The Greatest Film Of the Last 10 Years: Batman Begins

WARNING!

SPOILERS AHEAD
This blog post is about Batman Begins. It contains many spoilers both for this movie and for others including The Dark Knight.

Ok, so I guess I started this, it was my offhand comment about my choice that started us all on this ‘best film of the last 10 years’ mission. So, in the words of a character not in my choice:
“And here… we… go!”

That strikes me as a fitting place to start. The obvious question must be how one can prefer Batman Begins to it’s much vaunted sequel. Isn’t this that rare example, the sequel that’s better than the original? Doesn’t that preclude the possibility that Batman Begins is the best movie of the past 10 years? In fact it’s a question I was immediately asked by 2 of the most movie literate tweeps I know when I first posted it. Since it is such a perfect place to start, let me come back to it.

PLOT
Since Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan has been recognised as possibly the greatest auteur working today. The principal reason for that? His stories. Consider where he went from here: the Prestige, the Dark Knight, Inception. Every one marked by the intricacy and intelligence of the storylines. Batman Begins is no different – in my opinion it is Nolans best script to date.

Every person walking into the movie knew precisely where it was going to end – Bruce Wayne as Batman. Many of those going in doubtless thought they knew the beats they would go through to get there. To make a story exciting, to hold our interest when we know the end, takes a stroke of genius. And the first step of that was to eschew the blueprint most expected, Frank Miller’s seminal ‘Year One’, and borrow moreso from the overlooked one-shot ‘The Man Who Falls’.

The plot works like a beautiful timepiece. Every moment in the film keys together with every other. I have made the comparison with the Oracle’s speech from the original Matrix – the speech which only makes sense once you look back on it, how she tells Neo only what he needed to hear. It is a superb bit of screenwriting. And Batman Begins does it 3 or 4 times overtly, and throughout the film otherwise.
Starting from Thomas Wayne’s lesson to his son “why do we fall”, giving Bruce the strength to persevere despite his early defeats (an interesting nod to Robert the Bruce’s spider, the story which informed the early development of the character in the ’30s).
We then have Bruce’s conversation with Rachel, a discussion on the nature of justice and the reason why he will later demonstrate such a determination not to become an executioner – “Your father would be ashamed of you”
Then the big one – the meeting with Falcone. Every line in this scene informs Bruce Wayne’s next move: “That’s power you can’t buy. The power of fear” “You always fear what you don’t understand” “You’d have to go a thousand miles to meet someone who doesn’t know your name” “You haven’t thought about your ladyfriend… You haven’t thought about your old butler”. For my money this scene is one of the best written in any movie.
It is this intricacy and brilliance that marks out Nolan’s writing as some of the sharpest and cleverest in Hollywood today. You can see how an ordinary man goes from the distraught child on the pavement to the superhero who soars past the camera in the final scene – you can see each and every step he takes along that path and why he takes them. And it is that genius storytelling that allows Nolan’s Batman to live in the real world – it is far more than art direction or production design.

The risk is that the movie becomes a plod from cause to effect; leaden and predictable. Nolan counters this by employing one of his trademark moves – non-linear storytelling. It takes real directorial guts to structure a summer blockbuster comic-book movie as if it’s an art house pic or – God forbid – a ‘thinking’ film! But this is the man who wrote and shot Memento backwards. And he treats his audience with respect and intelligence, and the movie is so much the better for it.

CHARACTERS
Nolan is far from the first to want to make a superhero movie in the real world – that goes all the way back to Richard Donner’s Superman (remember being told that you’d believe a man can fly?). But nobody does it better than Nolan. And a good part of that is by filling his world with characters rather than charicatures. No matter how small the role each of Nolan’s characters comes across as a rounded human being. A big part of that is the incredible ensemble cast – on which more later – but it comes down also to the writing.

Of all the arch-enemy evil villains, surely none is as sympathetic as Liam Neeson’s Ra’s Al Ghul. What was also one of the best twists ever doubtless helps that, that we get to know him as the wise, Qui-Gon Jinn like Ducard before his true nature is revealed. But with typical dramatic efficiency, by giving him moments such as the story by the campfire, “once I had a wife, my great love” Nolan not only shows us where Bruce’s quest could so easily lead, but at the same time gives us genuine reason to feel for this villain, makes him a genuine, wounded, flawed human being.

Alfred, in the comics, is a deadpan Jeeves clone, and as such is outdated and stiff. Instead Nolan gives us Michael Caine, who plays Alfred with genuine heart and emotion, true affection for Bruce.

Lucius Fox, in the comics, is the armorer for Batman, the Q to his Bond, and yet never seems to twig what Bruce Wayne is up to. It’s the Lois Lane ‘glasses on / glasses off’ moment. And yet this is supposed to be a brilliant scientist and later businessman. Nolan squares this circle with style – Fox’s deadpan delivery of every awkward question becomes a high point of the film, not the embarrassment it could so easily have been. “Are you expecting to run into much gunfire in these caves?” “Planning on gassing yourself again Mr Wayne?”

