The first four modern-era Batman movies were such cacophonous lumberers that it’s tempting – very tempting – to over praise the fifth in the series, Batman Begins. Because it’s a prequel that concentrates on the mental formation of the young Bruce Wayne, there’s a critical urge to celebrate its concentration on character. Because it deals directly with the issue of superhero/supervillain-inspired fear, there’s a similar instinct to praise its “meta” qualities. And, finally, because the action is swift and compact rather than grandiose, one might reflexively use on of those trite phrases (“in your face,” for example) to describe it.
The simple fact is, though, that Batman Begins is a well-made, good movie, which should be enough. After all, summertime (Hollywood’s summertime, which begins in May) has, over the past decade, become a junkyard of crashing failures, of would-be “entertainments” that use that appellation to excuse the absence of any detectable filmmaking skills (vide Kicking and Screaming or Cinderella Man). Batman Begins is that rare achievement, a movie that achieves its modest goals through extraordinary means.
Christopher Nolan, the Englishman who directed the gimmicky but nevertheless fascinating Memento and the unfortunate Hollywood remake of Insomnia, might not sound like a sure bet to stem heroically the tide of swill that swamps the warmer months. But his handling of David Goyer’s script is exemplary in its application of touch, texture and mood.
You know competence may rule the day in the opening scene, in which the child Bruce Wayne ends up stranded at the bottom of a dry well on the family estate (the size of the Wayne mansion and its grounds are among the few laughable excesses in the movie). There’s a small opening in the side of the well and, following an ominous furry clatter, hundreds of bats come flying out of it, trapping little Bruce in their slapping wings until dad finally descends to save the day.
Bruce Wayne’s lifelong obsession with the bat is thus introduced as the totem it will become, the embodiment of fear overcome by its absorption into an image (the bat suit). Just as importantly, Nolan finds a way to communicate the boy’s panic without overdoing it. That might sound like faint praise, but “overdoing it” has been a motto of the Batman series till now. Each scene gets the cannonade treatment, so that any hopes of building a film under the larger structure of narrative get deflated in a flurry of visual panic and aural, well, nonsense.
As every schoolchild knows, the child Wayne sees his parents murdered by a mugger and is thus inspired to become an avenger. Batman Begins spends its first hour (out of almost 2 1⁄2) detailing Wayne’s (moodily effective Christian Bale as grown-up) training at a Himalayan retreat for would-be crime fighters. The semi-mystical training camp – presided over in part by Liam Neeson – is an obvious derivative of the legendary Shaolin Temple which is at the heart of so many kung fu movies. But it plays not as a rip off, but as a smart acknowledgement that something doesn’t have to be original to be suitable.
Wayne gets back to Gotham City where he sets himself against a Frank Costello-like figure named Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). But the powerful, if familiar-looking, mobster is only the outer layer of an onion of criminal activity wherein Gotham’s very existence is threatened.
Batman Begins is loaded with plot and characters and, once again, Nolan’s skill makes it all comprehensible and emotionally coherent in quietly competent ways (if a guy in bat suit leaping from skyscrapers can be “quietly” anything). This is a doo-hickey of a movie in which all the eccentric gears mesh.
Nolan even introduces a repeated visual movement as a sort of trope/motif. Just as little Bruce Wayne literally descended into the earth to discover/develop his consciousness’s deepest fears, so will grown-up Bruce and his costumed self constantly find himself plunging downward into nether worlds; in fact, all the characters in the movie have problems keeping their footings on whatever upper level of earth they claim. At all times, a plunge threatens the well-being of all. It’s a nice invention.
The only drawback to the movie is the way it raises the issue of class and then tries, futilely, to disarm it. The Waynes spend a lot of their fortune trying to stem the tide of poverty in Gotham City. Tom Wayne, Bruce’s father, alleviates a bit of the economic depression coincident with his life by building a huge mass transit system in the sky as both a make-work program and as a way of uniting diverse portions of the city.
True, the train plays a crucial role in the movie’s action climax, but it’s also a symbol of Batman Begin’s careful coddling of the rich. That the Waynes are living off vast inherited wealth during a depression doesn’t seem to strike Nolan or Goyer as much more than a footnote. In fact, the gangster Falcone – who, if nothing else, is an up-from-the-depths kind of guy – and his cohorts are somehow held to blame for the economic bad times.
This upending of rational class analysis is doubly ridiculous given the movie’s design. What with its subway-in-the-sky and towering skyscrapers the movie puts itself in direct descent from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Lang’s film, of course, was largely about class iniquities. Batman Begins seems largely content to borrow the older film’s tinsel while closing its eyes to its substance.