A few steps closer to art

Is this turning out to be the Year of Intelligent Summer Movies?

With director Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins challenging our assumptions about normal summer popcorn fare, right on the heels of Robert Rodriguez’s smart and stunningly-violent Sin City, you may have reason to think so.

Traditionally, summer movies are supposed to be mindless blockbusters – lots of explosions and noise, flashy and hyper-paced. They’re quickly forgotten as soon as you leave the theater.

Last summer’s Spider-Man 2 changed that a little. Here was a comic-book sequel with an actual story, and actual subtext to think about, if you were so inclined. It was a cut above the usual Hollywood summer crap.

Now comes Sin City and Batman Begins – both based in some form, by the way, on graphic novels created by Frank Miller. Miller’s Batman: Year One was the basis for Nolan’s screenplay, which is richer and deeper than all previous Batman incarnations, save the two Tim Burton rethinks.

Nolan has two "arty" films under his belt (Memento and Insomnia), but he wasn’t the first pick to do this Batman redux; Darren Aranofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) was, but he was cut off from the project for some reason.

Fortunately, Nolan is up to the task, tapping a bit deeper into what makes a man want to become a bat in the first place, while enlisting some of the best Brit actors around (Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy and – oh, yeah – Christian Bale as the batty one) and even doing a credible job of providing the bang-up, high-explosive pyrotechnics we’ve come to demand of our summer movies.

Still, it’s not perfect. First, there’s Katie Holmes as the much-too-young District Attorney of Gotham. Next to the assembled British cast (not to mention the always reassuring presence of Morgan Freeman) the soon-to-be-Mrs.-Tom-Cruise just doesn’t have the acting chops to pull this off. After all this time, she still hasn’t moved too far from Dawson’s Creek.

Also, Batman Begins takes forever to set up, bringing us slowly forward from an early "bat attack" at Wayne Manor that leaves young Bruce Wayne traumatized by furry winged rodents. We learn this through flashback, as we encounter an older, angrier Wayne (Bale) fighting his way through prison in Nepal or somewhere, taking out his aggression at his parents’ violent deaths on the local criminal types.

This is interesting, and it’s a very different take on the forces that have shaped young Bruce Wayne. In past incarnations, he’s simply been a rich, slightly oddball loner (through TV’s Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and the avuncular George Clooney versions). You never knew what was really going on his noodle, save a desire to fight crime. Here, he’s basically an asshole, and a tortured one at that. Bale plays Bruce Wayne with rich-boy arrogance, but also shows it’s his primordial fear that pushes him – and pushes him to use this fear to inspire fear in others.

Hooking up with the age-old League of Shadows, Wayne learns ju-jitsu and other stealth techniques from his mentor (Neeson), but then rejects their ultimate goal and goes off on his own: back to Gotham, where he hopes to combat the rampant crime that destroyed his city and the violence that ended his parents’ lives.

Sure, fine, whatever. But Wayne isn’t hooked up quite right in the head, having been traumatized by bats as a youth. He learned to understand the criminal mind by rejecting his rich pedigree and hanging out with criminals, we learn. After much internal questioning, he decides that he needs to present himself as an "icon" to Gotham to show he is there to protect the city. Naturally, he chooses bats. "Why bats, Master Wayne?" asks chummy old butler, Alfred (Caine). "Bats frighten me," he replies. "It’s time I learned to share that dread with others."

This he does, becoming the scariest Batman yet. As dark, perhaps, as Miller’s graphic novel dared to be, this is a peek under the brainpan of one of America’s most psychologically messed-up comic book heroes. Some may gripe that we learn nothing new about The Batman: so he’s afraid of bats, that’s old news. But the visual and psychological presentation by Nolan is miles beyond the gay-themed camp and bombast of Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman Returns. Finally, we see a Batman who is dark, complicated, and not a little frightening in his implications. Amen to that.

Some have also complained that the fight scenes are too quick-cut, too fast, and – literally – too dark. But this is part of director Nolan’s point: Batman should swoop out from nowhere, using stealth and darkness as his tools. This ain’t a kiddie movie, especially since the main villain, Cillian Murphy’s Dr. Kane, uses a hideous scarecrow mask and panic-inducing psychotropic drugs to quell his victims. We see the horrible things his victims see: Kane’s mask crawling with maggots, horrible glowing eyes, faces from childhood nightmares.

Fear is the main point of Batman Begins. Dread has struck Gotham, thanks to the criminal gangs sanctioned by mobster Falcone (Wilkinson), but also from outside attacks by criminal masterminds. Gotham has never looked quite so dark, decaying and dreadful – not even in Tim Burton’s perfectly fine but still kid-level interpretations. Here, it looks like a place that has had fear stuffed down its throat, and in a post-9/11 world, Gotham could be New York or any other big city confronted with its own demons.

To combat that fear comes a dark figure looming in the shadows. When Batman swoops across the skyline, even normal citizens cower: that’s an unintentional by-product of his chosen path. In the end, Batman becomes a victim of his own new identity: he is fated to induce fear in others, all the time moving further and further from knowing who Bruce Wayne really is. Kinda literary for a summer movie, yes?

This is the setup for what promises to be a rewarding new era in the Batman franchise. No, "franchise" is the wrong word, because that word is associated with product and merchandise. This is a few steps closer to art. And who knows? Maybe this Batman series can tap into and transmit the power of more graphic novels to the big screen. After all, Hollywood has long been bereft of ideas; why not go to the best "literary" sources, if you’re going to make comic book movies anyway?