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What, exactly, is "terror?" In Batman Begins, it’s a device, a means of manipulation. Batman begins with terror, a flashback: young Bruce Wayne (Gus Lewis) falls into an abandoned well on his millionaire father’s estate and thousands of bats surge from the darkness, swarming over him. The scene itself is only mildly frightening, but director and screenwriter Christopher Nolan doesn’t want to manipulate his audience, he wants us to understand how terror forms character and fate and how when it’s mastered it can be turned against others, used, like the Force, to cloud weak minds and make them do one’s bidding. It’s a tricky balance, exercising a faculty while at the same time trying to comprehend it — if not duplicate it, as Nolan did with memory and identity in Memento. He doesn’t just respect our intelligence, he demands we use it. Anyone expecting from Batman Begins a lazy immersion in spectacle, thrills, and faux "terror" will be disappointed. Those looking for a thoughtful, poetic fable about what’s most frightening in our lives today may not be fully satisfied either, but this is the movie for them. Young Bruce doesn’t adjust well to his trauma, despite the support of his philanthropic dad, who says things like we must fall in order to rise again. At what looks like a Gotham opera-house production of Faust (or is it Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bats?), a terrified Bruce insists on leaving when the extras take leathery-winged flight. Outside, in a sordid alley (Nolan’s Gotham, unlike Tim Burton’s, is clearly Chicago, with a few CGI additions and many more layers of trash and corruption), his parents are gunned down by a desperate mugger in the primal scene familiar to aficionados of the superhero. Add vigilante rage to guilt, terror, and unlimited wealth and what is a young man to do? Adult Bruce (Christian Bale) journeys to the heart of darkness, determined to confront evil in order to overcome it, a quest that takes him to the Himalayas and the lair of Ducard (Liam Neeson, in a variation of his Jedi role), representative of the League of Shadows, an ancient ninja-like order dedicated to maintaining justice. At first, Ducard seduces Bruce and even the most lily-livered liberal viewer into his harsh world view of good and evil and his methods of using terror (induced handily by a locally grown drug) to defeat the terrifying. But he, it seems, is one more evil to confront and overcome. So it’s back to Gotham City after an exile of years, where Bruce takes on the role of a playboy indifferent to the suffering of his fellow citizens, much to the disgust of dedicated DA and former childhood sweetheart Rachel (Katie Holmes). But like Bale’s yuppie creep in American Psycho, Bruce has a lethal alter ego, one that takes on the identity of that which he fears most. Like Peter Parker’s Spider-Man in the first of those films, Bruce’s Batman is a work in progress, put together with elements of his ninja training, bits of hardware from the Wayne Enterprises experimental applications warehouse (overseen by an avuncular Morgan Freeman), and TLC from family butler Alfred (Michael Caine earning a stipend). The enemy he challenges has many faces: a mobster with half the city under his control; a baby-faced psychiatrist working for a mysterious foreign agent; a system of entitlement that thrives on the misery of the masses. (This is the world of Cinderella Man as seen from the other side.) But the ultimate adversary is terror: illusory, ubiquitous, irrational. It’s the ideal instrument for the cynical moviemaker or politician, but one that Nolan regards with the cold eye of an artist. |
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Issue Date: June 17 - 23, 2005 Back to the Movies table of contents |
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