On Christopher Nolan and his Batman Trilogy

Will The Dark Knight Rises live up to the impossible amount of hype surrounding it? And how does the rest of the series hold up?

Well here we are: seven years down the line from the first film, and four since the sequel that lit the world on fire, down to a mere 25 and a half hours to the conclusion. I've got my tickets all set for tomorrow night and for the big midnight blowout of Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated Batman finale, called The Dark Knight Rises, and I've spent a few nights this week re-acquainting myself with the rest of the series. Needless to say, I can hardly even describe how psyched I am for this movie.

I'll admit that there have been a few times over the past few years where the ridiculously hyperbolic praise for Nolan, and especially for The Dark Knight, has really started to irritate me. And I'm a big fan of his: I think The Prestige and Inception are science fiction masterpieces, and I think he certainly stepped things up for comic book movies with Batman Begins. When that movie unraveled in the summer of 2005, Nolan was picking up the pieces of a franchise that had been, essentially, left for dead eight years earlier. Joel Schumacher's disastrous Batman & Robin is the kind of deal-killer that  every major studio has spent the past 15 years trying to avoid. It took a bankable property and proceeded to do almost everything wrong with it, from having George Clooney play himself in a Batman suit, to Arnold Schwarzenegger's plethora of cringe-worthy lines, to bat nipples. Schumacher's obsession with cheesy camp (and the resulting lack of dark, realistic textures or storylines) and a barrage of horrific reviews (the film scores a 13% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 28 on Metacritic) led to a disappointing box office gross. Or perhaps the studio realized that the script was, in fact, the worst ever written. In any case, the movie was acknowledged as the piece of crap it is by everyone. from studio heads to Schumacher himself, and the planned follow up, supposedly called Batman Triumphant, was canned. Years later, Clooney would hit the nail on head by saying "I think we might have killed the franchise."

Luckily, Christopher Nolan was there to pick up the pieces and build them back up into something that was not only worthwhile, but transcendent as far as comic book movies go. After watching both films back to back, I actually think that Batman Begins is the superior work. Nolan chooses to construct the film completely around Bale's Bruce Wayne, and the result is in turns haunting, hilarious, and viscerally thrilling. Somebody once told me that Batman Begins is a movie about Bruce Wayne, whereas The Dark Knight is a movie about Batman, and that's true. It's a blurry line, no doubt, but one that I think marks a valid difference. Wayne often gets lost in the shuffle during the feverish action and constant tension of the sequel, and we occasionally lose him entirely in the sea of other characters. Nolan tries to juggle Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox, Michael Caine's Alfred, the mob, a slew of corrupt cops, and a relationship between Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) that never quite works despite its paramount importance to the plot. His worst offense, however, is the amount of time he spends with the citizens of Gotham, which would be fine if he spent it in interesting fashion, but he doesn't. The extended "boat sequence" almost derails the entire film, focusing too much on characters we don't care about, and doing so with awful dialogue and a predictable arc. And then there's the Joker himself. No one can deny the sheer level of brilliance that Heath Ledger channels into his performance here, nor that he was deserving of the Supporting Actor Oscar in 2008 (though I personally thank that Javier Bardem and Christoph Waltz both won for greater, more nuanced villain work in the surrounding years). But Ledger's presence is so gargantuan that Bale's is greatly diminished, and while the film certainly comes together in time for its conclusion (a spine-tingling cutoff, especially now that the sequel is mere hours away), re-watching it in quick succession with the first film left me sure of one thing: I don't want another Dark Knight.

And it seems likely that I will get my wish. While I've sworn off reading any full reviews and kept myself deliberately in the dark concerning specific plot points and characters (just like last time around), the RT blurbs seem to agree on one thing: that The Dark Knight Rises, as great as it is, "doesn't quite live up to its predecessor." It's a weird qualifier to get excited about, but that's just what's happening for me, because the buzz says that we get back to Wayne and we see him come full circle from where he was in the first film: we get back to the heart of the matter. I trust Nolan to do that, because, for all of the fanboy hype and exaggerated claims, he has never made two movies that are even similar, let alone the same. The ballet-like story choreography of Inception is worlds away from the innovative filmmaking structure utilized on Memento, which bears no resemblance to the unraveling mystery of The Prestige. And his Batman films, while both members of the same trilogy, could hardly be further apart: one is a clear portrait of Wayne's psyche as he becomes more than a man, the next a cloudy glimpse of it, fraught with horrific threats, death, pain, and conflict; one is sheltered in the safety of Wayne Manor, the next consistantly shrouded in the shadows of a broken city; one is a man who loses his parents and vows to never let his loved ones be harmed again, while the next is the shattering realization that his transformation has only brought them closer to danger and doom. And the third film...well, I'm not sure what that will be yet. That's the point, right? But I'm hopeful that, by the time I walk out of the movie theater, sometime after 3 a.m. on Friday morning, I will have just experienced something visceral.

Something important.

Something completely satisfying in every way.

So bring on that midnight showing: it's time to see how this thing ends.

