Praising The Dark Knight seems almost pointless at this juncture in time. Everyone knows it’s phenomenal and nearly everyone wants to see it as soon as possible. The only thing left to do is discuss just what makes it so phenomenal and why everyone wants to see it so badly.Chief among these reasons is the cunning performance by the late Heath Ledger. As in all his finest work, he embodies his character with such authenticity that it becomes difficult to see the actor at work behind the persona. This is ever more true in the case of the diabolical Joker, a legendary Batman villain of the utmost cruelty. With swatches of clown makeup on his face, greenish tinted hair, and two sweeping scars on either side of his “smile,” The Joker has an appearance that suggests pure insanity and blatant self-disregard. He is also marked in a way that suggests something dark and twisted in his past. The nature of his scars is never fully addressed but throughout the film he tells several disturbing variations on how he received them. While the details are blurry, the importance of them is clear. His twisted psyche has been forged by them and their source and he continues to spread that carnage by marking his victims with that same, disgusting “smile.” In this, his finest performance, Ledger gives every bit the performance you would hope and more. His Joker is sinister yet unnervingly comical. That maniacal laugh is firmly in place. But added to the mythology is an anonymous sense of jaded anarchy. He laughs in the face of death and social order, making him what people living quaint, contented lived fear most. His goal, he says, is just to make life a little bit more “interesting.“ Writer/director Chris Nolan does nothing to really explain The Joker’s origins but simply regards him as a force of nature, unstoppable and incorruptibly evil. The effect is to make Ledger’s every twitch and twinge all the more fascinating. The Joker is an enigma. He begins as such and ends as such. The closest we get to logic is Michael Caine as Batman’s trusted confidant Alfred explaining that “some men just want to watch the world burn.” Ledger also plays his cards very carefully. He could have bandied about the film as a raving, shouting, laughing hyena. It could be that simple. Instead he restrains himself enough to make you want to do nothing more than study his face, peer into his eyes, and figure out the mystery of mankind’s greatest evil. The carnage he inflicts, by far the most in any Batman film, makes you only more obsessed with his mysteries. Much like Javier Bardem’s stoic Anton Chigurh in last year’s Oscar winning No Country for Old Men he functions in the film as a symbol of the modern world’s ruthless, soulless, and dishonorable nature. Our mayhem has begotten a monster and Batman is the hero at the gate being forced to defend out perimeters.
And it really is that epic a story. Crisscrossing plots about Hong Kong money schemes, RICO cases, and the wildcard Joker make for a time crusher of a film. It could be argued that trimming it would have aided it spectacularly in terms of endurance and appeal. I could even agree with that. But it plays out something like a tapestry of stories and themes, woven very carefully. I worry that removing just one stitch in the fabric would ruin its intoxicating effect. The outcome is, of course, that The Dark Knight, is far more than a Batman film or a fan boy’s wet dream. It’s stellar filmmaking on a grand scale, the smartest pop cinema of the decade. The very nature of the “hero” as we expect it in fiction is questioned in this morally grey feature. Comic book simplicity is washed away in favor of a more grim and dire real world Gotham in which being brave and noble is not a guarantee of good fortune and high praise. In fact, as in life, it almost assures you a more difficult journey. The gap between hero and villain closes with every frame of the film, leading to a chilling and tragic finale that sets up a very rocky road ahead for Gotham’s Dark Knight.
Grade: A
