The 1989 Batman movie holds up quite well, actually, though I still find the ending sequence weak; Jack Nicholson’s performance as the Joker has always seemed to me to be superb — an excellent example of an actor taking all the most offensive, insufferable characteristics of his style (the grin, the vulpine laugh and the general aura of in-your-face decadence that surrounds him and totally undoes his attempts to play heroes) and using them for a character for which they are totally appropriate (much the way James Mason did in playing a very different type of villain in North by Northwest). — 2/10/96
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What actually happened was that Burton and his writers, Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren (imagine! A superhero movie written by only two people! That would be unthinkable today; Spider-Man: Homecoming had no fewer than eight writers credited, and it looked it) managed to thread the needle, creating a dark, gloomy, Gothic cityscape but also supplying a lot of 1930’s-ish wisecracks for the characters (perhaps the best line is when Jack Nicholson as the Joker sees some of Batman’s tools in action, he says, “Just where does he get such wonderful toys?”) and intermingling images from the late 19th century, the 1920’s, the 1930’s, the 1950’s, the 1970’s and the 1980’s so thoroughly that during the robbery sequence at the Axis Chemical Company (a front for the crooks. led by Jack Palance’s Lee Grissom, that are secretly running Gotham City despite the best efforts of the mayor, the police commissioner and the district attorney to stop them — and naming the factory after the bad guys in World War II is just one of the many allusions that make this script unusually deep and rich for a superhero film) Charles proclaimed it a steampunk movie. A large part of this movie was clearly inspired by both the artistic and commercial sense of Ivan Reitman’s original 1984 Ghostbusters, which likewise took a bunch of comedians and set them loose over a dark, gloomy, Gothic cityscape — thereby making a film in which the comedy seemed even funnier from the contrast. Tim Burton had clearly been inspired big-time by Ghostbusters since his first major film was Beetlejuice, also with Michael Keaton, which flipped the central premise of Ghostbusters — instead of ghosts haunting people it was people haunting ghosts — and for Batman he managed to achieve a superb balance between the overall attitude of gloom and despair in the streets of Gotham City and the bizarre, sometimes campy doings of both Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson, top-billed) in the foreground. Burton was helped by the cinematography of Roger Pratt and by the presence of two major rock musicians in his music department.
One was Danny Elfman, former leader of Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo (a mouthful of a band name later mercifully shortened just to “Oingo Boingo”), who’d already worked for Burton as an orchestral composer on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice and here turned in a masterly score, combining sweeping Korngoldian action themes with deliberately sentimental music (like the romantic “waltz of death” to which the Joker forces Batman’s girlfriend Vicki Vale, played by Kim Basinger, to dance with him) — just about every composer who’s scored a big superhero film has had both Elfman’s work here and John Williams’ scores for the Christopher Reeve Superman movies as models. The other was Prince, who wrote an entire cycle of songs based on the Batman mythos and recorded them as an album, though only a few of them actually made it into the movie (the imdb.com “soundtrack credits” lists five but I only counted three, and one, “Scandalous,” is heard only over the closing credits) — one that isn’t used here, “Batdance,” became a surprising hit even though it was merely an instrumental reworking of Neal Hefti’s famous theme for the 1960’s Batman TV series. (As a result of meeting him on this film, Kim Basinger had a brief affair with Prince which she later said was one of the biggest mistakes of her life.) Another aspect of Batman that distinguishes it from more recent superhero films is that its plot is not only coherent but actually interesting; this is one superhero movie in which we don’t impatiently twiddle our thumbs waiting for the next big action scene. Gotham City is torn between its elected city government — the mayor (Lee Wallace), district attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams, yet another talented actor of color who was ill-used by Hollywood — two movies later in the cycle, in Batman Forever, the character would return but played by Tommy Lee Jones, and though the character was white in the comics it still seemed a retrograde step to take the role away from the excellent Black actor who played him here) and police commissioner James Gordon (Pat Hingle giving a more exasperated, less gentlemanly reading of the character than Neil Hamilton did in the 1960’s on TV), who promise to control the city’s criminal element in time for the scheduled festival commemorating Gotham City’s 200th anniversary; the criminal element, led by Carl Grissom (Jack Palance) until his crazy lieutenant, Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson), survives a setup — a robbery at a chemical plant that was supposed to knock him off by exposing him to lethal chemicals, only instead it turned his skin stark white, froze his face into a permanent grin Batman comics creator Bob Kane admitted he copped from Jack P. Pierce’s makeup for Conrad Veidt in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs — and kills both Grissom and another gang member whom he literally fries to death with a specially rigged joy buzzer. (The image is a quite gross and grisly one, surprisingly so for a PG-13 movie.)
