FILM
REVUE // BAT FILM
Rises and falls
Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy capper isn't without its flaws Now playing The Dark Knight Rises Directed by Christopher Nolan
Nana-nana-nana-nana ...
C
hristopher Nolan's best films are heady stuff. They've been dingily claustrophobic, small-scale noirs about head-games (Memento, Insomnia). Or an old-dream-project-turnedblockbuster (Inception) that seemed to plunge us playfully into the writerdirector's head, enfolding us in Russiannesting-dolls of plot and character motivation. Nolan's Batman movies have never, to my mind, been as strong, because its mega-budget marriage of comic-book noir and super-hero blockbuster has often lacked a sense of play and been overwhelmed by the need-to-be-a-big-deal. This sense of serious epicness has sometimes slowed down the series' plot machinations and dulled its dourly mythic main character. The trilogy's finale, The Dark Knight Rises, can't surmount these problems, either. The movie's generally weighed down by the double weights of portentousness and momentousness. Grand dilemmas and great darknesses are always a-coming. (BAT-SIGNAL—SPOILERS AHEAD) Here, Bruce Wayne's crime-fighting alter ego returns not
once, but twice, his new nemesis Bane's crime capers get super-bigger and super-bolder (a mid-air kidnapping; the daylight robbery of Gotham's Stock Exchange; a neutron-bomb hijacking), and the Wayne manor millonaire must contend with at least four foes (including the side-switching Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman), no cartilage in his legs, a broken back and personal bankruptcy. All of this is stretched out over 160 minutes, true, but for much of it our hero isn't even around (when we begin, the caped crusader's in self-imposed retirement after taking the blame for two-faced Harvey Dent's death). Into the shadowy void step Tom Hardy and Anne Hathaway. The trilogy's often been more memorable for its villains, not Christian Bale's titular hero, and so it proves again here. Hardy, bulking Bane into a dead-calm terrorist of brute force, his gravelly, Hannibal Lecter-like voice crawling out through his odd mask, easily and memorably out-rasps Batman. And Hathaway offers a few touching glimpses of her cat-burglar's desperation and self-preservation. The final act, too, throws in a cleverly veiled twist that marks The Dark Knight Rises as a better trilogy-capper
than a movie in its own right. There's just the right balance of wind-down and (inevitable) set-up for future flicks, with elements from the first film sprinkled smartly into the mix. The overall story remains a bit muddled, though. (And there are no great visual flourishes or outstanding action sequences—the best is the smallest, in a grotty little bar.) There's some dancing briefly around questions of hope, trust and people's power, to little effect. And the twin echoes of Manhattan-recovering-from-9/11 and the 2008 economic-crash don't really harmonize. Bane pretends to be for the people, but of course his anarchy is just warlord-opportunism; the movie itself, though, never really offers a sense of the people as Gothamites, either, just a few individuals who are heroic, lawand-order-keepers (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as constant-trooper Officer Blake). The movie's near-fascist celebration of Batman's high-tech military hardware only adds to this cynicism—it's a few all-too-powerful men and women, and their toys, who oppress us or can save us. All "we the people" can do is sit back and watch, hopeful but helpless. BRIAN GIBSON
// BRIAN@VUEWEEKLY.COM
REVUE // CRONENBERG
Cosmopolis Fri, Jul 27 – Thu, Aug 2 Directed by David Cronenberg Metro Cinema at the Garneau
A
young man drifts through Manhattan in a very long, white, soundproof, touch-screen-lined limousine, seemingly outfitted for every event save atomic holocaust. He's not going to office today, and why would he? The limo is everything. It's his chamber of meditation, chamber of sexual transaction, chamber of commerce. He takes meetings in it. He drinks, pisses, gets his prostate checked in it. He watches the yuan plunge in it. He gets some stern financial advice from trusted colleagues in it—advice he does not take. He just wants a haircut. His name is Eric Packer. He's handsome, powerful, a self-made billionaire, within the one percent of the one percent, Jay Gatsby-meets-Mark Zuckerberg, and over the course of Cosmopolis he's going to let it all go, the money, the car, the marriage to a pretty poet, even the hair. An angry, violent mob fills the streets outside, throwing rats and pro-
testing the failures of capitalism. But there's only one man amongst them who can touch Eric, one man who constitutes his dumpy double, his sloppy shadow. He's waiting for Eric and he's got a gun, and Eric seems to be slowly moving right to him, into the heart of darkness. Directed and faithfully adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel by David Cronenberg, Cosmopolis is talky, ideariddled, fantastic, at times awkward, at times very funny, mostly quite brilliant. The strength of the novel, far from DeLillo's best, but still crackling with the author's characteristic flashes of insight and condensed lyricism, is the world that passes beyond the tinted windows of Eric's roaming castle. DeLillo writes about crowds, American crowds, New York crowds, with rare powers of evocation. His Cosmopolis is drenched in sense of place. His Eric, on the other hand, feels interesting, but wholly artificial, a collection of ideas sewn together into an executive golem. The thing about Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is that it completely reverses this emphasis. Cronenberg has never been a natural-
Livin' the limo life
ist or documentarian. His best films are ablaze with ingenious artifice—it's his way of getting at truths. Cronenberg's New York is almost laughably unconvincing. It isn't New York; it's a New York state of mind. It's very obviously Toronto. And it isn't even Toronto. Or it's the same Toronto of Videodrome. A meta-place. And an almost palpably dangerous place. It's too easy to dismiss Cosmopolis as preposterous and mannered (the dialogue remains the high modern-
ist, tweaked vernacular of DeLillospeak); you've got to just roll with it. The supporting cast makes this easy: Juliette Binoche, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Giamatti and most especially Samantha Morton absorb DeLillo's cadences with perfect elegance and a cunning sense of how to flush out its sly humour. Even vampire heartthrob Robert Pattison is good as Eric, surprisingly unaffected, a cipher perhaps, but given his character's transformation, his surrender to the existential, perhaps suicidal abyss,
VUEWEEKLY JULY 26 – AUGUST 1, 2012
his deadpan seems appropriate. We need to identify with something blossoming virus-like in his psyche that can only gradually be revealed. He does eventually get that haircut, or anyway half a haircut, in the film's most playful scene, which, not coincidentally, is also the only one with working-class guys in it. But the barber's is the final stop en route to the underworld, where no amount of grooming can save you. JOSEF BRAUN
// JOSEF@VUEWEEKLY.COM
FILM 11