The Batman

An odd and troubling report regarding The Batman: it puts some viewers to sleep. Why? It’s not boring (though, at four minutes shy of three hours, it is incredibly long) or particularly soothing. I think I may have solved the mystery. It’s dark — literally, visually dark — and everyone whispers all the time, and there’s also the ever-present patter of rain. The goddamn thing may as well be a $200 million sleep app. Deep into the second hour, a nap started sounding softly appealing to me, too. But I stuck it out, and I can testify this is a masterful though sometimes punishing piece of filmmaking. I don’t know that it says much of anything; its thematic threads all tie into a narrative web interrogating different responses to trauma. Not that this is new, even in the context of a Batman story.

One thing I approve of: we don’t have to watch, yet again, the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, which leaves their son Bruce an orphan who dedicates his life to fighting crime dressed like a bat. The movie kicks off when Batman (Robert Pattinson) has already been making his nightly rounds in Gotham City for two years. He works closely with Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), one of the few honest cops on the force. Mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) controls everything, with the help of his consigliere the Penguin (Colin Farrell). There’s also Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz), who steals the mob’s booty. And, oh yes, someone styling himself the Riddler (Paul Dano) is going around killing corrupt people in high places.

Enough convolutions for you? This Batman is unconnected to any previous Batman film; it unfolds in its own private Gotham, as did 2019’s Joker. The director here, Matt Reeves, has by now proven himself a force in genre filmmaking; he oversaw two of the recent (and best) Apes films as well as Cloverfield and Let Me In. Reeves knows from spectacle — as if Batman didn’t have enough tsuris, there’s a climactic flood — and he also knows when to let the movie (and us) breathe. A few of the whisper-duets go on a bit; Pattinson and Kravitz have a sort of mopey rapport unbroken by any humor, and they whisper at each other a lot. (When Paul Dano finally shows up as the Riddler, we’re grateful for the theatrical goofiness of his acting; Colin Farrell’s transformation is impressive, but he essentially just plays a thug.) But despite the bombastic fireworks, Reeves is most comfortable with quietude and brooding. Hell, The Batman has probably the first rock song in a Batman film since Me’shell Ndegeocello and the Smashing Pumpkins perked up Batman and Robin, and it’s Nirvana’s morose “Something in the Way.”

Reeves, it should be noted, assembles a lot of other people’s ideas and themes into this mammoth package. The movie is a triumph of craft and design, but original it ain’t. The Riddler’s class resentment is borrowed from The Dark Knight Rises’ Bane; the idea of Thomas Wayne not being a particularly great man has been around. The Batman also continues these movies’ apparent tradition of overpacking the story with villains and, worse, providing a motive behind the killing of Batman’s parents. Once more, from the top: the whole point of Batman is that he wants to prevent anyone else from being a random crime statistic. Emphasis on random. Batman exists to impose his own sense on a world where your parents can just be shot in an alley for no reason at all. But that’s my Batman, not Reeves’.

I’m not sure how much more serious a Batman film can get. The Dark Knight Rises had seemed to be the pinnacle of high-minded adaptation of pulp, but The Batman makes it look like Batman Meets Scooby-Doo. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was serious but also purposeful and a little show-offy and had humor, even jokes. The Batman seems legitimately depressed — it shares its young goth hero’s moods. That in itself is an interesting wrinkle that sets it apart. Sometimes there’s serious tonal dissonance; a shot of Batman jogging through a crowded precinct hallway is clunky and awkward in a way I’ll probably come to cherish in memory. Perhaps the wittiest thing Reeves does with this Batman is to present his habit of appearing and disappearing wordlessly as an emo dude showing up at a party and then skipping out without saying goodbye. Then he goes to his cave and listens to Nirvana and writes deep thoughts in his journal. This is possibly the first Gen-X Batman. 

The Righteous

You’ve heard of cringe comedy? The first half or so of Mark O’Brien’s heavy spiritual/psychological thriller The Righteous is cringe drama. That’s not really a put-down. In scene after scene, O’Brien’s camera stares at people clumsily working through grief or uncertainty, and never averts its gaze. One or two times, I had to look away from the unrelieved anguish. It may not sound like a giddy night at the movies, but The Righteous is honest about intractable despair and fear in a way few films are, and it has an ace in the hole in that longtime reliable acting wizard Henry Czerny as Frederick Mason, a former priest whose guilt and sadness more or less animate the story. 

Czerny became known internationally for his indelible performance as serial child abuser Brother Lavin in 1993’s Canadian TV movie The Boys of St. Vincent and its sequel. Here he plays a different breed of tormented man of the cloth. Frederick was a priest until he met and fell in love with Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk), whereupon he left the Church and married her. They adopted a daughter, who has recently died. The two stay in their remote house, silently grieving; to blow off steam, Frederick sometimes goes out to the yard and works on disassembling their daughter’s swing set. One night, a young man, played by Mark O’Brien himself (he also wrote the script; this is his feature debut as a director after several short films), shows up outside Frederick’s house, injured and lost. 

