Review: The Dark Knight (4/5)

The superhero film had to grow up, and grow up it has with Christopher Nolan’s ‘Dark Knight

The Dark Knight
(Christopher Nolan):
Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine.
Running time: 152 minutes

He wets his lips with a lizard tongue-flick. His mouth, scarred to mid-cheek where once it had been widened with a blade, is painted red into a giant mocking smile. His white clown paint and kohl eyes stream like running plaster underneath a nest of chip-oil hair. And then there’s that voice, a growling glee, a killing joke. “Why so serious?” snarls Heath Ledger’s Joker into Maggie Gyllenhaal’s face, holding a knife to the corner of her mouth. He wants to cut a smile into her anxious face. “Why soooo serious?” She might explain that it’s because the superhero movie had to grow up.
Ledger had to get serious because he was stepping into the clown shoes shaped by Jack Nicholson. And Christopher Nolan, after Batman Begins, had to sharpen because questions were going to be asked why a director of his talent was making another superhero movie. He slips in a sequence where a couple of boys sit, pretend-shooting at cars, only for the vehicles unexpectedly to start exploding as Batman rides into view. I can think of a few
grown-up kids too who have been shooting superhero pictures without any real fireworks. It has taken Christopher Nolan to detonate the genre and fireball our imagination.
His opening shot glides silent and bat-like towards a skyscraper. And when it cuts, the film hits the ground and doesn’t stop running for 152 minutes. Nolan’s picture is a high-octane superhero picture, an urban crime thriller with the kind of burnished poise known to Michael Mann and, by turns, a Coppola-inspired genre-bending drama. It has an unashamedly high IQ. You’ll find yourself wanting to pause for breath but being dragged along. The first half-hour is like LA Confidential on kryptonite, as Nolan sets up the complex components of his picture. At the point where a lesser superhero film would wrap up, The Dark Knight takes flight, upping the bat-gear into tense drama.
Christian Bale, stolid, muscled, more chrome armadillo than bat, takes the lead role again. Beside him are his mentors: the Q-like Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and his cockney butler Alfred (Michael Caine). Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, the
ex-girlfriend of Batman’s daytime ego Bruce Wayne. She’s now dating Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Gotham’s white knight district attorney. Eckhart, should he wish, could smash the mob using nothing but his All-Amerian bone structure. Instead, they are cowed by the triumvirate of Batman, Dent and Lieutenant Gordon (played with invisible command by Gary Oldman), creating a space for The Joker to move in.
Dent arraigns the entire mob at one hearing, and we watch the judge open her casebook only for the Joker card to stare back at her. He likes to turn up unexpectedly. Talk about going out with a bang. Where Nicholson used arch to circle the manic smile, Ledger goes Method, making physical that demented psychology. He chomps through his scenes with lines tailored for lore, and Nolan keeps the camera squeezed tight on Ledger’s face, as if every moment of it were precious.
“This town deserves a better class of criminal. And I’m going to give it to them,” he says. Indeed. He’s a jittery anarchist, an artist of terror, and Nolan, writing with his brother Jonathan, uses The Joker to prise open new dramatic territory. He finds in Batman an allegory for a country at war, posing questions about how to respond appropriately to terrorism; or, if you take power for legitimate security reasons, can you give it back after you’ve won?
To find The Joker, Batman adapts sonar technology, Patriot Act-style, to monitor 30 million people. Lucius is disgusted. The Joker, meanwhile, parades like a Gotham bin Laden, a rational agent sowing fear for irrational ends. He goads Batman and Dent into more extreme action: is it possible to defeat an enemy that has no limits while maintaining the values you are fighting to uphold?
This kind of fertile territory reminded me of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, where Vietnam was unwinnable because America was unwilling to embrace “the horror” of total war, unlike Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. Ledger, sitting in the shadow of a police cell, explaining his pathological ideology, summons Brando’s famous scene. Though we won’t have the privilege of seeing Ledger grow old or let slip the mantle of greatness.
I look forward to watching Christopher Nolan. He nudges the last act into high-minded drama. It lacks a certain grace but makes a case for seriousness. Still, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that no matter how hard Nolan nudges, a superhero film is never going to be Hamlet.
There is a code governing its form and there are rules a viewer brings to it, built on the belief that our heroes, unlike ourselves, cannot be corrupt and that good must always remain strong and true over evil. You can shade character, you can make heroes into outlaws, but the outcome feels the same. Can a superhero film transcend genre under such strictures? For the moment, Nolan has pushed it as far as it can go. Irregardless, it is time for him to move up and away from this franchise. Clearly he has the makings of greatness.

