Much as I was looking forward to the Darren Aronofsky-helmed Batman: Year One (based on Frank Miller’s 1988 comic book of the same name), when it was cancelled I felt as much relief as disappointment. Despite admiring Aronofsky’s films to date, I had qualms about what appeared to be a direct transfer from one medium to another.
Batman: Year One is an excellent superhero comic book, balancing its darkness and violence with a humour and self-awareness sadly lacking in much of Miller’s other work. It is, however, most assuredly a beginning. We are introduced to Bruce Wayne and his police counterpart, James Gordon, as they arrive in Gotham. The jetset Wayne flys in to a media reception, while Gordon is met at the grubby, proletarian train station by his burly, corrupt new partner. Wayne and Gordon don’t want to be here, but they know they have to be.
Originally a four-part series, Batman: Year One is a series of intertwining tales, wending their way in and out of focus, each resolution spawning a new plot arc. The real climax occurs in the third part: not a confrontation with one of the classic Batman villains, but an escape from a police SWAT team, sent to kill Batman after rattling the cages of Gotham’s corrupt élite. We see Batman’s mortality, his vulnerability: a sympathetic character as well as a heroic one. The villians, however, are less clearly defined: an ensemble cast of corrupt cops, city bureaucrats, mafia dons, street punks. There is no single focus for Batman’s vigilateeism, only an ongoing war.
This is not a structure that lends itself to cinema, and especially not to the action-movie genre that blockbusters like Batman films find themselves stuck in. If nothing else, two hours simply isn’t long enough for a drama that is more like a television series, with a persistent cast of characters and an episodic form, with the overall structure marked by a story arc concerned with the development of characters and relationtionships over all else. Batman: Year One sets the scene for further adventures: it implicitly refers to an existing body of work that take up the story where this volume leaves it. It does not stand alone. A film, however, does—and in many ways, has to. The cinema audience wants to be told, in the space of those two hours, not just where Batman came from, and where he’s going, but somewhere he’s been: somewhere big, some self-contained story arc. An adventure.
When it was announced that Christopher Nolan would direct the latest cinematic installment of the Batman saga, Batman Begins, my response was twofold. Firstly, I mourned the death of Aronofsky’s film: Pi, his debut feature, demonstrated his ability to get inside a character’s head, and I have no doubt that the internal tension in Batman’s character would have been superbly realised. However, I could anticipate Batman Begins without worrying that my enjoyment would be ruined by its non-adherence to a prior, definitive work. They would have had two choices when rewriting Batman: Year One for the screen: rip out the comic’s structure, and replace it with a new story which would have thrown familiar scenes and characters at us, but completely bereft of the original context. Given the aforementioned lack of a “big villain”, this simply would not have worked: there would have been nothing for a shorter, simpler movie script to define its structure by. On the other hand, they could have been faithful to the source material, but simply chopped the story down, cutting scenes, dialogue, characters. This wouldn’t, I suspect, have worked either: again, there would have been less focus, and to put it bluntly, no one goes to the cinema to see a Batman film without at least one classic villain in it.
However, they made a smart move: while Batman Begins has villains aplenty, they’re not allowed to take the story away from Batman, in the way Jack Nicholson’s Joker did in the original Tim Burton film. This is Batman’s story: the story of a man becoming a hero. While it occasionally loses focus, and there are a couple of dodgy lines, it impressed me in a way a summer blockbuster (which this most assuredly is) hasn’t done for a very long time. This year I’ve seen The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Kingdom of Heaven, and Revenge of the Sith, and they were all disappointments in one way or another (some more than others, of course). Batman Begins, however, is an unalloyed triumph (at the box office as well as cinematically).
The casting is probably the best thing about it: Michael Caine puts in a strong performance as Alfred, and on the few occasions that he lets go of his reserved demeanour, you feel it’s justified. He projects an air of quiet authority, and yet manages to stand aside, to let Bruce make his own decisions, go his own way. I know some people were worried when he was cast—worried that he wasn’t quiet enough, that he would let his mouth run away with him, be too much Michael Caine and not enough Alfred. This, I’m happy to say, was a generally unfounded fear. Yes, you notice him more than Michael Gough, who was nearly always an unobtrusive presence, but given the film’s focus on how Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, his childhood and upbringing, it feels like an appropriate change. While we’re talking about understatement, allow me to congratulate Gary Oldman on his incredibly restrained performance as Police Lieutenant James Gordon. Relegated to a bit part, with little insight into the man and his motivations, Batman’s ally in his war on crime does manage to save the day on a couple of occasions, and Gary Oldman is perfect in the role. It is as though he isn’t acting at all: he is Jim Gordon.
