Starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson
Directed by Tim Burton
1989 was a big year for films, particularly summer season blockbusters. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the last of that trilogy (...) was the worldwide box office champion, taking over $474 million worldwide, but the cinema was awash with 'big' films, arguably more so than any year previously. Alongside Lethal Weapon 2, Ghostbusters 2, and later in the year, Back to the Future Part 2, the one which generated the most hype was Batman. It was directed by Tim Burton, the former Disney animator and concept artist, then best known for directing Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and the supernatural horror comedy Beetlejuice. A strange choice, perhaps, to take charge of a $30 million undertaking, Burton nonetheless overcame production difficulties, which saw the budget rise to almost $50m, and casting controversies, over which fans reacted with hostility to the primarily comedic actor Michael Keaton taking the dual roles of millionaire Bruce Wayne and his eponymous vigilante alter ego, to deliver a modern motion picture milestone. It is rich with his now famous 'darkness', reclaiming the character and brand from the overwhelmingly camp tone of the popular 1960s television series, and rightly veering away from the All American goodness of the successful Superman adventures of the late 1970s and early 80s. It led to four 'proper' sequels, Burton's own Batman Returns in 1992, and Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever and Batman and Robin in 1995 and 1998 respectively. The latter is said to have "killed the franchise", but the character was brought back in director Christopher Nolan's commercially and critically successful Dark Knight trilogy, and lives on as part of Warner Brothers' DCEU, with a standalone film Joker due for release later in 2019. Despite Batman not being a superhero per se, Buton's Batman could easily be said to be the film that gave rise to the current proliferation of Superhero films in cinemas.
From the outset the film is distinctive and stylized. Gotham City is shown in wide as a place of towering skyscrapers, distant wailing sirens, and wall to wall traffic, but at street level things are bustling, litter-strewn and noisy, a melting pot of styles and sounds. Men dress in what seem to be outfits from the 1940s, snappy suits, fedoras and raincoats, but the song The Future plays on a stereo by the side of the road. The architecture and inhabitants of this environment seem somewhat modern, but strangely lost in time, and the design recalls previous cinematic visions from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner to Terry Gilliam's Brazil. In a parallel to the childhood murder of Bruce Wayne's own parents, which would give rise to the thorn in his psyche that would become the Batman, a smartly dressed couple and their young son get lost in the maze of Gotham's backstreets, and are set upon, robbed and killed by two hoodlums. Enter "the bat" not to kill, but to tell them to spread the word and create fear among the criminals. Hearing that word is Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) a dogged reporter for the Gotham Globe newspaper, whom nobody believes before the entrance of freelance photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger). Together they attend a fundraiser for the city's 200th Anniversary celebrations at Wayne's mansion, where their host comes across as carefree, bumbling and absent minded, seemingly saved at every turn from disaster by his trusty butler Alfred (Michael Gough). Across town, narcissistic gangster Jack Napier (a snarling, arrogant Jack Nicholson) is set up by his boss, crime lord Carl Grissom (Jack Palance), to take the fall for a burglary at a chemical factory. Acting on a tip off to Police Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle), captured by Wayne's surveillance, Batman springs into action to foil the raid, and in the ensuing chaos, accidentally drops Napier into a vat of chemicals. The gangster emerges transformed into the Joker. Thus the plot settles on a straightforward struggle for control of the city between Batman and the Joker, and three strands of investigation; each attempts to uncover their adversary's true identity, as does Vale, albeit whilst pursuing a romance with Wayne.
The much-mooted darkness seems tame by today's standards, despite being hitherto unseen in this type of film. It is certainly present; Bruce Wayne is clearly a tortured individual and Batman shows little conscience, save for a desire to protect the innocent, whilst the Joker is a full-on crazy, casually shooting underlings and electrocuting a rival to death with a gruesomely comic hand buzzer, among other methods. The dark atmosphere of the city, vividly brought to life by Anton Furst and Peter Young's Oscar winning production design and Roger Pratt's cinematography, envelops every aspect of the frame. The few scenes of daylight are far from sun-drenched; there's no greenery in sight, and grey clouds fill the sky. But the violence is largely implicit rather than gory. The death of the family in the opening scene occurs off screen, and the murder of Wayne's parents is shown moodily, in slow motion, as he recalls the memory. Elsewhere, the Joker's goons are kicked and punched but slump away inconsequentially, only one is shown grimly plummeting to his death from the top of Gotham's cathedral. And, unsurprisingly, with the Joker on board, much is played for laughs. "As my plastic surgeon always said," he quips, "If you gotta go, go with a smile!". Knox and Alfred provide comic relief too. "He must have been king of the wicker people!" observes the former, inspecting an exotic suit of armour on display in Wayne's House. And, standing in front of a floor to ceiling mirror in the same room, "Maybe it should be Bruce Vain". As menacing as things are when the Joker vandalizes the Flugelheim art museum or sets upon the citizens of Gotham with poison gas, it's offset by his goofy gas masks, the garish purples and greens of his costumes, and Prince's funk-driven pop music which provides his themes. The adversaries are presented as two sides of the same coin. "You idiot!" says the Joker while fighting Batman, "You made me. You dropped me into that vat of chemicals". "I made you" comes the retort, "You made me first", after Wayne realises it was the younger hood who murdered his parents, given away by his words "You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?". But whereas the Batsuit weighs heavily on its wearer, Joker seems to liberate and enliven Napier, instilling in him a manic, cackling, if sadistic glee. To that effect Keaton and Nicholson play off each other impressively. Nicholson gets top billing and does his utmost to walk away with the film, but the film is named for Keaton's character. He'll be back for the sequel (but only one of them).
