Monday, August 13, 2012

Review of "The Dark Knight Rises"

[WARNING: Massive SPOILERS ahead. Reading this review before you have seen The Dark Knight Rises is not advised, unless you happen to be the arch-nemesis of fun.]

Wrapping up a beloved film trilogy in a satisfactory way is already a daunting challenge, but with The Dark Knight Rises, his third and final Batman epic, director and co-writer Christopher Nolan faced an even tougher and rather unique professional conundrum: how to follow up a sequel that became the kind of bona fide, genre-reinventing pop culture phenomenon that is impossible to duplicate by its very lightning-in-a-bottle nature. The Dark Knight took the unusual maturity and narrative density of Nolan's introductory origin story Batman Begins even further, while simultaneously offering a visceral, intense cinematic experience that can't really be compared to anything else out there, let alone other comic-book-based superhero flicks. A nerve-jangling hybrid of police procedural, post-9/11 political allegory, and apocalyptic horror that situates the Caped Crusader within an ensemble framework that refuses to make him its chief priority, The Dark Knight is a work that fiendishly created its own genre rules. The idea of a follow-up bending over backwards to create a new set of expectation-subverting rules seems in theory to be as ill-advised and potentially self-destructive as having whoever steps into the new film's villain role try to compete with Heath Ledger's unforgettable Joker performance in The Dark Knight.

So that The Dark Knight Rises doesn't rival its immediate predecessor in bracing freshness is far from a weakness. Nolan and co-writer brother Jonathan Nolan are shrewd enough to take elements from the series' previous films--the character-study-of-Bruce-Wayne focus and narrative-weight-carrying band of villains the League of Shadows from Batman Begins, the intense and downright Haneke-esque sadism and age-of-terrorism pontificating of The Dark Knight--and shape the new film around those elements so that the trilogy as a whole has a unifying drive and ambition.

But to acknowledge The Dark Knight Rises as a film intended more to provide satisfying closure to a giant-canvas trilogy than to reinvent the genre wheel isn't to say that Nolan has abandoned his sense of surprise entirely. On the contrary, Rises thrives on the unexpected, from Nolan's perhaps foolhardy attempts to top himself when it comes to narrative scale and action spectacle to his layering of class and even gender concerns into his study of those occupying Gotham City's margins. Also, what gives The Dark Knight Rises its own identity apart from its predecessors and makes it a work of grand cinematic excitement is how magically and fluidly it morphs from a sinister, hard-PG-13 downer to the most genuinely rousing studio crowd-pleaser in ages. If The Dark Knight's narrative drive was patterned after the Joker's chaotic, anarchic whims, Rises is governed just as recognizably by the mindset of its own villain, Bane (Tom Hardy), a buff, masked League of Shadows reject who believes that true hope cannot exist without crushing despair.

Nolan commits to the initial downbeat tone so thoroughly that he withholds the inspiring presence of Batman for the first hour or so--perhaps the movie's biggest TDK-level subversion, and an ingenious one. That hour is instead devoted to a portrait of the institutional complacency and corruption that has seeped into post-Dent Gotham City. The way Nolan has depicted Bruce Wayne's home turf throughout the trilogy feels informed by the very adult and subtextually loaded chronicles of urban rot offered up by masters like Sidney Lumet (Serpico and Prince of the City, the latter of which Nolan has admitted was an inspiration for Rises) and David Simon (TV's The Wire), and it's a huge if muddled pleasure to see Nolan test how far he can take that particular ambition in the first hour of Rises. After striving for and arguably achieving objective "perfection" in his last two films (TDK and Inception), Nolan was bound to get a tad messier at some point, and the web-like narrative intricacy of Rises' Gotham-centered introductory hour gets undeniably tangled. But the sheer density of it is irresistible, as are the political implications (i.e. Bane's terrorizing of Gothamites being narratively and thematically aligned with the more insinuating corporate dominance of Ben Mendelsohn's Daggett.)

