'The Batman' presents a different Dark Knight

With 2022's "The Batman," writer-director Matt Reeves has achieved something unusual within the broad field of big-screen adaptations of DC Comics' Dark Knight.

In a story that spans Oct. 31 through Nov. 6, we're introduced to Bruce Wayne during his early days of leading a dual life, but it's not an origin story. We don't see his parents getting shot, and both the Batcave and Batman's tools have already been built.

It's two years into Bruce's crusade, and he's questioning how much good he's done for Gotham, since crime has increased since "The Batman" made his debut.

Moreover, Alfred (Andy Serkis) is leaning on Bruce to get a life, not just for his emotional health, but simply to sustain his inherited fortune enough to keep his crusade going.

Because this Batman is no longer a new phenomenon to his Gotham, we're treated to another relative novelty for cinematic portrayals of the Dark Knight. Batman not only works with Gotham police, examining crime scenes side-by-side with swarms of officers, but he and Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) join up to solve an extended, multivictim murder-mystery.

Have no fears about "The Batman" skimping on viscerally hard-hitting action in its fight scenes. Unlike Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight Trilogy," Reeves believes every blow in Batman's hand-to-hand combat should remain clear and central to the camera's focus.

But as satisfyingly punishing and invulnerable as this Batman is, with his bulletproof armor suit and his pile-driver punches, it's the knowledge and insights that Batman, Alfred and Gordon bring to a string of murders of Gotham dignitaries that makes their investigations so compelling.

Robert Pattinson proves all his initial naysayers wrong (including me) by delivering excellently understated performances as both the Batman and Bruce Wayne, as we see him quietly figure out how to inhabit his dual roles effectively, especially as his myopic worldviews are challenged by Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress at the Penguin's nightclub who's spent her life trying to survive her involuntary connections to Gotham's criminal underworld.

While Kravitz receives far less screentime than Pattinson, and what feels like less time than Wright or Serkis, we're shown how her search for her roommate (and implied lover), a fellow "working girl" gone missing, transforms Selina from a survivor, looking out for herself, into a crusader, albeit one with even more vicious notions of justice than Batman.

What's easily this film's most haunting performance is delivered by Paul Dano as the Riddler, rendered completely unrecognizable compared to his comics counterpart, with a full BDSM-style face mask and magnifying-lensed eyeglasses, appearing mostly via low-resolution online videos that pixelate his visual details and distort his already uneven voice with thick static.

And yet, by reducing his Riddler to a grainy blur who speaks in a buzzing crackle, Reeves clarifies the frightening instability that Dano conveys, as he swings wildly between a creepy childish sing-song tone to snaps of enraged shouting, with his thick, layered costume of dingy green evoking filthy, septic medical bandages, left to set too long on a festering wound gone gangrenous. The traumas of Gotham have turned Dano's Riddler into a man-size scab, pulsing with pain and hatred for those he holds accountable for his own misfortunes.

This hits home for Bruce, whose reflexive cynicism has blinded him to the darker truths behind the facades of Gotham's historic heroes.

Gangsters and the innate corruption of Gotham - from its crooked cops and prosecutors to the scandalous secrets of its elected officials and old-money families - have been mainstays of Batman portrayals for decades, and Reeves is far from the first to interpret Batman's mentally unhealthy adversaries through the filters of serial killers and terrorists.

But dressing the Riddler in the trappings and iconography of the real-life Zodiac Killer carries an extra resonance in an era when so many TV viewers have become self-confessed "true crime" addicts, especially when his misdeeds rely on QAnon-style conspiracy-minded crowdsourcing.

Colin Farrell is likewise rendered unrecognizable by his heavy prosthetic makeup as Oswald "Ozzy" Cobblepot, the Penguin of the Iceberg Lounge nightclub, but his role, while amusing, is surprisingly minor, no more prominent than that of John Turturro as mob boss Carmine Falcone, who turns out to have unpleasant connections to both Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle's parents.

Then again, with a culminating plot hinging on the vulnerabilities of municipal infrastructure and the consequences of climate change, which are simply assumed rather than foregrounded, Matt Reeves' "The Batman" has as much on its mind as 1995's "SE7EN" by David Fincher, from whom Reeves borrowed the narrative structure and grimy, rain-soaked atmosphere of urban decay.

More hopefully, "The Batman" not only calls its titular hero out for inspiring even more extreme acts than his own, in the name of "vengeance," but it also shows its Dark Knight putting into practice the realization that he needs to become more than mere vengeance, for innocent people who already have too many reasons to be afraid.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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