BATMAN'S RETURN

By Brian D. Johnson

From Maclean's, vol 105 n 25, 06.22.1992

Hollywood launches a blockbuster sequel

Dateline: Chicago, IL

Well before its opening this week on nearly 3,000 screens across North America, it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that Batman Returns would be the hottest movie of the summer. The original Batman (1989) earned $475 million and generated a merchandising frenzy. Now, a fresh line of bat paraphernalia is flooding the market--hundreds of items ranging from T-shirts to sleeping bags. An array of corporations, from McDonald's to Coca-Cola, has launched massive promotion campaigns tied to the sequel. And buried somewhere, beneath all the marketing, there is a movie.

Michael Keaton is back on screen as the Dark Knight, scowling through a new and improved bat mask, remodeled to mimic the deltoid contours of his eyebrows. And replacing Jack Nicholson's Joker, who so completely dominated the first movie, are three new villains: Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), a sultry dominatrix in a black rubber bodysuit who knows her way around a bullwhip; the Penguin (Danny DeVito), a dirty old mutant ninja birdman who ascends from the sewers; and a toxic tycoon named Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), who is plotting world domination.

Despite the movie's massive scale, and its $65-million production budget, it breaks the pattern of most summer blockbusters. For one thing, it takes place at Christmastime, in a snow-frosted Gotham City. Keaton's Batman remains perversely spartan and introspective, more antihero than superhero. And although the action features the requisite barrage of explosions and special effects, the sequel, like the original, is above all a spectacle of visual design--an operatic costume drama by a director who worships weirdness.

Tim Burton, a 33-year-old former animator, has displayed a consistent flair for injecting the bizarre into the commercial mainstream. His characters have included the squeaky-voiced clown of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985), the cackling genie of Beetlejuice (1988) and the hedge-clipping dervish of Edward Scissorhands (1990). And with the Batman movies, Burton has tried to restore the dark vision of the comic-book hero created by artist Bob Kane in 1939. Said Pfeiffer, interviewed at a recent media launch for Batman Returns in Chicago: "Tim has a very unusual way of viewing the world. There's just no getting around it. He's very definite about what he wants, and he refuses to compromise."

The director certainly went out of his way to avoid making a cookie-cutter sequel. He decided against using the original's Oscar-winning sets of Gotham City, which were built in Britain by production designer Anton Furst. Burton started from scratch with Beetlejuice and Scissorhands designer Bo Welch, who created his own vision of the city on Hollywood soundstages. (During the sequel's filming last November, Furst killed himself by jumping off a parking garage next to the Los Angeles hospital where he had hoped to kick a 26-year Valium habit. His motives remain a mystery.)

Welch's Gotham is more fanciful (and less gothic) than Furst's austere city. "I didn't want to do the same thing," Burton told Maclean's. "So the dilemma is, how do you remain true to the spirit of it and still do something different? I like this stuff better, in a way." The Christmas setting was an attempt to achieve contrast, he said. "It was an emotional choice. I just wanted a coolness." Added Burton: "I feel closer to this movie. I like it better. But that doesn't make it a better movie."

In fact, Batman Returns is lighter, funnier and less nihilistic than the first film. The script, by Daniel Waters, who wrote Heathers (1989), a black comedy about teenage suicide, is riddled with one-liners. Gotham City is again a nightmare of urban chaos, but with softer edges. There are some scenes of jolting violence, but nothing as nasty as the Joker's vicious disfigurement of his moll, or his knife-slashing spree through an art museum. And unlike Kim Basinger, who served as a weakly scripted sex object in the original, Pfeiffer gets to play a multiple personality who finds manic liberation in a cat suit--she steals the movie.

Her character starts out as a skittish secretary named Selina. Shreck, her boss, is planning a power project rigged to siphon off the city's surplus electricity. After Selina uncovers his secret, Shreck throws her through an office window. Surviving the fall, but with her mind shattered, she stitches together the cat suit and adopts a savage identity. "Life's a bitch," she snarls, "and so am I." Catwoman gives Batman a good licking--with her whip and her tongue.

