GEEK VS GEEK:
The
Dark Knight is an
overrated movie. Oh yes, I just said that. And the late
Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the Joker is
also overrated. Yes, I
totally went there, too.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.Understand that I’m not saying TDK is a bad movie. It’s not. It’s…fine. Watching it is a perfectly adequate way to waste a lazy Sunday afternoon. But the enthusiasm -- no, make that the worship the film has generated from critics and cineastes far and wide is entirely disproportionate to its merits.
Consider: Although TDK drew eight Academy Award nominations and won two (including the aforementioned Mr. Ledger for Best Supporting Actor), in 2009 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would change its rules to permit the nomination of ten films in the Best Picture category, partially in response to the outcry that arose when TDK failed to bag such a nomination. Its worldwide box office has exceeded a billion dollars to date. I don’t know exactly how DVD sales have looked but I can pretty well guess. People love this movie.
Except I don’t.
Here’s why:
It’s too damn long.
TDK
clocks in at a robust 152 minutes and it seems half
again as long. It “ends,” what, four times? Between the
Joker and the Mob and poor Harvey Dent and Commissioner
Gordon, there’s way too much going on. Any one of those
things all by itself would have been the basis for an
excellent movie. But put all together, they make a film
that’s simply overstuffed. It’s worth noting that this is not a problem unique to this Batman movie, or even to this superhero movie. It’s pretty common for filmmakers to try to cram everyone’s favorite villains in. But it is a problem.
It’s hard to care about any of the characters – even the good guys.
For one reason and another, it’s hard to care about almost anyone in the movie. Maybe it’s the fact that the preponderance of plot and whizz-bang action sequences leaves little room for character development. Maybe it’s the fact that the title character sports an oddly depressed affect throughout, like he spent the entire shoot snorting barbiturates. (Christian Bale is a good enough actor that despite everything, he does give an entirely serviceable performance, but we’ve all seen numerous times that Bale is capable of a lot more than “serviceable.”) Among the other actors, Gary Oldman is entirely adequate but largely forgettable. Maggie Gyllenhaal does what she can with a seriously underwritten role (Nolan tends not to do particularly well with female characters anyway -- yes, I went there, too). Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are never boring on screen but they’re not in this one that much and Cillian Murphy and William Fichtner are criminally underused. I’ll get to Ledger in a minute. The only one I cared about by the end was this guy:
As Harvey Dent, Aaron Eckhart managed to upstage at least two Oscar winners and create an interesting and even tragic figure. I was firmly in his corner for most of the movie and actually thought that his eleventh-hour conversion to the dastardly Two-Face was an entirely reasonable response to everything he had been through. I was pulling for him against Batman, in other words. I’m not sure I was meant to be.
It’s even hard to care about the Joker.
Heath Ledger was a gifted young man who turned in a
groundbreaking, nuanced, heartbreaking, unforgettable
performance… in Brokeback
Mountain (2005). As far as
TDK
goes, I know that it’s geek heresy to even think this,
but really? Ledger doesn’t create a character, he gives
a performance:
his Joker is a mumbly, twitchy, inexplicable bundle of
tics, about whom it could reasonably be observed that
the apparent inability of the assorted heroes to take
him out in the first five minutes of the film casts
serious doubt on their competence as professional crime
fighters. I blame the writers, personally. Ledger didn’t pull that particular Joker out of his back pocket, I don’t think. -- Oh, and maybe the director, a little bit, for not reining Ledger in just a tad. Either way, it’s one of the more over-praised performances of the past decade.
It just takes itself too seriously.
“Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”
These majestic words -- which close the film, so they’re
the last thing that the viewer comes away with -- are
spoken in reference to… a guy dressed up like a bat who
chases around a guy dressed up like a clown.* Meditate
on that
for a minute.Is it possible to explore serious themes within that sort of context? Of course it is. Comics in general have often served up their action and adventure with a side dish of That’s Something To Think About. But these things can be carried too far, and The Dark Knight is absolutely brimming with angst, and darkness, and gloom. I cracked a smile exactly once -- when Wayne absconded with the ballet -- and while I never expected the movie to be a comedy, I also didn’t expect it to be as heavy as a Russian epic. Bruce Wayne is a man of tremendous wealth and power whose alter ego makes good people’s lives better using some of the niftiest toys ever engineered. Is it too much to ask that we get to see him, I don’t know, enjoy himself just a little bit? TDK is relentless; evil is everywhere and good people either get mowed down in its path (Rachel Dawes), give in to the darkness (Harvey Dent), or get blamed (Batman). That’s a lot to hang on… a bat and a clown.
Again, I’m not for a minute saying that TDK is a bad movie. It’s not. It definitely has its moments -- the “two ferries” sequence is nicely played, and Eckhart and to a certain extent Freeman and Caine turn in fine performances. And all those Oscar noms I mentioned above? They’re mostly in the technical categories, and deservedly so -- the movie is expertly crafted. It’s… fine.
But that’s really my point: it’s fine; that so many people think it’s this amazing and incredible masterpiece largely represents a triumph of marketing, or something. Is the state of genre cinema so dire these days that “competent” now passes for “brilliant” and “not terrible” is automatically considered “Oscar-worthy”? I refuse to believe it. The Dark Knight is simply overrated, and Heath Ledger is overrated in it.
--
Kate Nagy*Credit where it’s due: I’m not the first person to make the observation about the bat and the clown; I think I got it from a poster on Pajiba.com. I wish I had said it, though, because it sums things up so perfectly.
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