BATMAN AND GIRLS AT BAT

By John Simon

From National Review, vol 44 n 15, 08.03.1992

There is something disturbingly infantile about a society in which the summer's most touted, opulent, breathlessly awaited movie is Batman Returns. This piece of goods has just about everything against it a movie can have. Not only is it based on comic books, but also it is a sequel: two queasy genres in one. It was directed by a loutish director, Tim Burton, who specializes in films for children. (Backward ones, at that.) And even as comic strips go, Bob Kane's Batman was particularly primitive. But what is especially shaming for our culture is the critical acclaim this trash has garnered.

In this sequel, which I consider visually undernourished and inferior even to the original, there is neither a well-defined plot line nor an antagonist as funny and formidable as Jack Nicholson's Joker. The protagonist, Batman, in private life the befuddled billionaire Bruce Wayne, lacked much personality in either guise in the first film; in the sequel, he seems more pallid yet, both in and out of costume, which makes him a quadruple loser. In Batman Returns, he is no longer pitted against one solid villain, but against a flimsier and confusing two and a half: the Trumpishly greedy entrepreneur Max Shreck; the malformed ornithoid mobster from the literal underground (the sewers), the Penguin; and Catwoman, of whom he and we cannot even be certain whether she is an opponent.

Uncertainty here does not make for creative ambiguity, but for wishy-washiness. When they doff their bathood and cathood, Bruce and Selina Kyle are by way of becoming lovers, yet the movie cannot even make up its feeble mind about whether they recognize each other under their disguise. The plot crumbles before our eyes as Catwoman plays cat and mouse with Max, and cat and bird with the Penguin; and as the Penguin starts giving his co-conspirator Shreck the shaft. Intricacy does not thrive in such a simplistic setting, which cries out for one good knock-down, drag-out contest.

Add to this that either the main characters fall flat or the actors portraying them are poorly cast. Both the Penguin and Catwoman survive death in the same, even cartoonily, unconvincing way. The former, born Oswald Cobblepot, was flushed into the sewer by his parents and raised by an unlikely colony of penguins escaped from the zoo. The latter, nee Selina Kyle, was Shreck's incomparably dowdy but dedicated secretary. Yet the vile and thankless Max defenestrates her, one awning proving enough to break her fall from empyrean heights, whereupon an improbable cluster of cats licks our ailurophile back to life. As if that weren't enough, she sews herself a cat suit out of an old black slicker, and promptly becomes not only sleek and sexy, but also able to perform the most prodigious series of backflips. And outside her cat suit, she is a gorgeous, exquisitely groomed and gowned young woman -- in fact, Michelle Pfeiffer.

This Catwoman, moreover, has literally nine lives, when even James Bond only had 007. And whereas it makes some sense for the misshapen Penguin to hate mankind, there is no evidence that Selina was maltreated by any man other than her boss; at worst, she was a wallflower, which hardly justifies her all-out war against men, even if it may fit in with an era of unleashed radical feminism. And just why did the righteous hero become a proto-bat? Surely, Superman was a more glamorous creature. In a recent TV interview, Bob Kane said he got the idea from Mary Roberts Rinehart's play The Bat. If, instead, he had chanced on The Wings of the Dove, would our hero have become Pigeonman?

Actually, Michael Keaton is a kind of pouter pigeon. And under his high, narrow, curl-topped forehead, the lower half of his face -- the one the bat mask leaves exposed -- is puffy and soft, making his head look like an overripe pear. His acting ability, on the other hand, remains fully hidden, in both costume and business suit. As for the Penguin, played by the unprepossessing Danny DeVito, he is not scary: not even when eyeing Catwoman lecherously does he endow his beak with the properly phallic menace. Nor does he have the charm that Burgess Meredith, the previous incumbent, brought to the role.

Christopher Walken is an interesting actor who definitely knows how to be a threatening presence. But his Queens accent, however reminiscent of Donald Trump's, merely suggests a small-time chiseler, and his Paderewskian wig makes him look too much like a piano virtuoso to terrify anything but a keyboard. And Miss Pfeiffer? She comes closest to making an impression, but as the writing (by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm) fudges her moral status, she does not have a clear persona to play.

As the film progresses, it becomes ever sloppier. Finally it is no more than an orgy of naughty brats destroying everything in sight. Things and people collide, collapse, ravage one another, and blow up in such quick profusion that the violence melts together into an amorphous mess, something like a twenty-minute multiple-car crash. You don't know who did what to whom. And at the end, the obvious opening for another sequel glares at us like a pair of missing front teeth.