Shreck, meanwhile, makes a pact with the Penguin. Deformed at birth, with a beak nose and fused fingers, he was tossed into an icy creek by his horrified parents, then raised by penguins in an abandoned arctic pavilion beneath the Gotham Zoo. Now, he rides around in a rubber duck-mobile and draws on an arsenal of lethal umbrellas. He also commands an army of rocket-packing penguins--played by real penguins, animatronic puppets and small actors in penguin suits.

And from the zoo of images, a theme emerges. "Everyone forgets that we're still basically animals," said Burton. Totemism runs wild in Batman Returns. The movie's publicity posters show the Bat, the Cat and the Penguin stacked like faces on a totem pole. And there was an air of unreality to last week's interviews in Chicago, where the stars discussed the finer points of animal masquerade.

DeVito recalled with great relish that, after devoting two hours each morning to applying his Penguin makeup, he would remain in character all day, occasionally biting people on the set. Keaton revealed that the costume designer tried to build a zippered fly into his new bat suit. That "was considerate," he conceded, "but from odd camera angles, you'd see the zipper. And sometimes it would be half-open--or half-closed."

Meanwhile, Pfeiffer talked reverently about the "brilliant whip-master" who trained her--"I can't imagine Catwoman without his whipping," she said. "There was a grace and beauty to the way he worked the whip." She was less enthusiastic about the cat suit. "It feels like a second skin," she explained, "but if you've had it on too long, it becomes vacuum-packed and a little painful--I got a skin rash once."

Pfeiffer said that she was surprised by the challenge of the role. "It was really difficult," she said, "and I thought, `Isn't this ironic, that Catwoman might be the most demanding part of my career?' " She won the role after a strange controversy. Burton's first choice, Annette Bening, had to drop out after becoming pregnant. Then, actress Sean Young, who claimed that she was born to play Catwoman, stormed into studio headquarters wearing her own cat suit. Over Young's protests, Burton hired Pfeiffer. Comparing her with his Batman co-star Kim Basinger, Keaton said: "Michelle worked with her head--and Kim didn't."

But Pfeiffer's physical prowess proved an unexpected bonus. "She amazed me," said Burton. "She was doing karate fights on curved roofs with four-inch heels." In fact, Pfeiffer had taken up kick-boxing even before she was cast. "I'm really strong," she said, "and I'm pretty athletic when I choose to be."

After seeing the movie, Pfeiffer said, "it was more than I expected, and that never happens. I was blown away by the images and the scope and the beauty." Keaton's reaction was more measured. "I wasn't ready for some of it," he said. "When you make movies like this, they're so huge you don't know what's in them." Keaton also wondered aloud if the movie is suitable for his nine-year-old son, Sean. "There's a couple of things in it he doesn't need to see," he said. "And it's a tad too twisted for young, young kids--five- or six-year-olds."

Burton received criticism for the violence in the first Batman movie. But, he said, "I think children have their own barometers. Kids are not necessarily these pure little everything-is-beautiful creatures. I was always grateful for heavier subject matter when I was growing up." The director says that he has always resisted Hollywood's tendency to blunt creativity with marketing concerns. Warner Bros. executives, he said, "were scared of the Penguin--they thought he was too weird. But the thing that makes the studio nervous often ends up being the thing that works the best."

Burton's co-producer, Denise Di Novi, told Maclean's that Batman Returns cost $65 million. Still, Burton maintained, "I don't believe anyone knows the actual full-on cost. When you're doing a studio movie and you're paying rental on the studio, it's all this soft money going back and forth. I just wish for once that someone would hand me the money in a bag."

In all probability, Batman Returns will return a fortune. "The whole Batman thing has a power of its own," said Burton, who is riding a phenomenon that is bigger than a movie. The bat symbol, like the mask from The Phantom of the Opera, has become an icon of gothic glamour--a talisman for those seeking light entertainment from the dark side.