The Descendants

 The Descendants

Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2011

Directed by Alexander Payne

Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges

Three stars

When I first saw the trailer for The Descendants, it immediately jumped to the top of my most anticipated films for 2011. It looked like a great mix of comedy and drama, with the always likable George Clooney at the center, and also the return of acclaimed director Alexander Payne, who made Sideways back in 2004, one of the mid-00s Best Picture nominees that I never got around to seeing.  In many ways, The Descendants brought back memories of two years ago and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, another dramedy which also featured Clooney as a workaholic man re-examining his life after a big wake up call. That film, which, along with my recent topics of We Bought a Zoo and The Lord of the Rings, sits happily on the list of movies I first saw on Christmas Eve, and it ended up being my third favorite film in what I thought was a terrific year. I also think Clooney gave one of his very best lead performances in that film (second only, probably, to his terrificly explosive turn in 2007's Michael Clayton, which wins on the strength of its final scene alone). Unfortunately, The Descendants doesn't quite live up to either of those films, but there's still a lot to enjoy here, and I can certainly see why it's getting so much awards attention, even if I don't particularly agree with much of it.

The Descendants centers around a Hawaiian man named Matt King (Clooney), whose wife, Elizabeth, ends up in a terminal coma after a severe boating accident. It's only after he is given the news that his wife is never going to wake up that his daughter reveals she was cheating on him, leaving him with a complex web of emotions to fight through, as well as delivering a harsh wake up call as to what his life has become in paradise. King is torn between love for the woman he's been married to for 20-some years and rage that she could betray him in such a way, and Clooney executes both (and everything in between) with the nuance and skill of the true professional he is. Clooney, naturally, has some rage-filled moments, which he has always been great at playing, but there are some strikingly tender ones as well, and those are the moments that resonated me the most in this film. There has been talk amongst Oscar experts that this may be Clooney's year in the Best Actor category (he already won Supporting Actor, for Syriana in 2005), and I really wouldn't mind seeing him take it home: he's a bonafide movie star, a likable guy and easily the best thing about this film. While I would rather have seen him win for Up in the Air (he lost to Jeff Bridges) or Michael Clayton (he lost to Daniel Day Lewis), his work here is certainly among the best performances of the year.

Also notable is Shailene Woodley, who plays one of King's daughters, and serves as the perfect foil for Clooney. The younger daughter is nothing but a nuisance for most of the film, but Woodley brings life and depth to Alex, the one who caught her mother cheating and the one who reveals the information to her father. Woodley, whose only real credit up to this point is as the lead character on ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager (which, I can only assume, is one of those semi-trashy teen soap operas), gives a terrific performance here, and is probably a lock for an Oscar nomination at this point, proving that sometimes, talent can blossom in some pretty unlikely places. Unfortunately, Alex comes with Sid, her pseudo-boyfriend figure, who hangs around for the entire film for seemingly no purpose other than to inject some extremely misguided and misplaced comic relief into the proceedings. His presence is almost justified, though, in a scene where he and Clooney share a late-night conversation in a hotel room. The scene is brilliant, funny and tender, and represents my main problem with this screenplay: it's inconsistent. Sometimes the film is everything this scene is, other times it drags, leaving a film that feels both compelling and overlong, moving at times, and strangely hollow at others. It's a feeling that I can't explain entirely, but I was never completely emotionally invested in these characters, so what's supposed to be the big emotional "pay-off" at the end didn't really strike me like it should have.  

 

One of the Oscar bloggers I follow has always said that a Best Picture winner should be universal, that you could sit anyone down in front of that film and they would get it. The past three years have seen three extremely emotionally resonant films take the top prize (The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire), and while many (myself included) would rather have seen David Fincher's masterful The Social Network triumph last year, or James Cameron's landmark Avatar take the prize the year before (I was pulling for Inglourious Basterds that year, but I do believe that The Hurt Locker was the best film), and some will still tell you that Christopher Nolan's work on The Dark Knight should have merited a nomination and a win three years back, but the films that ultimately won had involving, emotional climaxes that were borderline impossible not to feel. In that way, I don't think The Descendants can win, because unlike those three winners, I just didn't get it. And the potential was there too: I really expected to leave the theater feeling both viscerally moved and emotionally satisfied, the way I felt with the past three Best Picture winners, but I think the screenplay misses. Ultimately, The Descendants is a good film, not a great one. Clooney is terrific, as usual, but he made a better film himself this past year with The Ides of March, and I would much rather see that film be awarded, even as it becomes increasingly unlikely that it will be. Yet, despite its flaws, The Descendants still works, and it's the onscreen dynamic between Clooney and Woodley that does it. As the two search for the man Elizabeth was "seeing," they form a tangible bond that really gives the film it's heartbeat. Irritating peripheral characters and screenplay inconsistencies aside, that relationship is the thing about this film I will remember the most, and if Oscar does choose to award this film, I hope it's for those two performances, without which it couldn't possibly work. And if Gosling can't win this year, Clooney is more than a worthy stand-in.