The Dark Knight

Dir. Christopher Nolan
2008
6.9


The problem with retrospective criticism is obvious. A film's value is dynamic. It changes over time based on a number of variables. Of particular interest here is how the quality of the films that follow it in the director's oeuvre might adversely affect an otherwise accomplished feature. For me, no two films better emphasis this dilemma than Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and his follow up, the turgid Inception. Two years ago The Dark Knight so thrilled me that I went to see it in theaters a half dozen times. I fondly remember weeks of infatuation and discussion amongst peers. Since that time, I have tried to embrace an unyielding critical eye that will righteously recognize superficiality; not simply looking past but looking through. I admit that on occasion I have overcompensated. In my youthful attempt to aggressively assert my opinion, I may have treated some films more harshly than they perhaps deserved. I failed to exercise the discretion and rectitude I have come to respect in many of the critics I follow. I am still, it seems, in the anti-navel gazing stage of my development as a film critic.

Which makes reanalysis that much harder. Inception so negatively influenced my opinion of Christopher Nolan that I was persuaded to reevaluate what I loved so much about The Dark Knight. Much of what I initially enjoyed is still present: the orchestration of spectacle, the convincing use of archetypes as mouthpieces for oppositional philosophies, Heath Ledger's still awe inducing performance. What crops up though, which cannot be excused as projection of doubt, are various flaws which detract from the pleasure of analytical examination. Though Nolan, with the assistance of his brother Jonathan, manages to write sophisticated monologues that inform like a college lecture on the fundamentals of philosophy, he largely fails to write many characteristically human interactions. Case in point: Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes strained relationship is certainly not helped by a noteworthy lack of humanity in their conversation. As Bruce Wayne has to constantly conceal his alter ego, so too does Nolan sometimes inexplicably conceal fulness of being beneath an exterior shell of fractured identity. Though we are meant to sympathize with Bruce Wayne, the viewer is often at odds with Wayne's lack of genuinely sympathetic characteristics.

There is also the inevitable complaint about the film's structure and lack of a distinct climax. The film prefers incident over arc to power its narrative. Though, as in Inception, each setpiece heightens the film's overall intensity, the dead air between them tends to suffocate rather than extend the drama. By the end, the hazards of the film's numerous action sequences are fully divorced from the emotional drama that initially propelled them. The intensity is inexhaustible but its impact is deadened by Nolan's decision to make the whole back half of his film a climax (sound familiar?). The irony of the bathetic consequences of such an adrenally influenced decision is somehow base and transcendental. Motivations are expository and relatively clear though not necessarily simplified. Nolan designs a complex polemical web with The Dark Knight and rigorously avoids resolution of ontological dissonances. This lack of resolution is the fundamental characteristic that keeps the film from disappearing into the void of sterile action cinema. It is also the film's most well deserved plaudit.

Nolan should be lauded for taming his wild horse of a film though the fact that he is responsible for its bad behavior slightly diminishes the accomplishment. Though The Dark Knight's conclusion doesn't quite hold water it is nonetheless comforting to see a director willing to put his reputation at risk both intentionally and inadvertently. Throughout the film, Nolan juggles chainsaws and swims with killer sharks; knowing full well that his solipsism may cause him irreparable harm. If anything was evinced by Inception it was that Christopher Nolan has a dangerously high opinion of himself and his films. While that film took fewer risks than The Dark Knight and resulted in a notably smaller pay off, it cemented directorial traits one could have chosen to identify or ignore in The Dark Knight. Interviews with Nolan elicit empirical levels of conceit, misplaced confidence in his base knowledge of the world and stubborn artistic inflexibility. He is amiable but vaguely puerile in his conception of how movies should be made.

A good friend pointed out that Inception is a highly enjoyable movie to watch but does not hold up under close scrutiny. I second this notion. As for the The Dark Knight, it fairs far better but is still best enjoyed viscerally rather than academically. The film captures an insular and microcosmic world that bears more than a slight resemblance to our own. Nolan supplies his film with a largely empathetic populace: confused, naïve to the complexity of the law, bigoted and self-righteous. That so many words are minced in reference to “the people” conveys directorial accordance with the film's assertion about the unnerving lack of facility for the principles of democracy to effect change. For a film so enthusiastically involved with diametrically opposing pairs, it is disheartening that this conclusion exists without opposition. Inception left me with little hope that Nolan fully appreciates or even recognizes this subtextual insinuation. In the end we are left to wonder if the reason why Inception was such a bloody mess was because Christopher Nolan amputated himself in some indelible way with The Dark Knight.