On that last point: it's puzzling that a film as contemptuous of unchecked corporate power as Rises would be labeled by short-sighted pundits as politically conservative, an accusation further hobbled by Nolan's purposeful placement of two protagonists far removed from the world of upper-class privilege Wayne occupies into the narrative. There's Officer (later Detective) Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt), born an orphan and emboldened to investigate why the boys who have been phased out of the now-underfunded boys' home he used to inhabit have turned to subterranean crime while his superiors lazily coast on the Dent Act's reassuring statistics. And there's Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a master thief who, in spite of her extraordinary skills, remains subservient to the male thugs who run Gotham's underworld. Both characters challenge Wayne to use his wealth liberally--Blake criticizes Wayne for neglecting social-responsibility "details" like the boys' home, and much of Selina's repartee with Bruce while the two dance at Miranda Tate's (Marion Cotillard) soiree (some of Nolan's sharpest ever dialogue, in my opinion) consists of Selina chastising Bruce for living in an overprivileged bubble. As actors, Gordon Levitt and especially the scene-stealing Hathaway effortlessly project the wounded souls and well-honed survival instincts of those who live outside the bubble, and also possess the cool, innate intelligence that Nolan favors in his actors.

While sheltered in a financial sense, Bruce, of course, has always been wounded in his own way, and at this point, Bale knows the exact level at which to pitch the character's masochistic grief. Yet entirely befitting an ensemble-driven trilogy, it's through Michael Caine's absolutely heartbreaking performance as Wayne's servant and advisor, Alfred, that Bruce's self-torturing plight hits us with a powerful emotional force. In Bruce, Alfred sees a man whose interest in ensuring the happiness and safety of others is fed by an equally strong rejection of those comforts for himself.

Bruce's discomfort is increased a thousandfold when Bane snaps his back apart in one swift move, a dismantling-an-icon, end-of-first-act shocker that's infinitely more nightmarish to see enacted by flesh-and-blood actors than it is in the pen-and-ink form of the comics' Knightfall story thread. Bruce struggles to get back in fighting shape while trapped in Bane's dank prison, and in an odd coincidence, this passage of the film is highly reminiscent of Herzog's Rescue Dawn, another Bale vehicle that revolves around his planned escape from a hellish prison camp. Spurring Bruce on is the sight from his cell TV of Bane turning Gotham into an isolated wasteland, using tons of explosives and rhetoric that fires up the city's disenfranchised citizens. (That Bane's speeches have a striking resemblance to Occupy Wall Street calls to action has also been used in accusations of the film being conservative, which misses the point entirely. As a recent thinkprogress piece pointed out, all three films in Nolan's trilogy provocatively show the villains making entirely rational critiques of Gotham's infrastructure; it's how the villains go about "fixing" Gotham's problems that Nolan disagrees with.)

When Bruce masters the riddle-like nature of the pit that serves as the prison's sole means of escape (like the Penrose Steps in Inception, it's a piece of architecture that carries with it a lot of narrative and psychological meaning) and climbs to safety, it's a moment of exhilaration so palpable you may actually feel your heart thumping in your chest excitedly. (The soaring crescendos of the invaluable Hans Zimmer's score and the awestruck reaction shots of Tom Conti as Bruce's prison confidante deserve some of the credit too.) The scene perfectly sets the tone for a third act full of rousing payoffs. The mammoth action scenes, triumphant tonal upswing, and indelible character moments (like Batman's moving way of telling Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon he's Bruce Wayne) act as giddy rewards for those of us who have embraced Nolan's trilogy with an admittedly fanboy-ish passion.

Even the reveal of Miranda's betrayal of Bruce, though obviously a dark surprise, is counterbalanced by Selina finding within herself the bravery and moral commitment to fight alongside Batman. Nolan is very savvy about creating character dualities and mirror images, and just as there are parallels between Bruce, Blake (an orphan who finds a constructive social outlet for his anger) and Bane (a former pupil of Ra's al Ghul and onetime inhabitant of the prison Bruce is trapped in for the second act), Selina is pointedly established as Talia's heroic doppelganger. Whereas Talia found the strength to escape a realm of male violence (Nolan and Zimmer incorporating the Star Spangled Banner into the score during Talia's escape from the prison is almost Spike Lee-esque in its awesome, ballsy symbolic bluntness), Selina summons the strength to stay--to not escape--and fight it head-on.

The hopefulness extends to the film's epilogue. While Nolan fans are accustomed to his tactic of furiously cross-cutting between horrific and intense simultaneous narrative occurences, it's a beautiful change of pace to see that signature stylistic move applied to simultaneous happy endings: Blake picking up the Bat-mantel; Gordon returning to the bat signal; and, most important of all, Bruce Wayne finally putting the past behind him and beginning the life that Alfred has always wanted for him. These final moments attest to why The Dark Knight Rises will endure as a great film beyond the unfortunate tragedy it has been associated with: it's a work of genuine joyousness and genre enthusiasm, clearly intended by Nolan to send you out of the theatre coasting on only positive vibes. Grade: A