The impressive visuals and ambience can't quite compensate for a script and plot which seem almost like an afterthought or a necessary evil. The 153 day strike of 1988 by the Writers Guild of America impacted the making of the film. Sam Hamm, the writer of the initial screenplay based on a treatment by Burton and his then girlfriend Julie Hickson was unable to complete the work, so Warren Skaaren (writer of Beetlejuice) was brought in to continue. This is evident in the film's climax, which evinces an uncertainty about how it would end. Indeed the film noticeably splutters in its final act. In an attempt to counter the Joker's scheme to poison the city's cosmetics, Batman drives his armoured Batmobile into the Axis Chemicals factory and although he has already determined the deadly combinations - he is meant to be the "world's greatest detective", after all - rather than working to counteract them, he simply blows the factory up. This acts as a cue for an extended explosive finale in which Batman mounts his Batwing plane in an attempt to sell more toys thwart Joker's destructive plans for the Anniversary Parade and bring him to heel. Aside from one lovely shot where the Batwing rises above the clouds and is silhouetted against the full moon, this sequence is utterly redundant. An array of machine guns and rockets line up and zero in on their target, but the Joker stands unharmed as they rain down around him. He then pulls out an unfeasibly long-barreled revolver and shoots the plane down. The Joker then flees to the bell tower of the abandoned, decaying cathedral with a captive Vicki Vale in tow; Batman pursues him to the top, they struggle, and the villain falls to his death. Later, Vale meets Alfred to return to Wayne's home, while Batman surveys the night sky, illuminated by a searchlight bearing the Bat symbol, a newly inaugurated call to arms for future emergencies. There are some great gothic touches in this climax, as Batman battles Joker's henchmen, crashing one into a giant bell with a plangent clang, and the Joker engaging in a face-off with a stone gargoyle. Ultimately, though, it's a rushed and perfunctory conclusion to what had been an engaging rivalry.
There are many fascinating aspects of the story which were, understandably, dropped from the final screenplay or changed. One version of the script, which was storyboarded and recently surfaced as a dvd extra, showed the introduction of sidekick Robin, the Boy Wonder. It was dropped from this film, although eventually used in the third, Batman Forever. One change to the mythos to which some fans of the comics objected was making Jack Napier responsible for the death of Wayne's parents. Any die hard Bat-fan will tell you it was mugger Joe Chill; this was restored (righted?) in Batman Begins (2005). In this instance it doesn't matter to the casual viewer, and it serves the duality theme of the story well. Despite these details, and its fizzling denouement notwithstanding, the film is a fairly satisfying entertainment. The narrative shortcomings are largely compensated for by the performances, stunning visuals, twisted sense of humour, and Danny Elfman's magnificent score. Characterisation isn't overly complex, and whether that could be expected from a comic book source is a different question, however it holds the viewer's interest. Keaton's rendering of Bruce Wayne is of "a pleasingly comic fellow", noted Pauline Kael, and his Batman has "a sort of menace that is disturbingly close to psychotic, wrote Mark Hughes. Nicholson's Napier / Joker, meanwhile, is credited with being the electric performance from a big name star which gave legitimacy to a lightweight proposition.
Watching Batman a scarcely believable 30 years on, many of the traits which marked it out as daring and original are now de rigeur. In part, viewing it outside the context of its own time diminishes its effectiveness; it's no longer challenging. Where it was once seen as too dark for a mere PG certificate in the UK (the 12 certificate was introduced specifically for it) it is now widely regarded as "camp" (*), the very quality it was meant to supersede. But really the fact that its qualities have overtaken the genre is a testament to its great / dubious (delete as applicable) achievement. Ultimately, this is a very-well-made not-very-good film. But whether it's good or not is irrelevant, something which is certainly true of today's blockbusters. Superman may have opened the door back in 1978, with an Oscar winning actors Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman on the marquee and a screenplay partly credited to Mario Puzo adding a semblance of respectability, but Batman kicked it wide open 11 years later. Now the packaging of this type of film, from words on the page to full page ads, has almost entirely supplanted content. Of course there are exceptions, but by large these thigs are run off the assembly line with a density that makes them difficult to consume properly. Once there were just a handful of truly massive movies a season, and they became "event movies". Bonanza openings were prized, but longevity was important too, and the space between them allowed other films to make their mark as well; Driving Miss Daisy, Parenthood, and Dead Poets Society were among the ten highest grossing pictures of 1989, the year Last Crusade and Batman were released, something unthinkable in the modern marketplace. But today the releases come so thick and fast, two or three a week sometimes, that a big opening is crucial, because in all probability the film will have dropped out of the Box Office Top Ten within a few weeks to make its home entertainment debut just a few weeks further down the track. Their density makes them less memorable. Warner Bros had to work hard to convince Nicholson to act in this film, but now every actor seems to want to have one like it on their resumé, and it's not perceived as slumming it to do so. Could this have been predicted by the makers of Batman? Probably not, although it might have been their wildest dream. When all is said and done, Batman is still an entertaining movie. It contains great things without itself being great. Most importantly though it's fun, and despite everything which has changed since it was made, it has so far stood the test of time, lost in time, like the suits and buildings of the city it depicts.
(*) See, for example, Emily Rome, Hitfix, 2nd August 2016
Pauline Kael "The movie's darkness is essential to its hold on us."
