Catching up here, because we went to see The Batman yesterday. It’s a long movie and we went out to dinner afterwards. (I’m going to skip this week’s Photo entry to get back on track.)
It’s a surprisingly (at least to me) good movie. It may actually be my favorite cinematic Batman ever, in fact. There’s a compelling feeling of dread through much of the film: it feels as if Batman has been dropped into a horror-thriller film where he is struggling to catch up and get some measure of control over the situation. He and Gordon together feel almost like the detectives in Se7en than a superhero and a sidekick facing a flamboyant antagonist.
Pattison does a great job as Batman: it’s the best acting I’ve seen out of someone who has most of his face covered, he conveys a lot with his lips and chin and head positioning. He’s not the best Bruce Wayne on film but that’s because he barely appears as Wayne and it’s also clear that at this point in this version of Batman’s story, Wayne barely exists as a human being. If they get the sequel that this is setting up (and I think deserves) that will clearly change and it will be interesting to see what Pattison does with the opportunity.
It’s also interesting to see the next representational turn of Batman as “realistic”: the fighting here is not martial arts but mostly brawling and elemental, the utility-belt toys are more pragmatic and feasible than ever, and the grappling hook is used in relatively minimalist and constrained ways. This is not a Batman who swings to the top of skyscrapers like Spider-Man. (There’s a great moment where the character does find himself way up high and needing to get down in a hurry and he is allowed to look just as afraid as any other person might be at the prospect of what he has to do.)
So what about the re-reading part? I have to be a bit careful here so as not to spoil the mystery elements of the film, which are quite well done. But I can see several famous Batman stories serving as source material for elements of the film, and it’s rather interesting to watch how some of the Batman mythos has slowly but surely turned into canon over the years from stories that weren’t necessarily part of his ongoing comic-book adventures. DC has in this sense been a good if accidental counterpoint to Marvel’s more famously consistent declaration that all their stories ‘really happened’, though in the end both franchises are in practical terms perfectly ready to ignore past stories that just don’t work any longer.
The first story lineage that informs this film comes from Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Year One issues, which also had some visual and narrative influence on Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. There’s a scene in that story that informs both cinematic versions of the character, where Batman follows what he’s coming to understand about how crime in Gotham really works to a dinner party hosted by the mayor where the dinner guests include most of the major mobsters in the city.
Which changes Batman from just being a weirdo who punches muggers to a major threat to the city’s power structure.
That was a canny move by Miller that brought forward Batman’s pulp roots and particularly the way that the character’s entire ethos draws from the entanglement of organized crime and municipal political power during Prohibition. It’s also a move that makes the idea of being a masked vigilante make sense as something more than a strange kink or show-boating flamboyance.
What’s interesting in the new film is the way it narratively structures Batman’s awakening to Gotham’s corruption. In Nolan’s Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne discovers the way the city really works in a flashback. It’s what drives him from Gotham into the quest that will make him into Batman. In this film, it’s something the character discovers well after he’s donned armor and set out to make criminals fear him, and it only happens because his antagonist has found out the truths that Batman has overlooked or ignored. I vastly prefer this way of telling the story, and it’s to Reeves’ credit that he found a good dramatic arc for the character that doesn’t require retelling the origin once again.
Another story that informs both Nolan and Matt Reeves’ approach is Jeph Loeb’s The Long Halloween. I’m hard pressed to think of a comic writer who is more bimodal in the quality of his work than Loeb: he’s created several truly memorable long-form comic stories whose cinematic structure made them immediately available for adaptation into film or television, and he’s written some of the absolute worst comic-book stories ever, some of them well after his most notable work.
What you can see in the Reeves film is how Loeb and Miller both brought organized crime forward as a major element in Batman’s world (as it was in the early version of the character), informed by films like The Godfather and Goodfellas, where the mobsters gain some depth as characters and some real menace as opponents rather than just being disposable sidekicks for costumed psychopaths. (Something of the same was done by Miller with the Kingpin in Daredevil, who started his comic-book career as a kind of laughable Sidney Greenstreet-type enemy for Spider-Man.) There’s some specific character hooks that Miller and Loeb worked up that have made it into this film, including a strong connection between Catwoman and the head mobster, Carmine Falcone. (Played in The Batman by John Turturro with terrific menace and presence.)
The other two story arcs that inform the new film that aren’t really present in Nolan’s films are Hush, another Loeb-written story that launched with great fanfare, and a grab-bag of narrative and atmospheric story elements from some more recent Batman works that aim to complicate the family history of the Waynes or to create doubt in Bruce’s mind about his own crusade for justice—Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP and Scott Snyder’s Court of Owls stories. (There’s also a few bits and pieces that I thought I recognized from Ed Brubaker’s work on various Batman titles.) The material that I think is drawn from Hush is limited but it’s about the best-case scenario for the use of that story that I could imagine, considering that I think the comic-book inspiration is mostly mediocre at best. Can’t really say more than that without spoiling the film.
Reeves also follows Miller in another respect that diverges his take from Nolan. This Batman is extremely local and in some sense parochial. It’s hard to imagine him beyond or outside of Gotham for any reason. And The Batman cannot possibly be the seed that grows another cinematic DC Universe: this character 100% does not belong in a universe with super-powered people of any kind.
We did wonder a bit about what they could do in a sequel in that sense that did not begin the same narrative ascension seen in the Nolan movies: the idea that a costumed vigilante gives rise to costumed criminals and an endless escalation, and so on. I had at least one way to avoid that, and one very unadapted story they could use, which is Hugo Strange as he appears in Matt Wagner’s re-telling of that character’s 1940’s initial appearance.
Combine Hugo Strange as mad scientist with Hugo Strange as gifted psychologist who makes shrewd guesses about Batman’s identity and you’ve got a story that nobody’s worked with in films. (There’s a version in the TV series Gotham, but I thought it was pretty poor stuff.)