BATMAN RETURNS
With Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, and Andrew Bryniarski.
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One wants to like Batman Returns with a sense of hopeful desperation, much as one wants to believe in Ross Perot or Bill Clinton; one even agrees in advance to feel depressed about the inevitable disillusionment in the hope that it will at least offer a new kind of depression, a fresh form of doom. Indeed, some reviewers have been praising Batman Returns for having the prescience to depict a three-way mayoral race in Gotham City, as if this were a shrewd anticipation of the current presidential race. It’s always tempting for journalists to treat the chameleon moods of the moment as if they had lasting significance, but I would hazard the guess that the current assumption that Bush won’t be our next president may be as myopic as the belief that Batman Returns will fare even better than Batman at the box office. And if a three-way presidential race is still viable four months from now, it will make the apolitical nihilism of Batman Returns, which strikes me as 80s to the core, appear ridiculously out-of-date rather than up-to-the-minute. Anyway, I seriously question the political savvy of any movie so fascistically tied to the star system that it makes any notion of a general populace appear both obligatory and irrelevant, like sofa stuffing. When the Penguin conspires at one point to destroy all the firstborn in Gotham City–an ambition worthy of a biblical plague–one doesn’t feel the slightest bit disturbed or frightened, because there are no visible signs of humanity in this picture to be destroyed, only empty symbols and faceless extras.
I didn’t mind that Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman was just as inexpressive as in the original, because his two major opponents–Danny DeVito’s Oscar Cobblepot/the Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle/Catwoman–promised to add something extra to the brew. Only at the end did it become obvious that promises are all this movie can offer; development or realization is entirely beyond its grasp. Even if one accepts the only emotions on view, teenage isolation and petulance–and given that the screenplay is by Daniel Waters, who wrote Heathers and cowrote The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Hudson Hawk, one shouldn’t be surprised by such a narrow range–it’s hard to accept them being expressed in the rawest possible state, without even a fictional world worthy of the name to fester in or the possibility of implied emotions that might give them some wider context.
In referring to the “arrested development” of the other characters, I mean only their imaginative inadequacy, not any lack of emotional maturity. As with the three lead characters, the script and direction rather than the actors seem mainly to blame for their thinness. As a suave, though hardly original, villain named after Max Schreck, who played Nosferatu in the 20s, Walken is more than adequate. But when he’s called upon to show some feeling for his son Chip (Andrew Bryniarski), we can’t quite believe it because the script hasn’t prepared us. There’s a bit more fatherly feeling in Alfred (Michael Gough), Bruce Wayne’s aristocratic butler, but the archetypal setup of this relationship–quite similar to the one in Arthur and its sequel–is hardly fresh either. And Pat Hingle’s Commissioner Gordon, Cristi Conaway’s Ice Princess, and Michael Murphy’s mayor are essentially standard types used like props.
