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Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, in “Rabbit Hole”, directed by John cameron Mitchell
Nicole Kidman took on another demanding new role in “Rabbit Hole,” an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer prize-winning drama about a fraying family“Rabbit Hole,” as well, as a producer of the movie, the first from her production company, Blossom Films. With a modest budget of less than $10 million, a brisk 28-day shoot, a surprising director in John Cameron Mitchell, few frills (no trailers for the stars) and many interns, “Rabbit Hole” is more like an indie than a Hollywood production. Make no mistake: it was Ms. Kidman’s wattage that got it made, and quickly. But it does not yet have distribution.
“This is a passion project for Nicole,” Aaron Eckhart, who plays her husband, said after shooting a scene at Papazzio restaurant in Bayside. “The reason why I’m in the movie is Nicole. If she wants to work with somebody, then that’s what happens.”(Dianne Wiest, Tammy Blanchard and Sandra Oh are also in the cast.)
Mr. Mitchell noted that he received the call to direct in February and began working soon after. “That never happens,” he said, “but it was a priority for her.”
A downtown actor known for adapting his own often raucous and sexually explicit work — “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Shortbus” — Mr. Mitchell was an unorthodox choice to direct an intimate story about the differing ways a couple cope with the accidental death of their young son. (In fact he was the second unorthodox choice: Sam Raimi was originally attached, but withdrew to do the next “Spider-Man.”) And it was strange for him to want to do it. “It’s the first thing since ‘Hedwig’ 10 years ago that made me drop everything,” Mr. Mitchell said.
He was attracted by Mr. Lindsay-Abaire’s taut script, and by a personal connection. “When I was 14,” he said, “we lost our brother, who was 4, to a heart problem. It was a sudden, unexpected event. It defined a family forever and recovering from it was something we’re still doing.”
But Ms. Kidman said Mr. Mitchell hardly needed to pitch her to get the job. “He already had it,” even before the phone call when he told her his story, she said. “Talking to someone, I don’t think words and talking is ultimately the way that you choose to do a piece,” she added over a cappuccino in the back of the set. “It’s all based on a sensation, on an instinct. That’s what my whole life’s been based on, a gut instinct. And either it goes way off and it’s something else, or it’s exactly what I thought it would be, or it’s way more.”
Her instincts have not always served her well lately. Ms. Kidman’s last three big-budget films, “Australia,” “The Golden Compass” and “The Invasion” were box-office disappointments, and an auteur-directed indie, Noah Baumbach’s “Margot at the Wedding,” was a moderate success at best. So while her red-carpet appeal is undiminished (her life in Nashville with her husband, the country star Keith Urban, and their daughter, Sunday Rose, is still tabloid worthy), her big-screen clout may be. That there are fewer boutique studios releasing the “odd stories” Ms. Kidman says she’s interested in — Paramount Vantage, which distributed “Margot,” is much diminished, for example — means she may have a harder time following her gut.
“It’s definitely a rough time,” said Bob Berney, the former president of Picturehouse, a division of Time Warner that was shut down last year. “There’s fewer buyers than ever before. On the other hand, I think the market in terms of audience is stronger than ever, in terms of the number of theaters there are, in terms of people who are interested in something unique or different.” (Mr. Berney has just opened a new distribution company, Apparition.)
Blossom Films has a first-look deal with 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight specifically for “Rabbit Hole.” “We get to finish at the pace that we want to,” Ms. Kidman said, “and then if people respond to it, we get to place it somewhere, with people that we feel are as passionate about it as we are.”
Ms. Kidman did not see “Rabbit Hole” on Broadway in 2006, but after reading a review, she called Per Saari, Blossom Films’ producer, and he flew to New York from Los Angeles that night, he said. He saw the show, for which Cynthia Nixon won a Tony in the role of the grieving mother, and set up a meeting with Mr. Lindsay-Abaire. Ms. Kidman read the play and later saw an Australian production.
“When I first responded to it, it was because I read it, and it was about grief, which fascinates me,” she said. “Loss and love seem to be themes that run through my work.” This film is about “a marriage and the way that people fuse through pain, that you can either be pulled apart or you can come together. In the same way that ‘Birth,’ a film that I did, was about loss of the loved one who’s your partner in life, this is the most profound loss, and it’s the worst place to tread. And so my nature tends to be to explore something that I’m terrified of.”