But it is not just the principal players – every character has this level of detail thrown in, and it is done with such a lightness of touch as to be almost invisible. Consider Falcone and Crane discussing drugs shipments over drinks. In one beat Nolan tells us something about both of these people:
CRANE: “There’s a girl at the DA’s office…”
FALCONE: “We’ll pay her off”
CRANE: “Not this one”
FALCONE: “An idealist? Well.. There’s an answer to that too…”
CRANE: “I don’t want to know”
FALCONE: “Yes you do”
In 2 lines we have both men, both important characters for the plot, laid out for us. That Crane is not just the corrupt psychiatrist he pretends to be, that he has a much darker secret he wants to hide. And that Falcone is not just a mob boss, that he knows people, how they work and where their buttons are. This is a level of character development most writers would give their eye teeth to be able to bring to their main protagonist over the course of a movie. Nolan does it in 2 lines.

Consider Flass. A nothing character, but in the hands of Christopher Nolan we get another fully rounded human being. We see he has a sense of humour (his quips at the docks, the “they don’t like falafel?” scene), we see his cowardice and his selfishness in the narrows. Nolan, again assisted by the superb and underrated Mark Boone jr, creates a character we can both laugh with and dislike without descending into parody.

PERFORMANCES
Christian Bale gives what is for me the performance of his life as Bruce Wayne. He plays the role from the ground up, you can see the childish impetuous Bruce, consumed by his own pain, during the courtroom / docks flashback, but then you see the same notes in the damaged young man in the Chinese prison. Without needing to express it, purely through performance you can see his need for a father, his latching on to Ducard to fill that role, then the disbelief when his new father turns on the memory of his actual father. Playing the role required three different personae, and Bale provides them all. The wounded young man, afraid of his own anger but desperate to pursue justice; the playboy he pretends to be for the outside world, and the animalistic Batman, the embodiment of Bruce’s suppressed rage.

Similarly it is difficult to imagine anyone but Liam Neeson being both wise mentor and mass murdering zealot in the same character. His Ra’s Al Ghul is for my money the best realised comic book villain yet to hit the screen – and that includes Heath Ledger’s Joker. It is a role which required subtlety, authority and steely calm. And Neeson delivers in spades.

But then work down through the cast – with the exception of Katie Holmes (even she doesn’t offend me as much as she does some people) there is not a bum performance among them, and many of these actors are in roles they might normally consider beneath them. And this again comes down to the guts of the director.
I have a minor part, limited screen time, couple of lines. Who else would think Morgan Freeman?
Lieutenant Gordon? Gary Oldman. Again a casting choice which pays off – can you imagine a lesser actor in the scene in his office “Now we’re two”? Oldman shows us a real, ordinary man, confronted in the dark by an unknown assailant. The fear is almost palpable.
The cast list reads like a who’s who of acting talent. Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer, Ken Watanabe, Linus Roache. Each given sufficient room to let their characters breathe, each giving memorable performances with well crafted material.

PRODUCTION DESIGN
Given the brief, the design of the film is a thing of wonder. By comparison with The Dark knight of course it may still seem that this is a fantasy Gotham, with its 3 level monorails and its overcrowded slums. But I prefer this vision, Gotham is supposed to be a city on the brink, in need of saving, and there is nothing here that you won’t find in the real world. That the narrows were based on the slums of Kowloon is well known. Each element that makes up the Batman we know is explained, again with laser precision and efficiency. And that is reflected in the design of the film. In that way this movie benefits from Nolan’s complete hands-on approach, designing the city and the vehicles in his garage whilst working on the script. It’s like an Apple computer – it fits together perfectly because that’s how it is designed, all guided by one man.

MUSIC
The final piece I think goes into this masterpiece is the score. James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer crafted a virtuoso score of atmospheric tones, ominous notes, without the need for a single theme or for leitmotifs, and it works perfectly for the movie. You may not come out of the cinema humming the tune, but it informs the mood of the film without ever becoming intrusive or overpowering the story.

CONCLUSION
In all, what makes this my choice for the best film of the past 10 years is the way that everything works together. The performances enhancing the script, the plot running so perfectly, efficiently and logically, the mood being set by the production design and enhanced by the score.

But then there is The Dark Knight. How can I prefer the original, great though it may be, to the sequel that set the world on fire?

To my mind these are two different movies. Batman Begins is Nolan’s superhero movie, to be considered alongside the Spidermans, Supermans, Blades or Hellboys. The Dark Knight is his crime drama, it has more in common with Goodfellas, the Godfather or Heat than with X-Men.

I agree that The Dark Knight has an ace up its sleeve, Ledger’s Joker is a revelation and richly deserved the Oscar (and as someone said, makes Jack Nicholson look like a fat guy in a clown suit). It has all the complexity of Batman Begins, it has the same degree of narrative complexity, treating it’s audience with the same degree of respect and intelligence. And in addition to the Joker, Harvey Dent is a superb role which Aaron Eckhart pulls off with aplomb, and additional screen time for Oldman’s Gordon can only ever be a good thing.

But Batman Begins just takes it for me. I am a sucker for a well written origin story, I find it interesting to see how these heroes are made. But the plot in Batman Begins is so neatly done, it moves so smoothly, logically and seamlessly, that I prefer watching this movie to its sequel. It is to my mind the most complete story I have ever seen.