Absent Thoughts: Sunday
Or rather, The Dark Knight: A Review. In which there may be spoilers, so avoid if you’re interested in watching it uncorrupted.
Heath Ledger may well win an Oscar for his role as the Joker in the latest Batman film. And he may well be posthumously accused of winning that Oscar purely because of its posthumous nature. That’d be a shame - as he probably deserves it.
James made me promise not to include spoilers, so I won’t*. Suffice to say that Ledger’s performance dominates, from the enjoyably confused opening to the character’s eventual demise. From behind the smudged chalk mask which adds so much to the impression of mania comes sheer, random danger, almost throughout.
It’s there in the movements, and in the voice. Ledger’s tongue lolls and flaps, barely able to stay inside the Joker’s mutilated lips. The body twitches in line with the character’s own mind, while limbs appear to have a mind of their own on occasion - look for an excited Joker, and they’ll be somewhere else. The voice, meanwhile, sums up the character itself; a low, unsteady croon skittering into gibberish in moments of excitement. Very dark, and very effective.
That’s not to say that the other performances are bad. They’re not; most involved either manage to pull of strong performances, or have roles so peripheral that it doesn’t hugely matter. Christian Bale follows his previous take on Batman well. Aaron Eckhart makes Harvey Dent so irritatingly perfect at first as to make Two-Face seem yet more vile. The rest of the cast - and the film in general - take Ledger’s dark lead, and work it into something worth sitting through. But Ledger’s Joker does set that tone, and so tends to dominate.
And, inevitably, there are problems. Some are mere irritances. Bale’s gravelly monotone when in Bat-mode pushes the stereotype a little too far, while at one point a defendent pulls a gun on the prosecuting attorney while in the dock. I’m happy to suspend disbelief for Batman, or the Joker, or anything that forwards the plot entertainingly - but sometime, it’s just not possible.
Other flaws are more serious. The film’s chaotic motif of fallen heroes and human fallibility should fascinate me; and yet it all felt a little tedious at times. Dent’s fall is done well, and the Joker’s psychotic tricks blur Batman’s lines of right and wrong enjoyably - but it happens to much. The film comes in at a very long 2 hours and 32 minutes and features dilemna after dilemna after dilemna for the forces of law and order. The moral mazes begin to feel forced, included for the sake of pushing character’s boundraries but failing to do so. And with that, the film drags at times. The contrast between the Joker’s capricious anarchism and Batman’s struggle with his conscience is compelling - but if it weren’t for the cracking action scenes that accompany each eruption of that contrast, they’d just get tiring.
Nonetheless, it’s a film worth seeing. Heath Ledger’s swansong as the Joker is superb, and the rest of the cast do enough to not look complete amateurs beside him. It might not be what the pre-release propaganda campaign hyped it to be, but it’s a fun little flick with lots of big explosions and dark plot hooks - enough to fill a long afternoon. And, probably enough for a sadly posthumous Oscar.
*(much)
[...] And despite the sunshine, Douglas on Scribo Ergo Sum has been taking in The Dark Knight. [...]