Eventual Gander: Batman Begins

Batman is what every Republican aspires to be. Born into wealth, but he earned it himself. His arsenal of expensive toys and gadgets (serviced by his Manservant, Alfred) is only effective when coupled with his merit. He drives an SUV, and he actually needs it! Bruce Wayne is fabulously wealth *and* helps the public, better than if his income were turned into taxes to support the corrupt government of Gotham.

And that's not to say the new movie Batman Begins is bad. Or good. It is good, excellent, even. It manages to introduce these issues of helping society without passing judgment on any but the most extreme alternatives. Perhaps this is the point of supervillains: never do Democrats and Republicans seem most aligned than when being killed in mass numbers by a poison gas.

Christian Bale's acting is as troubled as it needs to be, but not anguished to the point of melodrama. He holds himself as, during different points in the movie, a bon vivante, a dorky Princeton flunk-out, a Man-in-Black, a ninja (!!!), and lover. Michael Caine's Alfred is alternately helpful, challenging, witty, and inspiring. Morgan Freeman and Liam Neeson surprised me by being in this movie. Katie Holmes, for a moment, made me not want to smack her for being engaged to Tom Cruise and this close to choosing Scientology.

There are a few minutes of comic book hokieness. Characters look at each other with horrified looks and slowly piece together the conundrum they're in and that we've recognized they're in for the past 5 minutes. The plot is summarized, the bad guys are pawns of badder guys. But overall, this is a superhero of the Oughts, as opposed to the 80's. Christopher Reeves's Superman was challenged by kryptonite and beams. Tobey Maguire's Spiderman, the first in this new era, was appropriately emo. We get the feeling that if his girlfriend (Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane) died, he would be more hurt not by her loss, but having been responsible for her loss. Pixar's The Incredibles grappled with their own humanity even as they were animated. Batman, we learn in this movie for the first time on the big screen (after 4 predecessors that ranged from watchable to featuring George Clooney's nipples), is the product of immense loss.

The directing is peccable, but quite good. My colleague, Manohla Dargis, has criticized the action shots for not being followable enough. But this is the point. The Bourne Identity did a great job of creating fight scenes where we felt like we understood what was going through Jason Bourne's head as he created convoluted fights that knocked down soldiers. He was a machine. Batman is a man. He uses fear, he uses darkness. If we were to see what he was doing in full, we would not be experiencing in even the slightest the emotional impact of his fighting.

But the focus of this movie is the script. It uses standard tricks of the summer movie. Laughs come when you expect them, for the most part. But it adds something more. Scenes that follow idioms also have deeper meanings. The first occurrence of a repeated phrase is not the most appropriate, but the least. It is later, as our knowledge of the world expands, so do our understandings of its utterances. And, in a surprisingly profound finale, Batman Begins teaches us that sometimes we have to rip down the creations of our Fathers to maintain their legacies.

(this review is in a series of reviews that consider not only the art in question, but previous thoughts about it. See also reviews of Tom Wolfe's new novel or The Finer Point of Sausage Dogs, )