Peter Hodges

The Dark Knight is the best movie of the summer.

I went in expecting it to be a bit of a letdown given the sheer amount of hype surrounding the film. After reading countless reviews about Heath Ledger’s brilliance and the the quality of the movie, I felt that too many in the entertainment business were paying posthumous homage to a departed actor.

I was wrong.

Forget Jack Nicholson. Forget Tim Burton. Forget Michael Keaton. This iteration of the Batman story is vital, realistic, and visceral. The action, the acting, and the struggles in the film hit you at a level below the conscious. In the course of the movie, viewers are forced to contend with many of the social issues of today. The film doesn’t shy away from them, instead preferring to confront them head on. Remarkably, they arrive at an answer that I not only agreed with, but also found compelling.

The Joker embodies the ultimate agent of chaos. When literally confronted with a pile of money, he remarks to a group of mobsters that he’d rather have dynamite and gasoline. That says everything about his personality. He’s not interested in material wealth. He’s playing the game for the sake of it. He doesn’t want to ultimately win, and he doesn’t necessarily want to lose. He just wants to keep playing as long as he can.

Harvey Dent, the district attorney of Gotham, provides a memorable subplot as the eventual Two Face. First characterized as Gotham’s “White Knight” (an obvious foil to Bruce Wayne’s “Dark Knight”), he uses both Lieutenant Gordon and Batman to drive his fight against crime to nearly the end. It is his purity of character and the nature of his crusade that ultimate makes him attractive to the Joker. The Joker doesn’t want to discredit him so that crime can flourish in Gotham again, he wants to discredit him because he is the embodiment of Gotham’s best virtues. Dent has succeeded in being the hero that Bruce Wayne can only dream about becoming. He works in the open using the system, and has met a large degree of success.

As anyone familiar with Batman knows, Dent’s eventual transformation to Two Face is inevitable. The events that drive him to it are rooted firmly in pop psychology, but the bit about flipping a coin to determine fate was a little overdone in a movie that lacked traditional gimmickry. It felt slightly out of place given the larger scope of the story, but I can forgive Director Christopher Nolan for throwing this bone to the legions of loyal “purists.” The results of his transformation are gruesome, skirting closely to the edge of an “R” rating. 

If Katie Holmes was miscast as Rachel Dawes, then Maggie Gyllenhall isn’t much better. She seems more confident and less girl-next-door. She wears a sort of sultry sensuality under her good girl exterior (which Katie Holmes lacked), but she still isn’t believable as a crusading assistant district attorney. Her role is sorely under-utilized in the movie, but with a running time of two and a half hours and several large action set pieces, perhaps the writers can be forgiven for not developing her character further.

The ending is bittersweet, but Batman has always struggled with the cost of being the symbol of justice for Gotham City. There is a nice set up for the sequel in the last ten minutes of the movie. My speculation is that the next movie might prove to be even darker and more grim than this one.

The comic book or superhero genres are typically rife with unbelievable acts that rarely have real-world consequences. The Dark Knight has elevated itself above genre conventions and firmly into the role of serious drama. At no single point did the dreaded “Oh, come on!” escape my lips. Whether this is a testament to Nolan’s skill as a filmmaker or my own infatuation with the story and characters will have to wait on a second viewing.