Shooting a tense scene at the restaurant, Ms. Kidman and Mr. Eckhart remained in character between takes, continuing their conversation as husband and wife or staring intently down in concentration. Ms. Kidman didn’t deviate from the text, but made subtle changes in her inflection, giving the moment, in which she reveals that she no longer wants to attend a support group for grieving parents, a tinge of sadness or bitter resignation.
Asked if making a smaller-scale movie was a refreshing change, Ms. Kidman seemed to bristle. “I’ve always done them,” she said. “I mean, I won the Academy Award” — in 2003, for “The Hours” — “and I went straight into making ‘Birth.’ ”
True: for an A-list star, her career is a patchwork of quirky choices. And in conversation she was personable and down to earth, asking for recommendations of things to do in New York. “A good jazz club is what I need,” she said, “something that is really underground.”
Mr. Saari said she reminded him of his last boss, Robert Redford. “Redford has always had one foot outside of Hollywood,” he said. “I think Nicole, although she’s known to be a movie star, she has this independent spirit to her. It’s the same part of her that lives in Nashville and has a farm. She brings in these giant squash, and says, ‘Look what I grew in my garden.’ She wanted to enter them in a competition.”
Ms. Kidman said her goal with Blossom Films was to promote the vision of directors like Mr. Mitchell and writers like Mr. Lindsay-Abaire, who was surprised to find himself a part of the production even after he submitted his draft. “They haven’t changed anything without my permission, which in my experience never happens,” he said.
Of course vanity production companies in Hollywood are nothing new, nor are pet projects. Most of the films that Blossom is developing, including “The Danish Girl,” based on a novel about the first man to have a sex change operation, have roles for Ms. Kidman. (One that doesn’t is a remake of “How to Marry a Millionaire” in which a man is the gold digger; Ms. Kidman said it was her idea.) But surprise: Ms. Kidman said she has no plans to direct, though she would like to write. “I’m not interested in just producing movies,” she said. “I’m actually interested in protecting the material, because you don’t want this stuff to get hacked to pieces and commercialized and taken into a place that isn’t authentic and real.”
That may be true as an actor, but as a producer, doesn’t she want her films to be commercially successful? Ms. Kidman dismissed the question.
“Films are so ephemeral,” she said. “You can have all of the components and still miss horribly. That’s the beauty of art.”
“The September Issue,” a documentary about the creation of a single, very fat issue of American Vogue in a far-off gilded age (i.e., 2007), has little to say about fashion, the real ins and outs of publishing or the inner workings and demons of the magazine’s notoriously demanding meanie-in-chief, Anna Wintour. Rather, this entertaining, glib movie is about the maintenance of a brand that Ms. Wintour has brilliantly cultivated since she assumed her place at the top of the editorial masthead in 1988 and which the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, has helped polish with a take so flattering he might as well work there.
To judge from the flurries of behind-the-scenes evidence, however, if Mr. Cutler did work for the exacting Ms. Wintour he would still be doing reshoots. Shot on digital with an eye for sumptuous color by Bob Richman and briskly edited by Azin Samari, the 88-minute movie opens with Ms. Wintour explaining that “there is something about fashion that can make people very nervous.” Certainly she unnerves her staff, as you soon see from all the huddled bodies and popping eyes. Even the more self-possessed, like Candy Pratts Price, seem in the grip of awe. Is Ms. Wintour the “high priestess” of the magazine, an off-camera voice asks. “I would say pope,” Ms. Price says with a queasy smile.
Many will grasp this distinction, having already watched supplicants kiss the ring in the 2006 film “The Devil Wears Prada,” with Meryl Streep as a thinly disguised, fictionalized and Americanized version of Ms. Wintour. Etched in acid and often hilarious, the performance, while not wholly modeled on Ms. Wintour, helped humanize her public profile, lessening the sting of the original book, a roman à clef by one of her former .
Etched in acid and often hilarious, the performance, while not wholly modeled on Ms. Wintour, helped humanize her public profile, lessening the sting of the original book, a roman à clef by one of her former assistants, Lauren Weisberger. The documentary continues this humanization largely by showing Ms. Wintour very hard at work, rather lonely and sensitive about her British family’s low opinion of fashion. She’s a poor little rich girl swaddled in fur and iced to the bone.