Along the way to his final confrontation with Batman, the Joker manages to sneak contaminated beauty products onto the shelves of Gotham City’s supermarkets and chain drug stores (the mock commercial with which the Joker advertises these products is one of the most deliciously entertaining parts of this film); he vandalizes the “Flugelheim Museum of Art” and kidnaps Vicki Vale there and again at her home (where Keaton, who’s fallen in love with her in both his Bruce Wayne and Batman identities, tries to get up the courage to tell her he’s Batman in what Burton, Hamm and Skaaren made a pretty obvious parody of a coming-out scene); and at the end, after the city has canceled the official 200th anniversary celebration because with the Joker loose they can’t guarantee public safety at a major outdoor event, he stages his own celebration, floating jolly-looking balloons over a crowd (pretty obviously inspired by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man at the end of Reitman’s 1984 Ghostbusters), throwing $20 million in cash and then releasing an asphyxiating gas which threatens to kill them until Batman comes flying in in his Batplane and severs the cables connecting the balloons to the Joker’s float so they rise and dispense their gas harmlessly in space. The final action sequence is a bit disappointing (it disappointed me in 1989, too, when John Gabrish and I saw the film theatrically and were especially impressed by the surround-sound effect in which the Batmobile seemed to be driving through the theatre in one scene) but even there it’s clear Burton is referencing other movies to good effect — this time the 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame and 1925 Phantom of the Opera, both starting Lon Chaney, Sr. (and Burton even inserts a direct quote from Phantom’s two-strip Technicolor “Red Death” sequence of Nicholson as the Joker hiding out next to the gargoyle statue outside a large building, the way Chaney did as the Phantom). It’s disappointing that Burton, Hamm and Skaaren staged the final confrontation in an abandoned, deserted cathedral — the script has gone so far out of its way to depict both Batman and the Joker as characters heavily in love with their own theatricality, consciously putting on shows for their audiences, one expected the final scene between them to take place with all Gotham City watching either live or on TV — but aside from that one mini-lapse the 1989 Batman is everything you’d want a superhero movie to be, deep and rich in its allusions without sacrificing the campy, joyous spirit of the whole comic-book superhero genre.
It’s also flawlessly acted: Michael Keaton’s choice as Batman raised some eyebrows at the time it was announced (a lot of people expected someone taller, more robust, more like the comic-book image of Batman or the way Adam West played him in the 1960’s TV show) but he’s excellent in the role, a bit befuddled by the whole destiny he’s chosen for himself since he watched his parents gunned down by a robber while he was still a child, and interestingly equipped with glasses (and not the false frames Harold Lloyd wore) when he’s Bruce Wayne, which makes one wonders how he can see well enough to be Batman. (Maybe the hood of his mask was supposed to be equipped with special lenses that would provide him the correction he needed.) And Nicholson, who said at the time he looked forward to the part because it was a return to the psycho crooks he’d played in his early years as a contract actor at American International (where he’d made his first film, The Cry-Baby Killer, in 1958), is magnificent: I had never been a particularly big Nicholson fan, but the aspects of his acting that had put me off in his other films — the shark-like grin and the vulpine laugh — were absolutely perfect for the Joker. Nicholson seems to me to be the only actor of the three who’ve played the Joker in theatrical films to have understood the character: César Romero made him too campy; Heath Ledger made him too twisted and sick; Nicholson brought the two sides of the Joker together and made the character live as at once a figure of menace, evil and delight. As far as I’m concerned the 1989 Batman is “winner and still champ” among superhero movies — its only real competition, I think, is the 1943 Batman serial starring Lewis Wilson as the Caped Crusader and directed by the interesting Lambert Hillyer; in some ways Wilson was the best actor ever to play Batman — both he and Keaton never let us forget that Batman does not have superpowers: he’s a normal human being who willed himself to be a superhero and trained, both physically and intellectually, for the role; and Wilson looked wearier after the big fight scenes than anyone who’s played Batman since — but Keaton is surprisingly credible in the role, he gets to speak his lines as Batman in a relatively normal voice instead of the way Christian Bale had to in the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight cycle (in which poor Bale’s voice was run through a series of filters, equalizers and whatnots that made him sound like he was trying to gargle and bark at the same time), and he manages to convince us of his mastery as an urban fighter and his nervousness when he’s confronted with his emotions towards the heroine. — 11/11/17
