THE DARK KNIGHT (12A) ****
Director: Christopher Nolan
Running time: 152 minutesTHE Dark Knight is grimly magisterial. It's a summer blockbuster that contemplates near-total civic disaster: crowds surge, tractor-trailers fl
ip and buildings explode, but the pop violence feels heavy, mournful. Light barely escapes the film's gravitational pull. Yet flitting through this 10-ton expressionist murk is a diseased butterfly with stringy hair and a maniacal giggle. Played by a dead actor, he's the most alive thing here.
It's not quite fair to say that the late Heath Ledger steals The Dark Knight from Christian Bale and the forces of (problematic) good, but, as the Joker, he is the movie's animating principle and anarchic spark – an unstoppable force colliding with the immovable objects of Batman and director Christopher Nolan's ambitions. Much more serious in intent and message than 2005's Batman Begins, Dark Knight would be fatally ponderous without Ledger's nasty little sprite. As it is, the movie strains at its own Wagnerian seams.
Knight begins where Begins left off, with Gotham City desperately trying to wrest itself from the grip of the criminal underworld. New mob boss Salvatore Maroni (Eric Roberts) cuts deals with the Russians and Chinese while the media tries to figure out whether this Batman guy is a hero or a vigilante. Imitation Batmen run amok and someone is robbing the mob banks of Gotham, leaving a Joker behind as a calling card.
Is Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) of the Major Crimes Unit somehow involved in the heists or merely taking advantage of them to seize the bad guys' assets? What does the new district attorney, a white knight named Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), want?
As Bruce Wayne, Bale is gravely shallow. Bruce uses his secret identity as a hidden camera to glean information from the city's upper echelons, but he's not quite there otherwise. This, oddly, is what makes him interesting, both to us and to assistant DA and ex-girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal).
Batman's a whole other story. The filmmakers have worked out the mask problems from the previous film; Bale fills the suit with grace and danger. His voice is disguised as well – it's now a bass-heavy synthesised whisper. He represents a citizen's darkest urges, though, and it eats at him. He's Dirty Harry crossed with Hamlet.
The Joker, of course, has his own agenda, and if you're not sure what that is, he's happy to spell it out for you. "I'm an agent of chaos," he sneers in one of the script's more italicised bits of dialogue, but we don't need to be told, since Ledger embodies that sentiment in every brilliantly off-kilter line reading.
We never find out where the Joker came from. Every time the character tells the story of how he got his smiling scars, the details are different, as though he were making himself up on the spot. The character's body movements are wobbly but controlled, the eyes darting with nervous energy as he calculates his next move. The tongue slithers. Yet even when he's done up in drag as a nurse – a freakish, hilarious scene – this Joker never grandstands like Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman or Cesar Romero on the old TV show. Instead, he mutters and natters with bent, subversive intelligence.
The Dark Knight prods at the boundaries of power and surveillance as well, casting a shadow over Batman while leaving his technological guru (Morgan Freeman) in the light. (Michael Caine's Alfred, meanwhile, acts as the Caped Crusader's enabler, politely urging him to stay the course.)
These are good and necessary things to ponder, yet they're nearly lost in the cross-cutting clutter. You come away impressed, oppressed, provoked and beaten down, holding on to Ledger's squirrelly incandescence as a beacon in the darkness.
So is the performance on a par with Brokeback Mountain? In its interiority – in the sense that it springs from a mysterious engine at the actor's core – yes. Is it Oscar worthy? Sure, if that's how you measure these things. In the end, though, the achievement is more than that, or harder. It makes you mourn a gifted man's stupid death with fresh sorrow.
On general release from Friday
The full article contains 710 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