In the Times, Janet Maslin calls Batman Returns an often "unexpectedly droll creation," but the lines she adduces as witty (e.g., Selina to Max, "How can you be so mean to someone so meaningless?"; Catwoman to the Penguin, "I wouldn't touch you to scratch you!"; Catwoman to the world, "Life's a bitch; now so am I!"; an image consultant to the Penguin, "Not a lot of reflective surfaces down in the sewer, huh?") fall between balloons -- the comic-strip and the lead kind. Miss Maslin's colleague, Caryn James, goes even farther in her Sunday piece: "With the sneakiness and impact of a sucker punch, this wildly witty and inventive adventure taps into the confused Zeitgeist of the moment." And she proceeds to draw elaborate parallels between, among others, the Penguin and Ross Perot.

Most bizarre, though, is the praise Terrence Rafferty heaps on the movie in The New Yorker. A true heir of Pauline Kael, he extols anything that he considers "liberating" trash. Thus he praises (or raises?) Kane for "successfully plying his not entirely reputable trade" in the "law-of-the-jungle areas of the imagination," and lauds the movie for "respect[ing] the arbitrariness, the sheer out-of-the-blue berserkness of Kane's conception." Again: "The genius [sic] of Burton's approach to Batman was that it reveled in impurity, celebrated the anything-goes recklessness of comic-book art [sic], and made that quality seem as beautiful -- as right, in its way -- as the honed, shapely power of the most affecting fairy tales."

Kane, Rafferty speculates, may have found his "weird conviction . . . deep in the Batcave of his unconscious, as a disguised acknowledgment of the necessary unscrupulousness of his own artistic kind." And congenial Tim Burton responded by finding in himself "the delightfully unwholesome qualities that make a great popular artist." The yearning for subversion in these well-fed bourgeois reviewers is remarkable -- as is the assumption that this great popular art (for which read successfully crowd-pleasing schlock) really has the purposiveness and power to subvert anything. But the proteges of Miss Kael, the so-called Paulettes, multiply in the catacombs of criticism. Some sewers abound in reflective surfaces.

No better a film is the less cartoony but just as trashy A League of Their Own, which the studio first shelved as unmarketable. Crass as those studio bosses may be, even they have higher standards than our critics and audiences. This piece of sentimental claptrap, shabbily written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, derivatively directed by Penny Marshall, and anthologizing every cliche of the run-of-the-mill sports picture, seems well on the way to becoming a blockbuster.

During World War II, when it appeared that too many baseball players would be drafted, a women's league was started in three Midwestern states. Eliciting laughter and sneers at first, women's baseball, played with real professionalism, caught on, and coexisted with men's baseball for some dozen years. The screenplay revolves around two sisters: comely Dottie, her parents' favorite, married to a fighting GI, and a terrific catcher and hitter in local softball skirmishes; and Kit, her tomboyish kid sister, a fine pitcher who freezes at bat, partly because of her general inferiority complex vis-a-vis her beautiful elder sister. But Dottie cares for her, agreeing to try out for the All American Girls Professional Baseball League only if Kit is given an equal chance.

We get the usual bromides about the recruiting and training of the young women, from raw rookies (or cookies) into greathearted players. They have to take charm-school courses, wear cutesy uniforms, put up with apathetic management and a hostile press, not to mention a perfectly beastly coach, Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks). A former ace, he ruined his career through booze and a concomitant accident that permanently wrecked his knees. The movie follows his team, the Rockford Peaches, where, besides Dottie and Kit, we get the randy ex-taxi-dancer "All-the-way" Mae (Madonna, in one of her more restrained showings), along with the usual assortment of other beloved commonplaces of the genre.

Imagine, the movie even starts with Dottie as a middle-aged mother reluctantly yielding to her daughter as she lets herself be persuaded to travel to Cooperstown, where the Peaches are to be inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame. And it ends, after telling its tale in a flashback, with the tear-drenched and tear-jerking reunion of the survivors. But the climax comes when the sisters, by now both stars but playing on opposing teams in the crucial game (for contrived reasons I won't go into) face off with results only slightly less predictable than the sum of two and two.

Dugan, the misogynistic coach, urinates in front of his players and refuses to coach them; during games, he gets drunk and sleeps in the dugout. Needless to say, he is brought to his senses later, but by that time even the most callous team owner would have fired him. And, equally needless to say, there is a platonic romance between Dugan and Dottie that chastely ends when her hubby returns from the war. And . . . but aren't you crying uncle by now? A League of Their Own belongs in a class not quite its own -- a rather huge one known as rubbish.