Review: Dambé: The Mali Project (2/5)

Dambé: The Mali Project
(Dearbhla Glynn):
Liam Ó Maonlai, Paddy Keenan, Afel Bocoum, Toumani Diabate, Ali Farka Touré.
Running time: 94 minutes

Irish musicians Liam Ó Maonlai and Paddy Keenan travel to Timbuktu for a jam. They also want to raise concerns about the Mali northern region facing rapid desertification due to climate change. This is part musical documentary, part travelogue, directed by Dearbhla Glynn.
Borders collapse when the lads whip out the whistle and bodhran. Ó Maonlai squeezes his eyes closed and plucks his harp; grannies with skin shrivelled like prunes become lithe dancers to Keenan’s low whistle. The Irishmen soak in the heat and the country’s folk music purity. They also hook up with musical legends Afel Bocoum, Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabate before reaching the remote Festival au Desert where they play crossover tribal céilí with Afel Bocoum.
The information is anecdotal. The cinematography, in a country coloured like sand, is transporting. The music is a rudimentary joy. But I can’t say the same for our two hosts.
The pair, decked out in local vestments and funny hats, look like wacky children’s TV presenters. The ridiculousness peaks when they sit atop a horse and cart and play O’Neill’s March to bemused locals going about their business. For years to come, the locals will talk about the day Timbuktu was invaded by the leprechauns. A dust devil of cynicism whips in your gut only for you to remember that the pair are trying to cleanse our despair.

Review: Paris (3/5)

Paris
(Cedric Klaspich):
Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, Albert Dupontel, Francois Cluzet. Running time: 128 minutes

There I was thinking after Paris, Je T’Aime, Dans Paris and 2 Days in Paris that, surely, no more movies were going to be made soon about how great Paris is, when along comes Paris, a movie about how great Paris is. Ah putain!
Cedric Klaspich’s bustling, Magnolia-style ensemble boasts two giants of French cinema, Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris, the Gallic de Niro.
Both shine a quiet confidence. She plays an uptight social worker; he’s a dancer dying of a heart condition. Their story is interweaved with a midlife crisis TV academic (Fabrice Luchini) who seduces a student by text messages; a coterie of food-market workers who fight over the same woman; and a Cameroon man who aspires to live in France. His token story thread is established and then pretty much discarded.
Director Cedric Klaspich takes a naturalistic tone and threads nicely through each story, allowing his camera to savour old and new sides of the city. No forgiving, though, the jarring shifts in tone (a bizarre dream sequence featuring Dustin Hoffman lookalike Francois Cluzet) and a terribly contrived sequence involving a gaggle of fur-wearing fashionistas.
Death comes to some and cupid hovers in the air, while Duris lies in the back of a taxi, in a scene inspired by The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, admiring the view.

Review: Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (3/5)

Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging
(Gurinder Chadha):
Georgia Groome, Tommy Bastow, Alan Davies, Liam Hess.
Running time: 100 minutes.

The new film from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha couldn’t give two hoots about anyone but its target audience. That’s fine by us, tweens will say. The title is hideous but the film is warm like a furry hot-water bottle.
Fourteen-year-old Georgina (Georgia Groome) is trying to climb the mid-teen hump. She and her pals are teenagers who get spots, blush purple around boys, worry about snogging and don’t sneak out of the house to party all night on ecstasy and crystal meth, if teens like that still exist.
George Groome, with her round face and flat cheekbones, is quite unlike Chadha’s earlier muse Keira Knightley, but she has an every-girl charm.
School cliches are freshened up and crises are averted. It’s the kind of picture that eschews rapid-fire editing for measured storytelling, the kind I’m sure young teens grow out of, but hopefully rediscover as adults.

Review: Baby Mama (2/5)

Baby Mama
(Michael Cullers):
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Steve Martin, Sigourney Weaver.
Running time: 99 minutes

The gamut of Baby Mama’s tepid jokes can be found in the film’s trailer. This doesn’t bode well for a 99-minute ‘comedy’. Baby Mama is an odd-couple affair: there’s 37-year-old career woman Kate (Tina Fey), single and more uptight than her buttoned suit; she’s a desperado for a child when she learns she can’t conceive. And then there’s white-trash good-time girl Angie (Amy Poehler), a bit of a fertile myrtle, who agrees to surrogate a child for a large cheque. She winds up moving in and for the most part, the plot is as visible as old-fashioned VPL: Angie teaches Kate to have fun; Kate teaches Angie to become serious, while writer director Michael Cullers wants to have a little amusement himself, lampooning the middle-classes’ obsession for smoothies.
Both Fey and Poehler, former Saturday Night Live comedians, are fine company (though Poehler has the jucier part – she gets to pee in a sink). They are bolstered in the wings with comic turns from Steve Martin and Sigourney Weaver. They work hard but can’t disguise the anaemic writing or the fact that, for a first time director, Cullers displays the enthusiasm of a burnt-out journeyman.