Tim Burton’s Batman is a good, uneven gothic crime fantasy, anchored by Michael Keaton’s troubled stillness. Jack Nicholson gets the louder moments, but the oppressive city and Danny Elfman’s music supply much of the pleasure.
Tim Burton takes the masked crime-fighter seriously without making his surroundings sensible. Batman is a good, uneven fantasy whose oppressive Gotham does a great deal of the storytelling, sometimes because the screenplay has left it little choice. The city looks capable of producing both Michael Keaton’s withdrawn Bruce Wayne and Jack Nicholson’s insistently theatrical Joker, which gives their opposition a conviction the plotting does not always earn. Burton builds much of the film around the contrast between Keaton’s watchfulness and Nicholson’s appetite for an audience.
Anton Furst’s production design makes Gotham oppressive without making it anonymous: its gothic architecture gives the menace a definite shape. Roger Pratt’s cinematography keeps that architecture present in the darkness, allowing the city to remain threatening even when our attention is on the actors. We felt uneasy simply looking at it, because the buildings seem to leave so little room for ordinary life. The density of Furst’s city makes a convincing setting for the film’s violence, and Pratt preserves its strangeness rather than trying to make it look like somewhere familiar.
Keaton gives Wayne an awkwardness that is more interesting than conventional heroic assurance. His reserve suggests a man for whom becoming Batman is a private necessity, and he does not turn every pause into a request that we admire his pain. That makes him worth watching even when Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren’s screenplay gives him too little to work with. The writing supplies too few opportunities for Wayne to become more than a troubled presence, leaving Keaton’s hesitations and watchfulness to suggest what the dialogue has not developed.
Nicholson has no such difficulty making himself the centre of attention, and Burton often lets him stay there longer than the story needs. His Joker’s broad comic manner is entertaining because it does not make the character seem safe; the pleasure he takes in performing becomes unpleasant if we look at it for long enough. Still, each extra flourish makes it harder for anyone else to establish a comparable presence. Kim Basinger’s Vicki Vale suffers particularly from a screenplay that gives her prominence without enough character to justify it.
Ray Lovejoy’s editing does not quite solve that imbalance, and the movement between brooding and performance can make the film feel longer than its 126 minutes. Individual passages have force, but the story sometimes seems to be waiting for its next striking image instead of developing the confrontation already under way. Danny Elfman’s score gives those images urgency, its operatic scale making the hero’s presence feel substantial without requiring Keaton to compete with Nicholson at full volume. The music is especially effective at keeping a sense of seriousness beneath the broad acting.
Within superhero films, Batman makes a persuasive case for allowing a director this much freedom to make the setting strange. Burton’s city does not invite us to check the engineering or the plausibility of every threat, and we are glad of that. The danger remains credible because the setting and the performances agree about how exaggerated everything should be. Even when Nicholson threatens to become the whole attraction, Keaton’s quieter presence gives us someone worth returning to. We recommend it, provided a tightly plotted crime thriller is not what the evening requires.
