TDK: Can I Play With Madness?

As if we hadn't had enough TDK stuff around here already, last week, bouyed by all the hype surrounding the new Batman film (including quite a bit from this very site) I went out to the cinema for the first time in three years to see The Dark Knight. The only other film that caught my radar during this whole time (a self-imposed cinema exile due to having a small child about the house) was No Country for Old Men which I was content to wait for on DVD and maybe try and read the book first. Having been a longtime fan of Batman (about the only comic book character I have much time for) I was obviously up for seeing TDK, and since was a more action-based film and one, that I figured, might be worth seeing on the big screen. This isn't a review, since Ken has already done a far better review piece than I ever could but rather a collection of my feelings about the film and the thoughts it inspired (and here's some more bracketed text since I've already used lots in this introduction).

The big thing about this film, for me, was The Joker. The first Batman comic I ever read was Arkham Asylum and its portrayal of the Joker as beyond the understanding of ordinary psychology was not just enthralling, but positively terrifying. Most people can empathise to some extent with the motivations for most criminal behaviour - greed, anger and the appeal of primal instinct. On the other hand, how can one do anything but cringe in fear from something with a human face but wholly un-human motivations? It has remained for me the definitive portrayal of The Joker through all the other Batman stories that I've read - and I've found that for the most part, the different interpretations offered by different authors have remained at least partly compatible with that concept of the character. The result has been that my imagination has become imprinted with a very firm image of my version of who The Joker is.

As a result, The Joker has joined a small list of literary characters in my head for which providing a truly enjoyable film interpretation has become near impossible. When you have a version of the character so solidly stuck in your brain, attempts by actors and directors to offer you their own versions are almost bound to fail, no matter how well, technically speaking, they manage the part. Funnily enough my list is comprised mostly of villains - perhaps because they are almost inevitably more interesting and vivid characters than their heroic counterparts. My most recent disappointment in this regard was Imelda Staunton's portrayal of Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which my partner loved but which was invetibly unsatisfying for me because I have such a clear version of Dolores in my head. It's often quite annoying when this happens - I can see that it's a good performance and I'd love to appreciate it, but a powerful imaginative image always trumps what's on the screen and there's nothing I can do about it. In contrast, the last screen portrayal of The Joker by Jack Nicholson I hated as much, if not more, because it was dreadful, one-dimensional ham-acting of the worst order rather than because The Joker was one of my treasured characters. The fact his portrayal jarred so badly with my own understanding of the character just ended up being the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel.

So I approached this latest incarnation with trepidation, and well prepared for disappointment. The first couple of scenes were indeed as underwheliming as I'd supposed. Better than Jack, for sure, not that that's a very big step up in my book, and a fairly novel interpretation of the character. But this Joker, carrying out bank robberies and appealing to the mob looked like just another Gangster-dressed-as-clown incarnation.

That feeling didn't last. The transition point in my perception came during the scenes in the middle of the film where The Joker is in police custody. They were seriously intense, and there came a point when the Joker was busy laughing uproariously at his own inner humour while Batman was trying earnestly to turn his face into mincemeat when I was able to forget that the actor playing him was not in fact as mad as The Joker is supposed to be. I found that whole sequence, from the beating, through the The Joker using mind tricks to goad a police officer into attacking him, through the "I want my phone call" business, through the silent Joker thrilling in the slipstream of a police car, utterly spellbinding. So much so that I found the following car chase, much vaunted by our own Michael Barnes and my usual film critic an anticlimax in comparison. My favourite chase scene is still the one at the end of The Matrix Reloaded.

So in the end, I feel that Ledger did an amazing job. He came as close as anyone could, probably, to fulfilling my vision of the Joker on screen. It occured to me as I walked home after the film that the reason his character looked paper-thin in the opening scenes is because this film pulled off a stunt which you only usually expect from low-budget character-driven films, not Hollywood blockbusters - it ties the character development of all the characters directly into the plot. It's just not something I was expecting, so when I saw the Joker unveiled for the first time I thought that was all I was going to get in terms of character. And boy, was I wrong. And the fact that the action sequences in the film, such as that car chase, were very good but not great actually works in favour of the flim as a whole, because it keeps the focus of the plot where it ought to be - on the characters and not on the stunts. Whilst this isn't quite sufficiently character driven to deserve the label of "great american crime movie" that it earned from others on this site,  TDK does join a small group of big-budget films which have been able to conjour up the magic compromise and deliver not just big scenes and big tension but big characters as well.

