THE OSCARS GET A LOT OF THINGS wrong. But there's one thing the Academy got right this year – not nominating The Dark Knight for best film. It's overrated enough already.
A lot of people may be outraged by this statement, including this paper's film critic Alistair Harkness, who makes exactly the opposite argument on page six. Well, much as I respect Alistair, I beg to differ.
There's no faulting The Dark Knight's
ambition, or its pedigree. It's a visually stunning film, and deserves its nominations for best cinematography and visual effects. It has a great cast at the top of their game, especially Heath Ledger, who deserves his posthumous best supporting actor nod. But best overall film? No.
The problem is this. The Dark Knight, like its hero, has a split personality. It wants to be a serious, grown-up movie about complex moral dilemmas – principally, how those in authority defeat criminals without compromising their own morals. This movie's stylistic reference points are gritty crime classics like The French Connection, not superhero movies. But it is, on top of this, a superhero movie, requiring exciting, credibility-stretching setpieces, and a battle between good and evil.
Each of these movies undermines the other. The story, told with grim-faced seriousness, is preposterous. We are asked to accept that the Joker, with the help of henchmen recruited from a mental asylum, could carry out a mind-bendingly complicated plan involving the murder of a well-guarded judge and police commissioner, two perfectly timed kidnappings (both carried out in his absence), then the apparent police capture of the Joker, along with a henchman and a bomb that will aid his escape. Almost immediately afterwards, amid heightened security, he fills two large boats with bombs – plus a PA! – as well as rigging an entire hospital with explosives before sneaking in unconvincingly disguised as a nurse. Etc. A straight superhero fantasy would just about get away with this. But, like X-Men but more so, this movie's conceit is that it takes place in the Real World, so it just ends up looking silly.
Being set in the Real World, the film also constantly invites us to ask what it is "about". One inescapable answer is that it's about how the Bush regime sacrificed its moral authority in its response to 9/11 (referenced on the film's poster). But that, despite the script's best efforts, is too big a subject for a superhero movie to handle effectively – a point driven home by the clumsy scene in which Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) sees Bruce Wayne hacking into the private phone calls of everyone in Gotham to locate the Joker. "This is wrong," says Fox righteously, a none-too-subtle dig at Bush's Patriot Act. What? Until this point, Fox was quite happy to work for a violent, masked vigilante who breaks international law to abduct a Mob accountant. But the script now requires him to Make A Point.
The Dark Knight does this a lot. Its final minutes feature both a challenging idea – that those we think of as villains can be the most effective heroes – and a pointless Hollywood stand-off which ends (as always in these films) with a fall from a great height, after more speechifying from a man with half his face missing in a ludicrous, comic-book way.
In some respects, The Dark Knight is to be admired for trying to do something thoughtful, radical even, with a populist art form. But in doing so, it can't help expose how ill-equipped that art form is to do anything other than distract us. Watching it, I found myself doing something I've almost never done during a Hollywood movie – wishing it was stupider, so I could just get on with enjoying the spectacle.
Instead, I spent much of this overlong, ponderous film annoyed that a superhero movie is now so many people's idea of an intellectually challenging night at the cinema. Please. It's about a man in a cape.
The full article contains 671 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