She’s also pretty funny, perhaps at times accidentally so. Much of the movie’s pleasure comes from the utter ease with which Ms. Wintour plays the Red Queen of fashion and orders off with their heads (and even tummies). In the case of the British actress Sienna Miller, the cover girl for the September 2007 issue, which gives the movie its structure and hook, the head in question receives the 21st-century version of a severing: it’s Photoshopped to unreal perfection. However lovely, Ms. Miller proves a problematic Vogue ideal for the editors, many of whose own faces are somewhat surprisingly scored with wrinkles. It’s a mark of how pitiless Ms. Wintour can come across that you end up feeling a bit sorry for Ms. Miller.
In truth Ms. Wintour was just doing her job. Yes, there’s cruelty here, but of the most attenuated kind: she says no, employees tremble. The strongest, like the flame-haired Grace Coddington, the magazine’s longtime creative director and the documentary’s hugely diverting stealth star, seem to have figured out how to survive with their dignity intact. Most of the truly ugly stuff in fashion — the models starving themselves, the exploited Chinese workers cranking out couture fakes and the animals inhumanely slaughtered for their fur — remains unnoted in “The September Issue,” much as it often does in Vogue. And while the movie shuns any overt discussion of money, it includes an instructive scene of Ms. Wintour playing the coquette with one of the magazine’s important advertisers.
Of course it really is all about money. Despite being crammed with glossy images of beautiful, weird, unattractive, ridiculous and prohibitively expensive clothes and accessories, Vogue isn’t about fashion: it’s about stoking the desire for those clothes and accessories. It’s about the creation of lust and the transformation of wants into needs. Almost everything in this temple of consumption, including its lavish layouts and the celebrities who now most often adorn its covers, hinges on stuff for sale. Some of that stuff comes with a price tag, but some of it is more ephemeral because Vogue is also in the aspiration business. Mr. Cutler doesn’t notice or doesn’t care about any of that, which makes his movie as facile as it is fun.
Given this, it’s no surprise that Ms. Wintour is doing her part to flog the documentary: she gave a party in its honor and recently appeared on David Letterman’s show, with and without her signature sunglasses, her glazed stare and tight smile firmly in place. The movie affords you many opportunities to marvel at the parsimony of that smile and wonder if she’s as bored as she looks, even while waiting for an agitated Stefano Pilati, the creative director at Yves Saint Laurent, to show his newest collection.
“That’s pretty,” she says, in a voice so drained of affect it’s a wonder he doesn’t commit seppuku with his scissors. You feel bad for Mr. Pilati, but it’s Ms. Wintour’s hauteur that makes you laugh and keeps you willingly at her side.
By MANOHLA DARGIS (NYTimes)
Cannes Film Festival
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in “Antichrist,” a film directed by Lars von Trier and showing at the Cannes festival.CANNES, France — There’s no question that Lars von Trier knows how to get a rise out of the Cannes press — along with its rapt attention, its incredulous laughter and this year at least, its lusty jeers. The Danish middle-aged enfant terrible, who has been shaking up both the festival and world cinema for more than a decade with films like “Breaking the Waves” and “Dogville,” is clearly intent on holding on to his provocateur status, even if it means alienating (dividing, baffling) his audience further. This, in any event, seems one explanation for his latest, “Antichrist,” an alternately deadly serious and highly ironic exploration of psychosexual trauma, with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple grieving the death of their only child.
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS The stark Romanian drama, directed by Cristian Mungiu and set during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, portrays a country mired in depression and paranoia where everyday life involves navigating through a cruel bureaucratic jungle. The story follows two college girls, frightened, scatterbrained Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), who seeks an abortion, and her steadfast roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who does all the difficult work in arranging the illegal and dangerous procedure. Otilia, who has her own problems, must abandon her friend in the shabby hotel in which the abortion is performed to attend a nightmarish dinner given by the family of her selfish, possessive boyfriend. With no cinematic frills and no music, “4 Months” is grimly realistic and unforgettable.
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN The destinies of six characters intersect in the compelling cross-cultural drama by the German-born Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, whose 2004 film “Head-On” established him as a major international talent. They include a boorish Turkish widower living in Germany; a prostitute he shelters in exchange for conjugal favors but accidentally kills during a squabble; his son, a German professor who moves back to Istanbul and buys a bookstore; the prostitute’s daughter, a headstrong political zealot; the young German woman she falls madly in love with; and the German woman’s strait-laced mother, a former hippie (memorably portrayed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s muse, Hannah Schygulla). As the paths of these fascinating, complicated people cross (two go to jail), Mr. Akin regards them with unwavering compassion.
