Movie Madness: The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight has everything: fabulous performances, gorgeous visuals, well-paced plot movement, even for a film that is over two and a half hours long.  And, while the story is great, it’s also ultimately unimportant.  The film is a character study and the real plot points are not about who did what or how it happened, but about order versus anarchy and pragmatism versus chaos.  It’s Good against Evil, with Batman in the middle trying to usher Gotham from the darkness to the light.

The performances range from good to spectacular.  Christian Bale is back as Batman.  His performance is very good, but it’s not distinct from his performance in the first film.  He was very good then and he plays the same role in just about the same way this time.  Similarly, Gary Oldman is back as Jim Gordon and he does a great job, again, just like the first film.  Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart give capable, well-acted performances as Rachel Dawes and Harvey Dent, respectively.  Gyllenhaal is cast in the same role that Katie Holmes played in Batman Begins, but she quickly makes you forget that fact.  Eckhart is stuck in the role of a wide-eyed do-gooder.  He does fine with it, but the role was probably miscast.  The sardonic wit that made Eckhart so compelling in Thank You for Smoking has no place in this role as a heroic District Attorney.  He does well enough as the white knight (for a while, anyway) in this film, but the role just does not play to his strengths.

Heath Ledger is, without any doubt, the star of this film.  His performance as the Joker is creepy, scary, and absolutely insane.  This is not Jack Nicholson’s Joker who had equal parts homicidal and clownish tendencies.  This joker does not have a squirting flower full of acid or a silly gun with a six-foot barrel.  Ledger’s Joker is a demented soul who lives outside the law.  He hates both the police and the gangsters because they are all part of a society he rejects.  This Joker is a court jester, exposing absurdity and hypocrisy.  But, more than anything else, Ledger’s Joker is just nuts.  Just pure crazy.  And it’s a spectacular performance.

The situation gets a little more complicated when you start to think about the context of Ledger’s performance.  It is strange and unsettling to see Ledger play such a reprehensible character.  Before the film starts, you expect to have a somewhat sympathetic reaction to his character, but the Joker is just too crazy… too homicidal… for any sympathy at all.  But you eventually realize that that’s how it should be.  It’s a great compliment to Ledger that his Joker is so well acted that you see the Joker and not Heath Ledger on the screen.  Ultimately, it should be about the performance and not the performer and the Joker is simply the best character I have seen in a film this year.  Ledger should at least get an Oscar nomination for this role and I would be pretty surprised if he does not get a posthumous Oscar.

The film is not entirely without flaws.  There are some moments when Christopher Nolan gives in to the allure of a too-elaborate explosion and there are sections that might have been better off on the cutting room floor.  152 minutes was too long for a film that does not even claim to be an epic.  Also… don’t expect anything happy.  At all.  There are two or three moments when you chuckle and one good laugh.  The rest is very, very dark.

Overall, the problems were small and the performances were spectacular.  It’s a wonderful film and you should see it sooner than later.

Juice’s Grade: A