Review

Review Date: 20-July-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Jubilation!

The Dark Knight (2008)

It has almost become a rule that movies dealing with 9/11 will not find an audience, but I would argue that The Dark Knight has beaten this curse. As the movie's title character, aka Batman (Christian Bale), pursues a madman called The Joker (Heath Ledger), it becomes apparent that the evil at large is not something that can be pinned down with clear-cut sinister meaning. While mobsters, drug dealers, corrupt cops, and corporate sleazebags are dismissed as small fry, the bone-chilling enemy that emerges is chaos, the disorientation that arises when a city discovers that nothing is predictable or safe. Just as he communicated DNA-deep longing in Brokeback Mountain, Ledger embodies the horrifying randomness of terrorism in a movie that literally takes your breath away.

The late actor's performance is a rip-snorter, yet one of the many things I admire about Christopher Nolan's film is how each member of the cast contributes to the complex tale. (It helps that The Dark Knight is two and a half hours long.) Bale, gauntly gorgeous, exudes a powerful presence as a man not sure whether his do-goodish pursuits free him from demons or trap him in a lonely cell. Certainly the Batgig has put enough distance between him and his lifelong love (a feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal) that she has grown seriously attached to someone else, a someone as critical to his crisis as The Joker. This is Harvey Dent, Gotham City's crusading District Attorney and a character that puts Aaron Eckhart's exaggerated good looks to ideal use. Whereas Batman skulks after bad guys by night, Dent takes them on in the bright light of day, earning a reputation as a fearless champion of justice. (Shades of Casablanca, anyone?) Despite the danger to himself, Dent jumps at the chance to team with Batman's policeman ally Gordon (Gary Oldman, quietly assertive) to shut down all of the city's major criminals by seizing their assets.

But money is of little consequence to The Joker, whose manic energy Nolan harnesses into one long crescendo of exhilarating tension. (Kudos also go to the composers of the pitch-perfect score, James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.) The Joker wants to mess with people's heads, nay, their very humanity, forcing them into unthinkable situations from which there is no escape except nightmare. Stuck between the golden boy and the clown from Hell, Batman is even more of an outsider than ever, unable to find a toehold in the world of hope or despair. In fact, Nolan does not directly pit Batman's brand of heroism against The Joker's anarchy. He supposes that the decency of the common man is the antidote to the blind terror which can turn neighbor against neighbor in the absence of something to believe in. It is only when Batman realizes this that he finds his way.

The bam-boom action may be sparse for a lengthy summer blockbuster, but it is the space between the bouts that drives the show. The Dark Knight mesmerizes with the anxiety of What Next? rendered all the more vivid by The Joker's assurance that anything is possible (ask him how he got the scars on his face) and that no one, as Dent learns, is master of his own fate.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.