The Joker's On You
I managed to get my hands on an early treatment for Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s The Dark Knight. It, predictably enough, sets up the hero in the opening scene. Soon enough the villain makes his appearance, communicated in the pre-production notes as “Enter the Joker (looking like death warmed up).” Heath Ledger — being the first class actor he was — took that direction a bit too literally. Needless to say, art imitates life and The Dark Knight doesn’t end well for the Joker.
     Like most movie goers, I’ve lost count of the number of Batman franchise installments we've seen since Michael Keaton, then Val Kilmer, George Clooney and now Christian Bale, took on the guise of the caped crusader.
     This latest installment is called The Dark Knight presumably because one of its themes was exploring the darker side of the Batman character. I must say Bale wasn’t overly convincing in such a portrayal; and I blame director Christopher Nolan for failing to extract from Bale the dark side that his mother and sister are able to tap into at will.
     Then again, perhaps Nolan’s casting of Christian Bale as the foil to, the maniacally crooked clown, The Joker was simply an inspired choice. You see, Bale’s mother (yes the one who had him arrested for abuse just after the film premiered) was, once upon a time, a circus clown!
     Still, it’s not fair to single out Nolan’s inability to extract Bale’s truly dark side, when there’s so many other things wrong with The Dark Knight, for which he deserves blame. Firstly, like Bale, Nolan is British. I don’t mind the Brits at all; but couldn’t they find an American to tell an intrinsically American story?
     In American folklore, the use of Gotham as a descriptor for Manhattan was first used (I’m pretty sure) in 1807 by, essayist and author, Washington Irving (with whom I share a birthday and little else). Irving got the name from an English town whose inhabitants were all reputed to be mad. I don't know, perhaps that’s where the Nolan family came from?
     The question is why did Nolan (and his brother, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay) take a mythical American big city backdrop (Gotham) and use it as a metaphor for what they perceive is wrong with America in the world today? From start to end the film was a non-stop, thinly veiled, commentary on the "War on Terror" and the various diplomatic, judicial, extra-judicial and military remedies for it. Quite frankly I like my film plots like Bin Laden likes his women — heavily veiled! 
     At one point the villains in this flick are even referred to as “terrorists”. It’s a great buzzword for this decade; but hardly what Bob Kane had in mind when he came up with Batman for DC comics in 1939.  
     You’ve got to hand it Nolan: he took a comic book character, who hasn’t worked a day in his entire life; dresses up in a bat costume every other night; fights bumbling villains, who leave enough clues for a CSI school dropout to find them; communicates with the police through a “Bat Searchlight”, that can only work on foggy nights; and (through his Bruce Wayne alter-ego) dates women who are too stupid to recognize him when he’s wearing a cape and a large cod piece? And Nolan thought this to be the perfect vehicle for a commentary on US policy in the post-9/11 era?
     It’s hardly the most star-studded ever Batman cast; but Nolan was able to lure Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman with the kind of incentives that have sparked the attention of many an actor before them — money. There’s a lot I could say about Heath Ledger (but I won’t).
     Aaron Eckhart was very good as the Big Tobacco spin-doctor in Thank You For Smoking and absolutely wooden as the chef in No Reservations. As the Gotham City DA in The Dark Knight he falls (and I mean fall) somewhere in between.  
     As for Christian Bale? I will say this: German director, Werner Herzog extracted a great performance out of him in his 2006 film Rescue Dawn. If there’s to be another Batman installment and Bale’s in — unless Werner Herzog is directing — I think I’ll bale out.