 2.5 hours of this movie could have made been better as two 90 minute movies with great story lines and better writing for Batman. That said, I’ve seen the movie three times because I like it more than I dislike it.
cc
29 Jul 08 at 4:05 pm
Yeah, I hate the Batman voice. Even people who love the movie hate the Batman voice. But they see it as an isolated flaw, while to me it’s emblematic of Nolan’s narrow-minded dullard approach. Undoubtedly he feels that Batman would HAVE to disguise his voice because otherwise someone could use it to glean his identity. I think a director who focuses on stuff like that — stuff that only a viewer with zero capacity for suspension of disbelief would get hung up on — is preoccupied with the wrong things. It’s the curmudgeon’s take on fantasy.
Ben
30 Jul 08 at 5:32 pm