Putting the ‘goth’ in Gotham

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This article was published 05/03/2022 (1512 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If the 2019 Batman-adjacent movie The Joker took Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver as its grungy esthetic template, this new Batman movie from director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In) goes equally dark, modelling itself after David Fincher’s Seven, of all things.

As in that take-no-prisoners psycho noir from 1995, an ingenious, morally twisted maniac is targeting citizens of Gotham City for deadly punishments, all the while taunting the police with messages that drive them towards a fateful unmasking.

In this film, the madman happens to be the Riddler (Paul Dano), and the Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman duo are Batman (Robert Pattinson) and Gotham’s last honest detective, James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright). This iteration of Batman tends to play down the high-tech toys of past Caped Crusaders, emphasizing detective work. (One is reminded that at least one of the original bygone Batman publications, recently revived, was called Detective Comics.)

When it comes to solving puzzles, Batman has a more knowledgeable associate in faithful butler Alfred (Andy Serkis), who name-drops his own past in the British Secret Service.

After Gotham City’s mayor and police commissioner are discovered murdered — the movie does avoid Seven’s gruesome specificity to maintain the PG rating — Batman/Bruce Wayne seeks vengeance, seeing the Mayor’s traumatized young son and remembering the oft-documented murder of his own parents, thankfully not presented again here.

His investigation takes him into the posh drug dens of local mobster Oz, a.k.a. the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell), where Batman encounters Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a second-storey sophisticate who likes to don a catsuit and perform acts of burglary in an ongoing effort to serve justice in her own slinky fashion.

One of her targets is Gotham’s principal crime kingpin, Carmine Falcone (John Turturro).

It’s tempting to joke that Robert Pattinson was cast because his experience in the Twilight movies made him an accomplished brooder, but he really is rather enjoyably anguished here.

The true antecedent of his performance is the remote billionaire he played in David Cronenberg’s eccentric limousine-centred 2012 film Cosmopolis. Jettisoning the slick playboy trappings of past iterations, Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne suggests a goth kid who never grew out of the emo-curtained hairstyle of his tortured youth.

It gives his attraction to Selina a weirdly poignant vibe, more so since past Batman/Catwoman dynamics have generally settled for playing up the kinky implications. Kravitz is a correspondingly grounded Catwoman, always landing on her feet.

Also well cast, in a counter-intuitive way, is Dano as the Riddler. Never exactly known for projecting menace, he manages the task here with a gravitas that has never been associated with the character before. (It helps, one guesses, that he is not obliged to wear leotards.)

Director Reeves, who co-scripted with Peter Craig, handles the obligatory action component with great skill, especially notable with a manic, rain-soaked car chase that serves as the film’s pedal-to-the-metal centrepiece. The film’s three-hour running time flies by.

But Reeves has the smarts to read the room, in a wider sociological sense. When all is said and done, he is telling a story of a white billionaire vigilante. Thus, the film pointedly portrays Gotham’s moral landscape with most of the rot coming from the top, uncomfortably so in Wayne’s case.

The good guy/bad guy duality — opposite sides of the same coin — has been done to death in past Batman movies. In this one, suffice it to say, it’s taken to startling heights.

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