What I said about Joker also applies to The Dark Knight. You could remove Batman’s costume and The Joker’s clown makeup and still have the same movie: a monumentally captivating film about a vigilante accepting that his city prefers a more conventionally good hero while a madman makes us question the very nature of good and evil.
I watched The Dark Knight when it first came out and felt it was the first comic book movie to transcend the genre. Joker is now the second. While the latter really functions as a drama about mental illness, the former is basically an classic crime movie, right up there with Chinatown. Yet very different from that and from other heralded crime movies like L.A. Confidential and Heat. Much more existential, and while I feel like I use that word a lot in my posts it’s probably because I love watching movies that make us doubt all we know and get to our most primal feelings.
After watching the movie I learned from my friend Mike that it’s thematically (although not plotwise) an adaptation of the legendary Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke. He was later nice enough to give me his copy (thanks Mike!) and I read it. Although the story is very different and much shorter in The Killing Joke, the main purpose is still The Joker testing out his hypothesis that one bad day is all it takes to turn a supposedly good person evil.
That story is told so ambitiously in The Dark Knight and every detail is perfect. Of course Heath Ledger was the talk of the town at the time of the film’s release, not just for his incredible performance but for the mystique surrounding the fact that he had died of a drug overdose earlier that year and people attributed it to how much his Method acting as The Joker messed with his psyche.* Ledger won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, although I think it was largely a sympathy vote because to this day no other comic book movie actor has even been nominated for an Oscar.
As far as another such actor who also deserved a nomination, we needn’t look further than The Dark Knight itself. I was pulling for Ledger to get the award yet had hoped he would at least be nominated alongside his costar Aaron Eckhart as Gotham’s ‘White Knight” Harvey Dent. Meanwhile, Christian Bale further showed us why a former child star best known for the offbeat American Psycho as an adult ended up with the role of his career. Out of all the Batmans ever on screen there’s simply Bale and the rest. Sorry Mr. Keaton.
Other cast members shine excellently as well. Morgan Freeman has largely been a parody of himself post-Shawshank but brings gravitas here to the role of inventor Lucius Fox. Michael Caine takes Alfred beyond the role of simply Batman’s butler/caretaker into one having to carry a heartbreaking emotional load for him. Best of all, Katie Holmes, who, beautiful or not, showed her acting limitations in Batman Begins (Cillian Murphy blew her off the screen in every scene they had together!) was replaced by the magnificently talented Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel, the love interest of both Bruce and Harvey. Heck the acting is great down to the smallest parts, such as Tiny Lister as the huge African-American prison inmate. This sort of uniform excellence is something I’ve only ever praised in Chinatown itself!
Let’s go beyond the cast and start praising the crew. The bleak, nihilistic look of a city that seems constantly black and dark had been around since Blade Runner (and really popularized with the first Batman) but never looked better than here. Major props to the people in charge of sets and cinematography. The choreography, meanwhile, is astonishing, especially in any scenes involving The Joker or Two-Face. The whole thing is edited together beautifully, without a boring second in its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. Of course it wouldn’t have all been this way without someone like Christopher Nolan at the helm. That guy has never failed us and every time I think about this movie I start to wish that there had been more installments instead of them stopping with a trilogy.
Then again, maybe not. Batman Begins was good but nothing earth-shattering; the MCU has had at least five better movies. The Dark Knight Rises was just strange, as if they decided to completely disregard any sense of reality.
The Dark Knight is truly one-of-a-kind; a movie whose message doesn’t seem to need our external reality. It asks the fundamental question: how good or evil are any of us truly, depending on circumstances?
However you feel about that, this movie addresses the question in a provocative, enthralling way and is also just a fun cinematic masterpiece. The Dark Knight is currently ranked by IMDB users as the fourth greatest film of all time, and while Eckhart and the other living above-the-line talent were shut out of Oscar consideration, the film made history by getting a Writers Guild nomination for the screenplay and by actually leading the Academy to change its rules to allow up to 10 Best Picture nominees, so there would be room for commercial movies!
Bottom Line: If you still don’t know what the hype is about don’t waste another second!
*We shouldn’t ignore the fact that Ledger’s drug use predated The Dark Knight and that at the time of his death he’d moved on to his next film. However, people often prefer a good story to facts. James Dean is someone else who forever immortalized himself by dying young and beautiful, and once when a tour guide was saying that he was known for his reckless ways that lead to his violent death, and sometimes you can still see his ghost driving through Hollywood at dangerously high speeds, I wanted to yell “For f—k’s sake, he died because someone else took an uncontrolled left turn without yielding to him!”
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