Despite Ethel’s misgivings, Frederick offers the man — who gives his name as Aaron Smith — shelter for the night. Soon, Ethel spends time with Aaron and quickly grows fond of him, perhaps seeing him as filling the void left by their daughter. The Righteous has only seven speaking roles, but they’re all there to make points about how the effects of past sins ripple outward forever. In the first scene, Frederick, laid low by guilt, beseeches God to punish him. Aaron, it begins to seem, has been sent to deliver on that prayer. I’ve seen The Righteous described as a horror movie, but that description possibly suggests a more literal apocalypse of blood and demons than it is. Instead, the movie is shot in crisp black and white, and its chills are rhetorical (indeed, the movie would work well on the stage) and subtle. The apocalypse happens in whispered conversations between people buffeted by uncanny forces they can’t control or understand.

Like practically everyone in Canada, O’Brien must have seen and been scorched by The Boys of St. Vincent (though he was only eight when the film first aired), so when he had written a former priest sunk under the weight of sin, I would guess Henry Czerny was his first choice. Czerny is the guy you want for square men with twists and loops in their nature; the angular Clark Kent/Morrissey features of his youth have settled into the grays and lines of painful wisdom. The Righteous is probably the biggest role he’s had for a while, and he excels at putting across Frederick’s soul implosion. When Frederick tries to smile, he looks false and genuinely alarming, like an alien attempting to mimic human expressions; when someone tries to compliment Frederick, he responds with what I can only call a visceral scoff. His self-disgust is fierce but held just underneath the surface, held with great and graceful aplomb by this open-hearted actor.

As an actor, O’Brien holds his own with the master, giving Czerny something real and potentially sulfurous to sniff and respond to. (The two played father and son in the 2019 horror-comedy Ready or Not.) As a filmmaker, O’Brien lets his camera linger on Czerny as often as possible. If the director falters here, it may only be due to budget. We hear that Frederick is subject to visions, fugues. Not a lot is done with that angle, though it does serve to handwave away some of the overtly supernatural stuff we see. More than once, Frederick is shown waking up, and more than once I was confused as to whether that meant he had only dreamed the previous scene. It may not matter in the literal sense; by the end, we understand we’ve been watching one man’s inner war on himself, and everything else we’ve witnessed is sort of up for grabs. Czerny enlists in this war with all the restraint and subtextual power he’s always had, and O’Brien does everything he can to give Czerny a battlefield worthy of him.

The Northman

Twentieth-century softies like me may experience a film like Robert Eggers’ The Northman as a contemptuous but invigorating slap in the chops. Life was hard in AD 895, and every frame of the movie is there to show it, in all its magic-hour, snow-flecked beauty and all its torn-flesh, bloody-mud-puddle ugliness. Like Eggers’ two previous films — The Witch and The Lighthouse, both of which I adore — The Northman devotes itself to recreating a time long past, along with its moods, attitudes and details of day-to-day life. It would be easy indeed to parody The Northman, with all its shrieking madmen and howling to the black sky and chanting in the Old Languages. But Eggers offers up this material so earnestly, and with such carefully crafted art, that to lampoon it would feel callow and vile.

I’m about 75% on board with the film — it runs a bit long, and we start to feel it with about half an hour left to go — but I’m glad it was made, and I hope its poor showing at the box office won’t put Eggers in movie jail. This is the sort of expensive, excessive fantasia that sniffs around in deeper, darker nooks of cinema largely forgotten about and lifts the art form. The Northman is loud, with a brooding score and metal clashing against metal, but it has more in common with silent film than with anything else around. Based on the legend of Amleth (which in turn spawned Hamlet), it seems to want to take us back to the beginning of drama, or at least the birth of many tropes. It tells the most elemental of stories, the one about the son avenging his father, and grafts a lot of pagan strangeness and gore onto it.

Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) is out to get his stinky uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who murdered Amleth’s father, King Aurvandill War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), and married his mother, Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman). For years, Amleth grunts and growls and readies himself for the moment when he realizes his oath: “I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” Amleth’s entire life becomes about that, after which, he guesses, he’ll just kill himself or something, because his life will no longer have purpose. Amleth does pursue a brief interest in the young sorceress Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), who proposes another level of purpose to Amleth’s life. But mainly his fate seems to be mired in rage and pain and blood. It may take a little bit before a viewer recognizes that Amleth as presented here isn’t really the hero, just the protagonist.

