The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight (****)

The Dark Knight is the best superhero movie ever made, surpassing its already excellent predecessor Batman Begins in just about every way. Its a movie that will be foremost remembered (with good reason) as Heath Ledger's final, and maybe best, performance before his death due to an accidental overdose. Ledger's performance, however, while every bit deserving of the attention its received, is but one aspect of a film that is all-around amazing and features great performances from just about everyone in its ensemble cast. As he did with Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan uses on-location filming in Chicago to create a fantastic vision of Gotham City, dark and imposing enough to provide a suitable backdrop for Batman's crime fighting, but less abstract and expressionist than Tim Burton's Gotham. The story, however, is what really drives the film. With the origin story already told, Christopher Nolan, and his brother and co-writer Johnathan utilize Batman's ultimate nemesis and the ultimate tragic figure of Batman lore, and weave them into one deeply resonant storyline that reflects everything that Batman's always been about, while also exploring brand new facets of Batman's world.

After we catch a brief glimpse of the Joker during a heist of a mob-controlled bank, our first good look at the Joker comes when he shows up at a meeting of the same mobsters that he just stole from. The composition of the scene isn't all that dissimilar from the scene in which Jack Nicholson first appears as the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman and eventually burns a guy down to a charred skeleton with his variation on a novelty hand buzzer. When Heath Ledger enters as the Joker in The Dark Knight, he does his own "magic trick" of sorts that still has a bit of the macabre, "the joke's on you buddy!" sort of feeling that encapsulates what the Joker is all about, but at the same time is much more jarring and much more disturbing in its realism. As with the Jack Nicholson scene, one of the gangsters gathers around the table points out the obvious and says, "You're crazy." In Tim Burton's movie, Nicholson retorts with "Haven't you ever heard of the healing power of laughter? (cackles)." In Nolan's Dark Knight, the Joker give a harsh glare and replies "No, I'm not," in a voice that seems as though he's trying to convince himself of that fact as much as he's declaring it to anyone else. This scene is probably the best example of the genius of Heath Leger's performance. He keeps just enough of the essence of the Joker there, but gives him a whole new depth that isn't really in the comics at all.'

Even though two of the Joker's big trademarks are his cackling laugh and his incessant disturbingly black comedy, a lot of what Leger does in his performance is more subtle and non-verbal. When he crashes Bruce Wayne's party and spots Rachel Dawes (now played by Maggie Gyllinhall, who is a big step up from Katie Holmes) he remarks "Why hello beautiful!" and starts awkwardly parting his messy, matted hair and feeling his tongue around his mouth. The image of this is far creepier than any weird joke the Joker could've told in the scene. I don't think its hyperbole to say that Ledger's joker is going to be remembered the same way Anthony Hopkins is for Hannibal Lecter or, the other Joker, Jack Nicholson for what he did in The Shining.

To focus only on the Joker, though, is to ignore the rest of the performances, all of which are pretty much exactly what I'd want them to be. Aaron Eckhart's towheaded Harvey Dent doesn't really resemble how he's usually portrayed in the comics, but he plays the character with a hard to describe combination of a sort of stoic resolve but with a boyish charm on top of it that makes the tragic turn of the character that much more powerful when it happens, even though you're already expecting it if you're already indoctrinated in Batman lore. In their script, Nolan and his brother give him some powerful lines that make the character both more endearing and more meaningful than the over-the-top campy portrayal by Tommy Lee Jones in the god-awful Batman Forever. While a lot of the Joker's scenes were distributed liberally as the movie was being promoted, the studio did a damn good job of keeping the specifics of Harvey Dent's fate tightly under wraps, and as his part of the film's climax plays out his character is shockingly brutal in the best possible way.

Batman himself is more introspective in this second leg of the series, and actually has to be propped up by Alfred, (again played by Michael Caine) as the relative order he brought to the city begins to deteriorate as the Joker wreaks havoc. The idea of "escalation" between Batman and the Rogue's Gallery that he inspires originally brought up by Jim Gordon at the end of Begins continues in Dark Knight in full force. The movie also plays with the idea of a fatalism existing between Batman and the Joker, because Batman can never kill the Joker because of who he's trying to be and the Joker can never be reformed or controlled.

Even if you don't care about extracting big ideas from a superhero movie and just want to watch a superhero do superhero type stuff, you'll likely still find the The Dark Knight near perfect. The benefit of the on-location filming in Chicago is once again obvious to see, and the action sequences trump the best of those in Batman Begins. This is a masterpiece of the genre.