Inception

This review was originally published here on Tiny Mix Tapes

Dir. Christopher Nolan
2010
2.5


Since seeing Christopher Nolan's Inception for the first time more than two weeks ago I have cycled through a series of feelings from glossy eyed amazement to utter contempt to cool irony and finally plain disappointment. I've settled on disappointment because I think it is the most judicial of all emotions one could possibly feel about a film like Inception and its director Christopher Nolan. Nolan came from a modest, innovative background in the early years of this past decade and has built steadily toward envelope-pushing studio productions. His films are enjoyable and thought provoking due to their characteristic combination of confident spectacle and earnest intelligence. They are introverted and textually interact almost exclusively with themselves although they are capable of being read widely. Up until now, Nolan has seemed uninterested in his place amongst heavy hitting filmmakers. Unexpectedly, it is pretense and a cocksure attitude about the ideological content of big budget blockbusters that causes Inception to feel disingenuous and insecure. Those same characteristics are also utilized to dismiss contemporary Hollywood cinema as vapid and insincere. Ironically, this pretentious attitude is the reason Inception has risen to levels of extreme, undeserved recognition amongst viewers and critics.

Inception represents the zeitgeist of popular American cinema. So saturated by dainty romantic comedies, predictable slasher reboots and disingenuous, market driven sequels even a humble version of Inception's high concept psychological thriller could have attracted a wealth of attention. However, modesty is not the strong suit of summer blockbusters. Inception is no exception with immodesty becoming the genesis of innumerable gestures that cause the film to be both absurdly entertaining and gratingly insufferable. At every step the film overcompensates as best exemplified by the relentlessly brooding score that places a dramatic emphasis on even the most stale bites of dialog as if to suggest that every miniscule detail is of the utmost importance. Bloated and self-congratulatory, Inception eventually becomes unwieldy and ends as an absolute mess. Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight, was also something of a mess, albeit a mostly endearing one. That film opted for noir polemics over, say, the dialectics of Westerns or as the Joker said best “an unstoppable force colliding with an immovable object.” The effect was undeniably disabling. While not everyone appreciated the choice, Nolan took a big risk that delivered in the form of one of the most talked about films of 2008.

With Inception, Nolan largely abandons his history of challenging polemics in favor of a manipulative and highly unethical cinema of distraction. After an expository opening half burdened by malnourished jargon and an obligatory chase sequence, the film succumbs to trope after action film trope, dismembering and condensing three genre films into one. The back half of the film is a four-tiered reverse-heist complete with kidnapping, car chase, Matrix-esque zero gravity fight scenes and vintage 007 extreme sport killing sprees. Not surprisingly, this initially thrilling setpiece so lacks self-restraint that it eventually becomes inane. Nolan gets so caught up in his action film purism and the complexity of his interrelated mechanisms that his screenplay falls into film limbo; drama and action drifting around purposelessly. I suppose one could sardonically praise Nolan for designing a film that adheres to self-made dream logic.

What Nolan should not be praised for, however, is designing a consistent or meaningful film. While the film's action is occasionally engaging the actors who take part in it are almost entirely vacant. Nolan's characters lack any kind of depth. Even Dominic Cobb (Dicaprio), who receives most of the screenplays enervated emotional energy, is an archetype of very plain proportions. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Arthur is a snoozy stiff. The capacity of Ellen Page's Ariadne to perceive the very obvious signs of Cobb's psychological damage seems to indicate that on some level Nolan realizes that his characters are flimsy and uninteresting. This is all pretty predictable fair from Nolan. He seems to relish using actors who can't fulfill the basic needs of their characters. With the exception of Marion Cotillard as the underdeveloped but still deeply disturbing vision of Cobb's deceased wife Mal, the remainder of the characters are more Bruce Wayne and Rachel Dawes than Joker or Leonard Shelby. Noteworthy is Wally Pfister's cinematography which is even better than it was in The Dark Knight. Here he gives action sequences room to breathe and deftly captures Inception's surrealist universe. Its just too bad Nolan's subconscious didn't populate this cinematic dream world with less clunky projections.

Pauline Kael once said of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (both the film and its director have likely been of some great influence on Christopher Nolan) "If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they've put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art." Though ripe for commentary and conversation, Inception is a deeply flawed film. Shooting to be mind blowingly great, it ends up just OK. Not nearly as audacious as folks have made it out to be, Inception is the kind of self-important art that preys on the insecurities of its patrons. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised as Nolan takes his film's psychological premise to its most literal extreme, doing to his audience exactly what Cobb and his gang do to poor Robert Fischer: implant a simple idea in the most elaborate and lavish way possible. Nolan's simple idea? That Inception is a film worth getting excited over and believing in. That idea has taken hold amongst many but remains, just as in the film, an immoral coercion of our emotions and ego.