The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan. With Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldham, Morgan Freeman, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
152 minutes.
Overlong, extremely ponderous, straining towards artfulness, and irritatingly murky, I (among the few I guess), found filmmaker Christopher Nolan's latest go at the Batman franchise largely disappointing. Despite Nolan's talents, the movie seems to disdain narrative coherency (characters float in and out, scenes buck up short without achieving any dramatic frisson, screwing the lid down tighter seems to be the only impetus for the storytelling arc), but the grisly rawness of the tale make it all arty downer and cutting edge editing. All that is, except for Heath Ledger's virtuosic and exquisitely calculated turn as the Joker. Imbued with a whole extra tone as one of the infamous (and infrequent) cases of a Dead Acting Walking, Ledger, wobbling frantically, caked in white powder, muttering maniacally, manages to steal the movie without veering into hammy grandstanding. His full-blown anarchic spirit sticks in your brain even as the movie dissolves from its own highbrow calculatedness.
