Language: English
176 minutes is a long time to go without laughs. And once you settle into Matt Reeves’ universe of Gotham, you kind of brace yourself for whatever might be around the corner, it’s definitely not a joke. The closest thing here is someone dismissively referring to Batman as ‘Zorro’. If nothing else, you’ve to admire Reeves and his cast’s commitment to their material, to go ahead knowing there won’t be a single laugh-out-loud moment in this nearly three-hour magnum opus. In a post-MCU universe, where the focus is to deliver neatly pressed one-liners every other minute in standardised moulds, lest you risk losing the audience to their phones, it’s almost refreshing how languorous the first 15 minutes of The Batman feel. It’s almost like Reeves is starting out with a pilot episode of a six-hour show, so assured are his pauses. And yet, there’s very little here that we haven’t seen by the end, unlike some of the set-pieces in the Nolan trilogy that went for broke even if it meant looking silly by the end (The Dark Knight Rises *cough!*).
A 30-something Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) walks among Gotham’s civilians in a hoodie, as it pours on Halloween night. If one were to compare it to Christian Bale’s arc in the Nolan movies, Pattinson’s Batman is still somewhere in the first hour of Batman Begins. It’s been a couple of years since he became Gotham’s masked vigilante, but he’s still far off from becoming the gregarious billionaire, who buys hotels and whisks away the entire Bolshoi ballet company on a whim.
Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne/Batman is considerably more reclusive, and unsure of his place in the world. What’s his role as the vigilante? How can he stop all the criminal elements given how large the city is? Is he able to accomplish anything? Is the city even worth saving? He’s haunted by many such questions, and he looks like he’s carrying the weight of Gotham’s moral compass on his shoulders. He sits around like a voyeur, observing people from a distance. He’s yet to come up with a fully-rounded ideology. He’s still relatively young and ignorant enough to see the world in solid black and white. And yet, there’s a desperation in his voice as he scribbles into his diary: “I need to push myself harder” – almost a stand-in for a young actor driving himself to insanity after landing a part that he’s admittedly obsessed over.
Reeves’ film shot by cinematographer Grieg Frasier’s (Dune, Lion), has a decidedly dark and brooding colour palette. It looks exquisite, but it’s hardly the most novel look in the aftermath of the Nolan trilogy and Todd Phillips’ Joker. The grime of Gotham city, the overflowing trash cans, how Gotham’s residents go around vandalising public property while sporting clown make-up: even though an authentic look for a post-Capitol insurrection America, doesn’t look any different from the umpteen dystopian cities.
If The Dark Knight (2009) followed the filmmaking grammar of Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), then The Batman (2022) is closer to David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). It has a similar nihilistic outlook on society, a serial killer at its centre who is looking to ‘preach’, and an ill-fitting detective duo in Batman and Jeffery Wright’s Lieutenant Gordon, who must overcome their mutual trust issues to catch the murderer before he gets to his next victim. Reeves’ film is hardboiled noir that makes The Dark Knight (a grim superhero noir unto itself) look like ‘lighthearted entertainment’. But where Reeves might be mistaken is for a film coming out more than a decade after Nolan’s trilogy and Zack Snyder’s brooding Batman interpretation starring Ben Affleck in the 2010s, makes his 2022 film look closer to the rule than an exception. It’s not unexpected that a filmmaker has gone full goth, grunge and gritty with the world’s greatest detective.
There’s a lot of heavy breathing and grunting in The Batman, from both our protagonist and the primary antagonist - Riddler (Paul Dano), almost as if Reeves wants to transport his audience to a Gotham with not just widespread corruption, but where even the air is noxious. Dano, while an excellent choice for the character on paper, it must be said he looked far more creepy in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, where he played a similar character, but where he wasn’t going around explaining his ‘evilness’ to the audience. Dano has such an eerie presence on screen that all he needs to do is stare blankly at his audience and break into a smile, to send chills down the spine of audience members. His Riddler gets such an incredible build-up, that the ultimate reveal was always going to fall short.
Zoe Kravitz gives a cryptic performance as the perpetually shifty Selina Kyle a.k.a Catwoman. In a film, where she’s just about short of an ‘ally’ to Pattinson’s Batman and a love interest, she gets a memorable send-off in the film’s final moments. Colin Farrell as Oz/Penguin is a campy hoot of a performance that belongs right alongside Ridley Scott’s version of the Gucci family.
However, what begins as glacially paced, becomes increasingly overwrought post the halfway mark.
There are too many subplots, too many resolutions occur rather hastily, people go around (especially John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone) giving entire backstory motivations in capsule monologues, as if mere props in the hands of a director desperate to tie loose ends of his film. To be fair, to see Reeves’ vision materialise on screen, I wouldn’t mind sitting through a four and a half-hour version, provided the film proceeds towards an organic climax. Instead, there are at least two times when I thought the film was coming to an end, only to keep going on for another 20 mins. The worst possible trait for a film could be one that seems to overstay its welcome.
In the end, it is Robert Pattinson’s haunted eyes that ensure that the film isn’t a plodding mess. Pattinson is great for the part, and the foundation for a second (more adventurous?) outing has been laid with a late special appearance by Barry Keoghan. That’s what cinemas need: another billion-dollar franchise that ‘reinterprets’ an IP without going full nutty.
Rating: 3 (out of 5) stars
Tatsam Mukherjee has been working as a film journalist since 2016. He is based out of Delhi NCR.
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