“The End of America,” an unsettling documentary polemic about the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of 9/11, brings up matters many of us would rather not contemplate in the middle of a financial crisis and on the eve of a new administration. Federal laws enacted during the last seven years that threaten our constitutional rights, it reminds us, remain in effect.
The pointedly inflammatory film, adapted from Naomi Wolf’s book “The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” compares the Bush administration’s attempts to discourage dissent and to wield increasingly unchecked power to the events preceding the establishment of 20th-century dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Chile and elsewhere. Without explicitly invoking the word, it implies that since 2001 the United States has drifted toward fascism in the name of fighting terror.
Tightly constructed and fiercely one-sided, “The End of America,” directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (“The Devil Came on Horseback”), interweaves excerpts from a lecture in New York given by Ms. Wolf with film clips and interviews illustrating her contention that the rise of those dictatorships created a “blueprint” that the Bush administration, consciously or not, has followed.
According to Ms. Wolf, the first and fundamental tool for acquiring power is the manipulation of fear. In the shell-shocked post-
9/11 climate, the overwhelming public reaction to the Patriot Act of 2001, which gave law enforcement agencies expanded powers of surveillance, was mute acceptance of whatever was deemed necessary to keep us safe. Since then, she says, a color-coded system of terror alerts has been effectively wielded to keep us on edge.
The film’s most disturbing moments are its accounts of James Yee, a United States Army chaplain at Guantánamo, who was accused of espionage and held in solitary confinement for 76 days before being released, and Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian telecommunications engineer, who was detained at Kennedy International Airport, then later deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. He was eventually cleared of charges of terrorism.
Courtesy of STEPHEN HOLDEN
MOVIE REVIEW
Bathed in light so lusciously golden and honeyed that you might be tempted to lick the screen, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a rueful comedy about two young American women who, during a summertime European idyll, savor many of the Continental delicacies that such travelers often take pleasure in: art, music, culture, yes, but also strange bodies and unexpected dreams. These bodies and dreams open possibilities for the women, intimating freer, somehow different lives, despite the persistent tugging of a voice that hovers at the edge of this story trying to pull it and its characters down to earth, where desire can fade quickly.
That narration, which weaves in and out of the story like a thread, is spoken by the actor Christopher Evan Welch, but more rightly belongs to Woody Allen, the film’s writer and director. Although “Vicky Cristina” trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its locations and stars — and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and people imply — it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss. Mr. Allen may be buoyed (like the rest of us) by his recent creative resurrection, but this is still the same glum clown who, after the premiere of “Match Point,” his pitch-black, near pitch-perfect 2005 drama, commented that cynicism was just an alternate spelling of reality. Ah, life! Ah, Woody!
Ah, wilderness of a heart that knows what it wants even when the rest of the body does not! Sensible Vicky (Rebecca Hall) insists that she knows what she wants — her dull fiancé in New York, for one — while dreamy Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) does not. The two have traveled to Barcelona so that Vicky, who speaks little Spanish, can work on her masters in Catalan culture, while Cristina plays her foil, and we play virtual tourist amid the city’s Gaudí splendors. With the narrator setting the brisk, at times rushed, pace, the women move in with some acquaintances (Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn), but their sentimental education doesn’t really begin until they meet one of Spain’s national treasures: Javier Bardem.
Mr. Bardem slithers into “Vicky Cristina” (and in that order) like a snake in the garden, wrapping himself around the two women with blissful, insinuating, sensuous ease. He’s the celebrated painter Juan Antonio, one of those artistic sybarites who attack both women and canvases with bold strokes. Eyes hooded, smile taunting, he invites the Americans to fly away for the weekend — a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, thou and thou — a proposition that inspires mockery from Vicky and girlish excitement in Cristina. Mr. Bardem, relieved of his ghoulish Prince Valiant bob from “No Country for Old Men,”invests the cliché of the Latin lover with so much humor and feeling that he quickly vanquishes the stereotype.
