THE JOKER IS WILD, BUT BATMAN CARRIES THE NIGHT

By Jack Kroll

From Newsweek, 06.26.1989, United States Edition

"The Official Batman Batbook" lists 347 Holy Bat-Words; two of my favorites are "Holy Rising Hemlines!" and "Holy Priceless Collection of Etruscan Snoods!" You don't hear any such holyspeak in Tim Burton's Batman. This Batman is hip, postmodern, noir, a swooping dive into the tangled recesses of the contemporary psyche. Holy Urban Psychosis! (Sorry, it's hard to resist.) Still, that's Burton's premise: Bruce Wayne/Batman (Michael Keaton) and Jack Napier/The Joker (Jack Nicholson) are both wackos, as New York's Mayor Ed Koch would say; except that one is good and one is evil.

In fact, Koch look-alike Lee Wallace plays the major of Gotham City, a festering hellhole that simmers with evil from every manhole. Much of the movie's $35 million budget has gone into designer Anton Furst's gigantic set for Gotham City, which he wittily sees as a decaying hodgepodge of styles from Fritz Lang-Metropolis to New York art deco to '80s eclectic.

Such a bollixed-up burg breeds madness; mobster Jack Napier is a nut case even before he falls into a vat of toxic goo that turns him into The Joker: his face corpse white, his hair poison green, his mouth fixed in a blood-red grin, his frame draped in a purple zoot suit. Scheming to poison Gothamites with Smylex gas, he announces proudly: "I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist."

Only Batman can deal with this killer clown. But whereas we've learned a great deal about the joker, we learn very little about the Caped Crusader (except that his parents had been bumped off by Napier). "He's psychotic," Wayne remarks about the Joker to his squeeze, ace photojournalist Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger). "Some people say the same about you," she probes. "It's not a normal world," he answers, inadequately. And how did rich young philanthropist Wayne become Batman and not Hawkman or Boa Constrictorman? "Bats are great survivors," he says. But inquiring minds want better answers.

This lack of balance between the Joker and Batman is the major flaw in the screenplay credited to Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren. Director Burton sees Batman as the antithesis of Superman. The Man of Steel is from another galaxy, he has megapower and X-ray eyes, he can fly. Batman is a mixed-up human, he wears glasses, he's no hulk and has to use grappling hooks and wires to get around the rooftops. But not enough is made of this contrast. It might have been fun to see Wayne and his faithful butler-assistant Alfred (Michael Gough) devising his bat-haber-dashery, including the body armor that includes cosmetic muscles.

The best stuff in Batman reflects the surreal, black-humorist sensibility of 30-year-old Burton, one of the most original moviemakers to come along in years (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice). In one of Batman's best scenes the Joker and his men invade the Gotham City museum and proceed to slash and deface the entire legacy of Western Art. He saves only one painting--a twisted, screaming portrait by the English modernist Francis Bacon: "I kinda like this one," says the Joker. The Burton of Beetlejuice pops up when the Joker kills a guy by shaking his hand with a high voltage Joy Buzzer--and then conducts a friendly conversation with the charred corpse.

The irreverent, subversive Burton doesn't seem that interested in Batman's action sequences. Most of these fall flat; Batman, swaddled in his black armor and mask, lacks the physical freedom and flair of the great action heroes. But in the climatic bash between Batman and Joker on the roof of the Gotham cathedral, Burton effectively mixes action and character: in this life-and-death situation the incorrigible Joker turns to one of the cathedral's stone gargoyles and snarls: "What are you laughing at?"

Even with Burton's marvelous technical crew--people like cinematographer Roger Pratt, visual-effects wizards Derek Meddings and John Evans--Batman sometimes falls flat on the amazement scale. Burton doesn't have as much fun with the Batmobile as the James Bond movies have with his Aston Martin. Better is the gag that has the Batwing, bristling with high-tech controls and superlaser weaponry, shot out of the sky by the Joker's long- (extremely long) barreled pistol.

Hero-villain face-off: What makes Batman lack ultimate zap is its failure to produce a memorable conflict between its hero and its villain. They should have been two disturbed, funny-scary representatives of a disturbed society. This is clearly what Burton was after. But only part of it is there. When Batman tells the Joker at the end "I made you, but you made me first," we haven't really seen that. The movie has never shown the complicity between moral opposites that drives the great hero-villain face-offs--even in comic books.

The cast is first-rate. Nicholson is a one-man theater of evil--he sings, he dances, he cracks wise, he kills and he enjoys every knife-ripping, bullet-riddling, acid-scarring minute of it. Michael Keaton plays his underwritten part with a brooding style and charm that suggests much more than meets the eye. Kim Basinger's part is also underwritten; she compensates by literally lighting up a physically dark movie. Roger Pratt's lens reveals a human face intricate and ravishing. Holy Physiognomy!

Batman is half brilliant. It looks as if Burton was aware of the flaws in this project but that, handed a big-budget blockbuster after only two movies, he couldn't blast all of them away, as Richard Donner was able to do in the first Superman. There's hardly a doubt that Batman will reap zillions. Let's hope that Tim Burton won't get caught up in the sequel syndrome. He should pursue his own projects--that's the real excitement of a talent like his.