BATOPHILIA STRIKES

By Jay Carr

From The Boston Globe, 06.23.1989, City Edition

Tim Burton's new, dark Batman isn't a great action movie. It's something better--a great city movie. There's a lot to be said for Michael Keaton's brooding Batman; and as the white-faced, green-haired, leering Joker, Jack Nicholson slams home one of Hollywood's great demento numbers. The inescapably penile Batmobile suggests a cross between an armadillo and a vintage Corvette, and the Batwing is a dream toy, too. But the thing that's going to make you want to see Batman a second and third and fourth time is Gotham City as a brutal pile of dour, gothic, Art Deco menace. Girdered, buttressed, thrusting, crushing, it's architecture from hell, a nightmare projection of civilization in malignant, life-threatening retreat, a literally fantastic projection of the city as a huge dead battery.

In short, Batman will take its place alongside the small handful of film's visionary apocalyptic cityscapes. After Metropolis and Blade Runner and Brazil there haven't been many. Not that Batman hasn't got more going for it than doom-laden scenery. It's an inspired visual expression of a world in which art as well as heroes has fallen into disrepute. One of its best sequences involves a square-off between Batman and the Joker in a heavy metal mausoleum wickedly called the Flugelheim Museum, in which the Joker's vandalizing of paintings seems less barbarous than the so-called museum's display of them. There's something almost heroic about the Joker's way of manically raising the energy level in the soul-crushing world he wants to rule. Once he takes that acid bath that contorts his face into its permanent leer, he never lets up. There's nobody like Jack Nicholson if you want an over-the-top Jack Nicholson impersonation.

There's also an invigoratingly perverse wit in the Joker's crimes. First he rubs out Jack Palance, his double-crossing boss, in an Art Deco penthouse whose nocturnal beauty is stronger than the bloodshed. Then he makes his victims his collaborators in ways that would have aroused in Richard Widmark an envy greener than the Joker's hair. Then, he gets to people through their vanity, lacing a factory batch of cosmetics with a poison that causes people to die laughing. Burton uses a TV anchor team to wicked effect to illustrate the poison-cosmetic murder wave. After an anchorwoman dies on the air after laughing at other victims, her co-anchors keep showing up on TV with messier and messier complexions: They're afraid to use cosmetics. Later, when the Joker decides to decimate the population of Gotham City, he uses greed, riding a parade float through town, scattering money, then gassing the masses after he slaps on a respirator.

But any Batman movie in which the architecture and the Joker take over is, you will gather, a bit lopsided. What's wrong is that Batman is too muted, his conflicts too internalized. He's got a great Robocop look--his suit is black molded armor, not the comic-book gray--and he retains the vulnerability that always made him more appealing than Superman. Unlike the Man of Steel, who could fly through brick walls as long as they didn't contain kryptonite, Batman becomes admirable for his cleverness in inventing gadgets to extend the range of human activity. He's great with the utility belt, whether shooting a grappling hook onto a roof or radio-controlling the armored Batmobile. Keaton is just as fascinating as the Robin-less millionaire playboy, Bruce Wayne.

In civvies, his brooding works. He knows he's a guy with a problem, that his need to glide through life caped and masked stems from more than a need to avenge his parents' death at the hands of street thugs. His dilemma is captured wittily and wordlessly by Burton in a scene with Kim Basinger. After they've made love, she falls asleep, then awakens startled to find herself alone in bed. Peering through the murk, she finally spies Bruce Wayne on the other side of the room, hanging batlike by his feet from a gravity bar. The succinct visual wit here almost makes up for the lack of a revelation scene when she learns he's Batman. One minute she thinks he's Bruce Wayne; the next, she's in the Batcave, talking to Michael Gough's suave, warm Alfred, the butler and factotum. Batman, meanwhile, grows too internalized. There are a lot of scenes that seem not so much edited as abruptly truncated;. this is the most glaring.

Not that Basinger is a major ingredient in Batman. She's pretty much just along for the ride, a distraction to take our minds off the fact that Robin has been broomed. In the film, she plays a photojournalist named Vicki Vale. But she's less than Batman's Lois Lane. Robert Wuhl, her snoopy reporter colleague at the wonderful retro newspaper named The Gotham Globe, with its yellowing clip file, marble columns and fedora-hatted wiseguys, is more fun to have around. Others, such as Billy Dee Williams' district attorney and Pat Hingle's Police Commissioner Gordon, are restricted to brief window-dressing roles. We never even see Batman summoned by the Batsignal. But one of the film's most effective moments comes early on when Batman drops silently to a tenement rooftop in a swooping glide, then takes out a couple of muggers.

There's something spidery and eerie in Batman's first entrance that Burton and Keaton only intermittently recapture. To their credit, they don't beat into the ground the notion that Batman and the Joker need each other to define themselves. Instead, Burton displays their mutual dependency as a symptom of the spiritual corrosion (one of the film's visual metaphors is pervasive rust) in which Gotham City is steeped. Audiences expecting an action movie will find Batman insufficiently active and dramatic. Narrative isn't Burton's strong point. And Batman loses impact by not getting the Batman-Joker balance right, by not tipping the film more toward Batman. Terrific as Nicholson's bravura Joker is, he'd be even better if there were 10 minutes less of him. Yet you wouldn't want to miss the showdown between Batman and the Joker atop an exfoliating gothic cathedral lifted from Fritz Lang's Metropolis by way of Antonio Gaudi.

If slack intrudes as the narrative thins out, and if Batman sometimes grows recessive, Burton gets the important thing right. Just as he did in very different ways in his first two films--Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice--Burton specifies a world that's vivid and very much unlike anything quite put on film before. He and his production designer, Anton Furst, fill their high visual style with weight and impact, and draw us into it with the undertow of the dreamlike. Burton further increases his film's unsettling sense of dislocation by blurring the year in which it takes place--it could be anywhere from the '30s to a retro 21st century. Burton is an original. His flawed but powerful Batman is a world apart from Hollywood's summer parade of play-it-safe sequels. It's the first Hollyood movie of 1989 I can't wait to see again.