The Dark Knight

The wife and I saw The Dark Knight yesterday morning and I’m here now to talk a bit about it.

Unlike, say, Iron Man, I didn’t walk out of the theater completely excited.  I knew I liked what I saw but I wasn’t giddy like I was after even Batman Begins.  This made articulating my feelings about the film difficult.  Looking back I think I now know why.

Many people are calling The Dark Knight a great superhero film.  Maybe even the greatest.  But in my ears it sounds like they’re saying, “The Dark Knight is great – for a superhero movie.”  As if the film was king of its own genre and should be happy with that.  And, maybe it should.  But then I realized why I didn’t feel giddy.  I didn’t feel that way because in my heart I didn’t feel I really saw a great superhero movie.  I just saw a plain great movie.

And I think that should be the legacy of The Dark Knight.  It transcended its genre like The Return of the King did for the fantasy movie genre.  They’re each great films, not just great superhero or fantasy films.

It seems obligatory that I should spill some ink on Heath Ledger’s performance.  What can I say that hasn’t already been said?  How about this:  He didn’t exceed my expectations.  And that’s a good thing.  It’s not that I had the bar set too high.  I just had the wrong set of expectations going into the film.  I was looking for the comic book Joker.  This new Joker is a different monster than even seen in The Killing Joke or The Long Halloween (both books given to Ledger to get an idea of where Nolan wanted to go with the character – books, thankfully, Ledger never read) graphic novels.  Ledger disappears into this role.  He’s nowhere to be seen.  What remains is the embodiment of chaos that delights in tearing down systems just to show how pathetic they really are.  How pathetic we really are.  There is some truth, I think, to that.  Society plays at being civilized but when a little chaos is introduced (think the riots in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina) how quickly do we turn on each other like jackals?

But as much as this film is about the Joker, it’s also about the rise and fall of Harvey Dent.  He’s Gotham’s white knight.  And that is why the Joker needs to destroy him.  Not because he’s scared of Dent, no, but because he needs to show Dent that he’s a hypocrite.  Introduce a little chaos into Dent’s world and watch him fall.

It’s heartbreaking in a way.  Here you have the partnership of Gordon, Dent, and Batman all working together to do what is best for the city and the best of the three (and he is) is torn down.  To paraphrase something a character said in the film, Dent is the hero Gotham needs, Batman is the hero Gotham deserves.

As much as Ledger’s performance is the definitive Joker, Aaron Eckhart is Dent.  Of course, we only have Tommy Lee Jones to compare him to, and Jones wasn’t even Two-Face to say nothing of Dent, but that doesn’t detract from Eckhart’s achievement.  He’s great in this film and I think it’ll do great things for his career.

In the end no one is left untouched by the Joker.  Everyone pays a price and loses something.  The good guys don’t win in this one.  They only succeeded in not losing worse.

What did my wife think of the film?  She didn’t like it.  But she can’t put her finger on why because she liked Batman Begins.  And that concerns her.