Movie Review: Batman Begins. WARNING: LONG

I don't know if it was just my feeling that all the recent Tom Cruise shenanigans smacked of desperate self-promotion, or what, but I really wasn’t expecting all that much from Batman Begins. In the event, however, Katie Holmes notwithstanding, it was one of the better comic book movies I’ve seen, on a par with the Spiderman and X-Men franchises.

Unlike the Marvel-based movies, however, Batman Begins provided a lot of fodder for my inner American Studies dork. To begin with, it felt an awful lot like it had been made by someone who fell asleep in 1934 and woke up in 2004, pausing only long enough to brush up on filmmaking technology and advances in weaponry, but remaining uninformed of and untouched by the history or anxieties of the intervening 70 years. At its heart, this origin story might as well have unspooled in the daily boxes of a long-gone comic strip. The menacing mob boss at the heart of Gotham's moral decay is more pragmatic than depraved, an Al Capone type who'd be eaten alive by the more modern noir criminals of Sin City. The Mongolian/Himalayan training sequences, though less rife with thoroughly horrifying racial stereotypes than they would have been in 1930, are at their heart part and parcel of the Orientalist fantasies of the dying Imperial age, when there were still corners of the earth no “civilized" man (we won't mention the women) had trod, and anyone might find Shangri-La... or, given world and time enough, build a Secret Mountainside Assassin Training Lodge on a glacier, of course. The placidly asserted moral and parental superiority of young Bruce Wayne's multi-billionaire father, who selflessly pours all his resources into building an architecturally stunning Art Deco elevated train system in an attempt to lift his fellow Gothamites' spirits in the midst of a depression AND tends to his young son’s hurts and fears in a caring but stoic fashion, puts him somewhere beyond Daddy Warbucks in some Saintly Rich Guy Pantheon that Andrew Carnegie can only grumble at from his position in purgatory. Alfred is a bossy, snarky amalgam of Jeeves, Bunter, and Mary Poppins, dedicated to making sure his young "master” doesn't destroy himself or the family name.

This is perhaps the most curious part of this movie: despite its dealing with a fundamentally American icon, and allowing only Liam Neeson (and a few pan-Asian lackeys) to speak in a non-American idiom, the movie feels essentially British in many ways. Not just British, but dying-Empire British, with an emphasis on the duties and responsibilities of the upper classes toward their social (if not, this time, racial) inferiors and to their own legacies. Bruce's flight from the confines of Princeton toward the wastes of China makes perfect sense in the tradition of Burton and Shackleton (or, hell, Prince Hal, for that matter). Stately Wayne Manor (no one actually calls it this, more’s the pity) is an ancestral pile of the sort that just doesn't spring from the earth on shores this side of the Atlantic, never mind the claims that it sheltered "six generations" of Waynes. It is suggested that Wayne Enterprises’ foray into the fields of military research is in some way a betrayal of a proud familial legacy (which, of course, begs the question of exactly what they did to originally amass all those billions, because there are few, if any, fortunes of that sort acquired without depredations of some kind, particularly if they predate the internet). Even Bruce’s assumption of the Batman mantle is framed not as an exercise in old-fashioned American vigilantism (he does try that, and fails), but as a noble obligation to a crusade. He's as much idealized Edward the Black Prince as he is modern superhero, chastely maintaining his love for the girl whose token he (eventually) bears.

I'm very far from the biggest Batman geek out there, but I don’t think the "Dark Knight" moniker has ever felt quite so appropriate. It's interesting, because there is a very specific recurrent boy-meets-girl boy-loses-girl-because-boy-likes-violence boy-gets-girl-back-because-girl-realizes-violence-is-necessary-and-boy-is-The-Last-Good-Man plot in American pop culture that justifies violence in general and vigilantism in particular through the approval (and, usually, sexual passion) of wealthy and/or upper-middle-class "civilized" women (see The Virginian or The Clansman, though you're forgiven for not wanting to). I thought toward the beginning of the movie that it would adhere to that plot, but it doesn't quite. Bruce’s beloved approves of Batman as a crusader, and seems to come to see him as somehow above the law (like a king) rather than merely outside it, as he would have been as a common vigilante. Despite this, she declares that she can't be with him, as he has "left Bruce Wayne somewhere out there” in his quest to become Batman. While I'm certainly not going to object to the lack of twooo wuuuv here, it’s hard not to feel like part of her discomfort is that she will always be the housekeeper's daughter, and this is a movie, above all, about people who Know Their Place (and/or Duty).

Indeed, the villains in the movie seem to be successful in their goals based primarily on how worthy an opponent they are to "Gotham's prince." The (nouveau riche and uncouth) mob boss is easily and handily dispatched. Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow, a genuinely disturbed and disturbing psychiatrist, is harder to evade, and has better laid plans. Like Peter O'Toole's, Murphy’s uncommon prettiness can seem simultaneously aristocratic, deranged and otherworldly. I've always thought that O’Toole's eyes, even in his lightest, "straightest,” roles, conveyed a sense of having spent a bit too much time under the hill drinking mead with proud Titania, and Murphy has that quality here. If there is a whiff of twenty-first century post-terrorist menace to be found in this movie, it’s in the Scarecrow's happy embrace of violent psychoactive drugs. He's willing to watch a city rip itself to pieces to satisfy his own clinical curiosity, but ultimately lacks both a true commitment to a cause and the resources to carry out his experiments independently. The true villain of the movie is Ra's Al Ghul, who seems to have been vaguely Arab or Middle Eastern in the comic books, but here is ostensibly Japanese. He is seen as Batman's flip side, another aristocrat, but one who understands that society must be destroyed to save it from itself. Somehow, this comes across as more misguidedly Neitzschean than twentieth century genocidal, and the battles between those men are seen as duels of a certain kind of honor between equals.

All of which may or may not be intentional, but doesn't distract from the movie’s clear goals: to present a Batman who is both psychologically and morally "realistic” or at least comprehensible, and a world where such a being is merely improbable, rather than totally ridiculous. Depending on one's feelings about the plausibility of cloistered evil superninjas, it more or less succeeds on all counts, from the batarangs to the Batmobile. And, of course, the actors are fantastic... it's unfair to complain about Katie Holmes when she's being held up for comparison to the likes of Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman (underplaying the eventual Commissioner Gordon so well he was nearly unrecognizable) and Michael Caine.

The movie's ending makes clear that Warner's would like this to be the start of a new franchise, and it definitely deserves to be. I would hope, however, that next time they add a bit of the erotic to Batman's tortured psyche and give him a love interest worthy of this endeavor. That means someone needs to hire Angelina Jolie to play Selina Kyle/Catwoman right now. Because as acceptable as Michelle Pfeiffer managed to be, Catwoman is supposed to be both brunette and mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Angelina ain't getting any younger, and I don’t think there's ever been an actress more suited to prowling around in bias-cut satin wielding whips as weapons and toys. C'mon, guys... you know you want to.