There's an Adolphus Meekus quote that adorned the wall of Francis Ford Coppola's office in the early seventies that goes something like, the best films are made in Hollywood. And once every year, twice if were lucky, Hollywood proves that adage correct. This year, that film is Batman Begins.
Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as that hyperbolic statement might make it seem. Most of the blame for that falls at the feet of the too slow (and yet somehow very quickly paced) opening act. An awful lot of information is crammed into the first twenty minutes of the film but it's just a long parade of scenes in which the scene begins, something important is said and then the scene ends. There's no air in any of these first scenes. I'm sure that was done to make the parts before there's a Batman in the film move as quickly as possible but it seems that this over-editing might have had the opposite effect. Peter Jackson's theatrical cuts of the Lord of the Rings films had the same affliction and, when compared to the longer versions found on the special editions, makes me long for an extended cut of this film.
That aside, there is some very good stuff in this film. The focus on fear, for instance is borderline brilliant. Batman operates on the principle of fear. He is, after all, a man running around in a giant bat suit. If he doesn't scare the shit out of people, he's going to be laughably ineffective. Not coincidentally, that's the same dilemma facing the filmmakers. They have an actor dressed in a bat suit hanging from wires trying to look badass. They have to convince the audience in the same way that Batman has to convince the criminals. And how both parties achieve this effect is by showing the man in the suit as little as possible. Batman hides in the shadows and is, in turn, hidden by Nolan's choice of camera angles. He strikes out quickly, violently and without remorse or compassion and the audience sees these actions in the quickest of flashes. In the action sequences, very few shots last longer than half a second. I don't know if this is the only way Batman could be rendered effectively on film but I do know that this way certainly works.
Back to fear. The main villain of the piece is the Scarecrow. At first this seemed like a terrible idea. Fear toxins and a man in a stupid suit don't, at first, appear to be the most effective villainous elements to legitimize the Batman mythos. But, surprisingly, they are. They make the people of Gotham (and the viewers since they see this world through the eyes of the Gothamites) see the Batman in the same way the bad guys do. It also allows the characters to ruminate on the nature of fear and the ways that fear affects people's behavior without veering too far from the plot (and therefore sounding ridiculous). It's no accident that the film's best sequence features Batman as the predator in a horror film.
Add to this the fact that Nolan and Co. have gotten all the little things right (Gordon and his relationship to Batman, the Bruce Wayne love interest that could never really be, etc.) and you have one fine film that should please fans of Batman both old and new. And that's an incredibly hard task because he is, after all, a guy in a suit hanging from wires.
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