On that walk I also ruminated on what it would take to truly deliver on my vision of The Joker on screen. And I was struck by the thought that for that one brief moment I could actually have believed that Heath Ledger had gone mad. Perhaps with villains - many of whom are unhinged to some degree in one way or another - a transition from book to screen with all their dark glory intact is truly impossible. When I read about a character behaving like a lunatic, I can construct that character in my imagination to be as utterly insane as the character is required to be. On screen an actor is faced by the virtually insurmountable problem that the person he's trying to be has a mind which he absolutely cannot understand. A skilled actor can, of course, portray someone who has a different level of intellegence or different morals or different motivations from the actor himself, but how does one go about constructing a character whose reason for being is partly or wholly beyond the realms of your understanding? The answer is simply that he can't. And that's the reason why even half-believable portrayals of the mad are so heavily lauded, it's the reason why Ledger ought to be up for a posthumous oscar for his performance and, sadly, it's the reason why most of my favourite literary villains will never get the treatment they deserve on the big screen.

What about the other characters? Batman is also on my list of characters imprinted on my imagination because anti-heroes are, if anything, even more interesting than villains. Sadly Bale's ultra-dour interpretation of the character, whilst servicable, can't rise above the realms of the ordinary because he's left himself no wiggle-room. This is a Batman so stoic that he greets good news and bad news with the same implacable impassiveness and that's not a character you can do much with. My favourite portrayal of Batman to date is Michael Keaton's version - I personally thought Batman Returns was right up there with Batman Begins at the top of the franchise until this film came along. Gary Oldman and and Aaron Eckhart (who I don't recall seeing in a film before) on the other hand are multi-dimensional characters and utterly fantastic. As others have commented the film is let down by a lack of strong female characters - Maggie Gyllenhaal might be better than Katie Holmes but she's not really been given a whole lot to work with here. The plot could be described as being a carefully rewritten version of the Killing Joke comic strip but that direct a comparison would be unfair. Rather it attempts to examine similar concepts of morality, madness and humanity as that comic strip in a different plot framework. Nevertheless I find it no suprise at all that the actors were given the Killing Joke as source material - I don't doubt it was an inspiration for the screenplay and the film is much the better for it. It treads the narrow line between plagerism and disrespect for the source material with a high degree of success.

However I can't pass comment on the film as a whole without mentioning one big, overriding problem which spoilt my enjoyment no end and relegated what might have been an absolute trumph of a film into the second teir of "very good, but not great". The problem is simple. Throughout the film, The Joker is able to smuggle vast quantities of explosives (and on one occasion, poison) into private and, one would assume, relatively security concious locations such as hospitals and then take all the time required to ensure that these are placed at the points required to cause maximum damage and wired together to detonate simultaneously at the flick of a single switch. No explanation of <i>how</i> he and his henchmen are able to pull off these miraculous feats is ever given. If this happened once, it might be forgivable, but it keeps going on. If this was a super-powered superhero film with a big suspension of disbelief, it might have been forgivable, but it's a film which seems to pride itself on as realistic an approach as the subject matter allows. Even then I might have let it pass had the whole plot and indeed the whole basis of how The Joker is seen as a threat to the city not been founded on the belivability of this premise. It's a plot hole I just can't close.

Ultimately though, this is a film that I felt was worth giving up valuable gaming time to see at the cinema. It was a film that I thought was good enough to be worth writing a semi-review about, even though we've already had one on the site which was better. It's a film which I'll probably be buying on DVD and watch with my partner, cackling with glee because I know the plot when she's on the edge of her seat. It's the best superhero film ever. It's Batman come of age. They ought to stop the franchise here - seriously - because Heath Ledger is sadly gone, and they're not going to drag out a better villian for any sequels. Danny DeVito already nailed the Penguin to perfection and no matter how skillfully they rewrite the Riddler to be dark and wicked (a feat I've yet to see managed successfully in a Batman comic) he'll forever live in the shadow of Jim Carrey.