THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

I reviewed this when it was in the theaters, but I had a chance to see it again. The first time around, I made the point that Heath Ledger's performance is extraordinary: frighteningly real and deeply psychotic. I've seen the snake-like tongue before in other performances and I would swear he's stolen the vocal inflection and rhythm from a cartoon I've seen somewhere, but the energy and the animal-like concentration, the joy in performing, and the fact that he just moves in, takes over, and holds down the center of the movie make it a rare treat.

I wish Christian Bale had not reconfigured his larynx in order to come up with Batman's voice. It's a bad actor choice and the director should have stepped in and said "No." Bale sounds like he's trying to recreate Michael Keaton's performance in one of the other, cartoon-like Batman movies. A seriously bad choice. It totally neutralizes anything he has to say by removing inflection and the fact that it sounds phony, since they have to amp up the volume in order for it to be heard removes much of the character's credibility.

Bale does an otherwise very good job of getting out of the way of Heath Ledger. It's difficult to be Batman. Ellen Burstyn, a wonderful actress and good teacher that I watched at the Actor's Studio in New York City, said that the actor's job is to create masks for the character to wear and then at precise moments to let that mask slip so that the audience can see behind it and see the true heart of the character.

Batman is difficult because he is all mask. Bruce Wayne is a mask for Batman. And Batman is a mask. The only moments we might get a chance to see the true self are in the eyes of Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, the two people most loyal to him.

Bale and Christopher Nolan, the director, work fairly hard to edit Bale's performance so that we seldom see him without one of the masks, unless it is in profile, and quickly. He seems to be motivated by his continuing love for and need for love from Rachel, but the only time he comes close to expressing this is with his back to us, as though he were embarrassed by the simplicity of the feeling.

The story is complicated and handles a lot of different layers of guilt and responsibility without ever preaching a specific moral code. In the spectrum of super heroes, Batman is definitely the darkest of the knights, and the one most familiar with corruption of the soul.

They don't spare the rabble, by that I mean we the people and our culture, either. My favorite line is one of the last, as Batman limps away into the darkness; Commissioner Gordon's son turns to him and asks, "Why is he running away?" The answer is simply, "Because, we need to chase him." It's a chicken-and-egg question and the answer here is that we need bogeymen in order to justify our primal urge for violence.