The same goes for Penélope Cruz, who plays a combustible Judy to Mr. Bardem’s smoldering Punch. As Maria Elena, Juan Antonio’s unstable former wife (an incident with a blade botched their happily ever after), Ms. Cruz has her own type to surmount, which she does with fire, smoke and comedy. With her artfully tousled hair and watchful eyes, Maria Elena is a classic screen siren (and totally crazy chick), but one with the pulse of a real woman. Ms. Cruz, slipping between Spanish and English (the latter was once a serious obstacle for her), does especially nice work with her voice, which seductively lowers and sometimes rises with animal intensity, suggesting a more variegated interior world than that provided by Mr. Allen’s writing.
Maria Elena and Juan Antonio give the film such a twinned jolt of energy that you may wish it would head off into Almodóvar country, but that wouldn’t be true to Mr. Allen, for whom desire remains an agony. Still, he’s enough of an entertainer to give the audience its pleasures, which partly accounts for Ms. Johansson. She isn’t much of an actress, but it doesn’t terribly matter in his films: She gives him succulent youth, and he cushions her with enough laughs to distract you from her lack of skill. The appealing Ms. Hall, whose jaw line and brittle delivery evoke Katharine Hepburn, furnishes an actual performance, one that, tinged with sadness, makes evident that this is as much a tragedy as a comedy.
There will always be an audience that hungers for a certain kind of Woody Allen movie, but it’s a relief that he has moved away from the safety and provincialism of his New York. Working in Britain for his previous three films and in Spain for this one has had a liberating effect, perhaps because it’s made it easier for him to step down as a leading man.
The characters in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” by contrast, generally move fluidly — bopping and weaving, going here, pausing there — a looseness that works contrapuntally with the voice-over’s insistent forward drive. Delivered in novelistic third person, the narration allows Mr. Allen to dispense with large chunks of exposition, to fill in the narrative gaps, yet it also puts some aesthetic distance between him and his characters. The film feels personal — “Sentimental Education,” a touchstone here, is one of the things that makes life worth living, as he says in “Manhattan” — though not claustrophobic, another cloyingly needy dispatch from a ravenous id. What Mr. Allen says about life and disappointment still sounds very Woody, but these days he seems content to speak through his characters, not just for them.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Dark as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind — including “Batman Begins,” Mr. Nolan’s 2005 pleasurably moody resurrection of the series — largely by embracing an ambivalence that at first glance might be mistaken for pessimism. But no work filled with such thrilling moments of pure cinema can be rightly branded pessimistic, even a postheroic superhero movie like “The Dark Knight.”
Apparently, truth, justice and the American way don’t cut it anymore. That may not fully explain why the last Superman took a nose dive (“Superman Returns,” if not for long), but I think it helps get at why, like other recent ambiguous American heroes, both supermen and super-spies, the new Batman soared. Talent played a considerable part in Mr. Nolan’s Bat restoration, naturally, as did his seriousness of purpose. He brought a gravitas to the superhero that wiped away the camp and kitsch that had shrouded Batman in cobwebs. It helped that Christian Bale, a reluctant smiler whose sharply planed face looks as if it had been carved with a chisel, slid into Bruce Wayne’s insouciance as easily as he did Batman’s suit.
The new Batman movie isn’t a radical overhaul like its predecessor, which is to be expected of a film with a large price tag (well north of $100 million) and major studio expectations (worldwide domination or bust). Instead, like other filmmakers who’ve successfully reworked genre staples, Mr. Nolan has found a way to make Batman relevant to his time — meaning, to ours — investing him with shadows that remind you of the character’s troubled beginning but without lingering mustiness. That’s nothing new, but what is surprising, actually startling, is that in “The Dark Knight,” which picks up the story after the first film ends, Mr. Nolan has turned Batman (again played by the sturdy, stoic Mr. Bale) into a villain’s sidekick.
That would be the Joker, of course, a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger. Mr. Ledger died in January at age 28 from an accidental overdose, after principal photography ended, and his death might have cast a paralyzing pall over the film if the performance were not so alive. But his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once. When the Joker enters one fray with a murderous flourish and that sawed-off smile, his morbid grin a mirror of the Black Dahlia’s ear-to-ear grimace, your nervous laughter will die in your throat.