When I saw just how many great actors were in it, I was worried about the film feeling crowded—and at times, it does. Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow is underdeveloped, and Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, love interest and Assistant District Attorney, seems to be simply cut from classic Good Girl cloth with little to differentiate her from other stereotypical idealistic and moral heroines. Thankfully, Ken Watanabe’s Ra’s Al Ghul turns out to be a red herring: Liam Neeson, playing the underling, is the real villain. This removes one actor from the long list of those taking up screen time (and our emotional investment).
Despite my earlier points about how Batman: Year One wouldn’t have transferred well to cinema, I was cheered by the inclusion of a few set-pieces, which were incorporated near-seamlessly into the new storyline. The standout, of course, is the police raid on Arkham Asylum; rescuing Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), childhood friend, love interest and Assistant District Attorney, Batman is trapped in the building and his capture by the police seems imminent. Activating the ultrasonic emitter in his boot, Batman calls all the bats from miles around; a flapping black cloud, they surge through the building, screaming, twisting, turning, allowing Batman to make good his escape.
It is by no means perfect—the story wavers at a couple of points, and it’s so full of characters and plot points you can’t relax for even a moment (blink, and miss something that’ll be important later)—but for all its flaws, it’s the best Batman film to date, a fuller and far more rounded work than Tim Burton’s muddled and overblown efforts. Wearing its heart on its sleeve, Batman Begins declares from the beginning that it wants to tell the story of how Bruce Wayne became Batman, and had an adventure; in this, it succeeds admirably. Thoroughly recommended—I can’t wait to see it again.
2 responses
While I’m on record as being no fan of the Tim Burton movies, to his credit, that director didn’t use Batman’s origin as (too much of) a crutch. His first “Batman,” while it halfheartedly tried to serve as an origin story, really focused on how the Joker came to be. Which is part of the reason why it was so unsuccessful.
Especially when adapting these huge, monolithic comic book legends, directors get a head start when they spend screen time retelling the way a character received his/her powers.
Just look at Richard Donner’s “Superman” or Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man”; you could argue about the quality of both, but they are the most fun and watchable when they’re recounting the story of how their respective hero came to be. Nolan’s “Batman Begins” is very obviously an origin tale, which is part of the reason it’s so enjoyable (it also happens to be made exceedingly well).
This is part of the reason, too, that Miller’s “Batman: Year One” is so compelling. As people we actually really do like to hear the same story over and over, just told with new twists. Origin stories for comic book heroes, especially the ones mentioned here, are so well-worn and familiar that they easily evoke strong emotions in audiences when they are retold with creativity and class.
Khoi Vinh June 21st, 2005
That’s certainly a valid point, but I suspect that any film trying to do two things (in this case, tell Batman’s origin story and also deliver a recognisable Batman adventure) will also be more difficult to pull off than one that simply does the latter, at least where that origin story is such a huge part of the film. While the rewards are great if it’s pulled off well (as it is in Batman Begins), it’s a tough tightrope to walk, and Christopher Nolan should be applauded for getting it as right as he did.
Movies are perhaps the closest thing we have nowadays to a common oral tradition. In the past, the same tales of heroes and villains were told again and again by bards and poets; Homer, after all, was in a sense “just the guy who wrote it all down”. With the development of modern society and technology, that oral tradition (at least insofar as it affects society as a whole) has faded, but we still feel that human need for huge mythologies to draw inspiration and validation from.
This is why Star Wars is so huge (and perhaps why the prequels don’t work as well as the originals; they fail to provide the level of human connection, in terms of emotional investment in places, artefacts and characters that the originals did). The telling and retelling of the Batman saga approximates the way a bard’s stories change in the telling, but the essentials, the emotional core, remains the same.
Ben Eastaugh June 22nd, 2005