A self-described agent of chaos, the Joker arrives in Gotham abruptly, as if he’d been hiding up someone’s sleeve. He quickly seizes control of the city’s crime syndicate and Batman’s attention with no rhyme and less reason. Mr. Ledger, his body tightly wound but limbs jangling, all but disappears under the character’s white mask and red leer. Licking and chewing his sloppy, smeared lips, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth like a jittery animal, he turns the Joker into a tease who taunts criminals (Eric Roberts’s bad guy, among them) and the police (Gary Oldman’s good cop), giggling while he-he-he (ha-ha-ha) tries to burn the world down. He isn’t fighting for anything or anyone. He isn’t a terrorist, just terrifying.
Mr. Nolan is playing with fire here, but partly because he’s a showman. Even before the Joker goes wild, the director lets loose with some comic horror that owes something toMichael Mann’s “Heat,” something to Cirque de Soleil, and quickly sets a tense, coiled mood that he sustains for two fast-moving hours of freakish mischief, vigilante justice, philosophical asides and the usual trinkets and toys, before a final half-hour pileup of gunfire and explosions. This big-bang finish — which includes a topsy-turvy image that poignantly suggests the world has been turned on its axis for good — is sloppy, at times visually incoherent, yet touching. Mr. Nolan, you learn, likes to linger in the dark, but he doesn’t want to live there.
Though entranced by the Joker, Mr. Nolan, working from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan Nolan, does make room for romance and tears and even an occasional (nonlethal) joke. There are several new characters, notably Harvey Dent (a charismaticAaron Eckhart), a crusading district attorney and Bruce Wayne’s rival for the affection of his longtime friend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, a happy improvement over Katie Holmes). Like almost every other character in the film, Batman and Bruce included, Harvey and Rachel live and work in (literal) glass houses. The Gotham they inhabit is shinier and brighter than the antiqued dystopia of “Batman Begins”: theirs is the emblematic modern megalopolis (in truth, a cleverly disguised Chicago), soulless, anonymous, a city of distorting and shattering mirrors.
From certain angles, the city the Joker threatens looks like New York, but it would be reductive to read the film too directly through the prism of 9/11 and its aftermath. You may flash on that day when a building collapses here in a cloud of dust, or when firemen douse some flames, but those resemblances belong more rightly to our memories than to what we see unfolding on screen. Like any number of small- and big-screen thrillers, the film’s engagement with 9/11 is diffuse, more a matter of inference and ideas (chaos, fear, death) than of direct assertion. Still, that a spectacle like this even glances in that direction confirms that American movies have entered a new era of ambivalence when it comes to their heroes — or maybe just superness.
In and out of his black carapace and on the restless move, Batman remains, perhaps not surprisingly then, a recessive, almost elusive figure. Part of this has to do with the costume, which has created complications for every actor who wears it. With his eyes dimmed and voice technologically obscured, Mr. Bale, who’s suited up from the start, doesn’t have access to an actor’s most expressive tools. (There are only so many ways to eyeball an enemy.) Mr. Nolan, having already told Batman’s origin story in the first film, initially doesn’t appear motivated to advance the character. Yet by giving him rivals in love and war, he has also shifted Batman’s demons from inside his head to the outside world.
That change in emphasis leaches the melodrama from Mr. Nolan’s original conception, but it gives the story tension and interest beyond one man’s personal struggle. This is a darker Batman, less obviously human, more strangely other. When he perches over Gotham on the edge of a skyscraper roof, he looks more like a gargoyle than a savior. There’s a touch of demon in his stealthy menace. During a crucial scene, one of the film’s saner characters asserts that this isn’t a time for heroes, the implication being that the moment belongs to villains and madmen. Which is why, when Batman takes flight in this film, his wings stretching across the sky like webbed hands, it’s as if he were trying to possess the world as much as save it.
In its grim intensity, “The Dark Knight” can feel closer to David Fincher’s “Zodiac” thanTim Burton’s playfully gothic “Batman,” which means it’s also closer to Bob Kane’s original comic and Frank Miller’s 1986 reinterpretation. That makes it heavy, at times almost pop-Wagnerian, but Mr. Ledger’s performance and the film’s visual beauty are transporting. (In Imax, it’s even more operatic.) No matter how cynical you feel about Hollywood, it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a shot of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels. He’s just a clown in black velvet, but he’s also some kind of masterpiece.
By MANOHLA DARGIS