The images appear to be charged by the post-human energies of spirits and fae. The shadows and scents of femininity seem to reduce these crude, brutal men to animals, and the women, dealing with this off-the-scale-toxic masculinity, are in danger of becoming inhuman wretches themselves. Queen Gudrún, for instance, certainly comes across as vindictive and cruel, but to what extent have the culture of 895 and its sickening rules (rape is no big deal, it’s part of every king’s victory lap) made her that way? There are other men, though, noncombatants, fools, he-witches, who have wiser heads — until they lose them to someone with a hotter head, plus a sword. The Northman seems simple, or simplistic, until we start turning it around and peering at it. 

The sensibilities we see in the movie are very remote from ours. We could almost be watching aliens. Sometimes the film has a harshly musical Icelandic vibe; Eggers recruits the Icelandic poet Sjón as his co-scripter here, and puts Björk in majestic electrocuted-penguin garb as a character called the Seeress. As I said, the narrative begins to drag a little, but the compositions and the colors of night and the cast’s dedication to exploring long-gone behaviors — all of this is first-rate. The Northman might be my least favorite Eggers project, but that means nothing — oh, it’s only a B+, or maybe even an A-. Eggers goes big here, and uses paints he hasn’t used before. His three films feel alike, in that they could all unfold in the same uncanny, demon-haunted universe at different times, but they’re also very distinct accomplishments. Eggers is still a major reason to stay interested in whatever movies are becoming.

River’s Edge

When River’s Edge opened in America (35 years ago on May 8), reviewers and columnists chased it around like cartoon reporters waving their mics at a murder suspect. They probed it for social meaning and decided it was a commentary on the affectless kids of baby boomers (meaning, the kids of the columnists). For those of us of the generation in question, the movie was “John Hughes Goes to Hell.” It took the ethos of The Breakfast Club — “When you grow up, your heart dies”— and ramped it up. The kids in River’s Edge were born with dead or broken hearts. Generation X nodded in recognition, then probably moved on to Beverly Hills Cop II later that May as a palate-cleanser. To a greater or lesser extent, we looked at the kids in River’s Edge and said “Yeah. We know kids like this. Sometimes we are kids like this. This isn’t a social commentary, this is a snapshot.” The boomers really didn’t want to hear that.

The shock of River’s Edge isn’t that it shows kids who either kill or respond to death numbly; it’s that it shows those things in an American movie. Screenwriter Neal Jimenez and director Tim Hunter are commenting, if anything, on what we usually expect young American protagonists to do, how we demand they respond. The situation here, which Jimenez based loosely on a 1981 murder case, is that one of the film’s teenagers, Samson (Daniel Roebuck), has strangled his girlfriend, for no explicable reason — meaning, with no clear motive. “Motive,” in this movie’s terms, is a fake thing that other movies do. What Coleridge called Iago’s “motiveless malignity” holds sway here. As for the other kids, for a long while nobody is sure what to do, how to respond — except for one — and the body lies out in the open, uncovered, unmoved. 

The conflict arises not from the authorities trying to prove Samson did it — for he admits to the murder to practically anyone who will listen — but from the ethical struggle between two of the other boys in this group, Matt (Keanu Reeves) and Layne (Crispin Glover), over what should be done about Samson. Layne proposes that they all close ranks around Samson, hide him, whatever. His reasoning appears to boil down to “She’s dead — we can’t help her. He’s alive; we can help him.” Matt isn’t so sure; like the others, he has a flicker of conscience and consciousness, which can either be extinguished or fanned into flame. We’re not too surprised when Matt goes to the cops fairly early on. Even 35 years ago, Keanu Reeves projected a basic kindness. But even Matt doesn’t act quickly enough for the police’s liking. Most of the adults in this movie are essentially ghosts of movies past, insisting on the clearcut morality and narrative rigidity that are irrelevant in the gray and tangled world of River’s Edge. 

The film has a hell of a lot under its hood, and not all of it was intentionally placed there, but some of it clearly was — the whole doll motif, for instance, linking a dead girl to hollow objects of male desire or destruction. I guess Matt’s new girlfriend Clarissa (Ione Skye) is supposed to be the living, breathing exception to all that, but she’s a little blank. (Someone like Allison Anders could step forward to tell Clarissa’s story.) We learn nothing about Jamie, the girl Samson killed. She’s literally just a naked body to be argued over. We never hear her speak, only briefly see her alive in a flashback, moments before she’s killed. 

My hunch is that Hunter and Jimenez are getting at something more elemental and distressing than just “these kids today” or “adults suck.” The passage of 35 years has made River’s Edge feel more timelessly tragic. Other than a few bits of score that briefly make the movie sound like a banal ‘80s thriller, it has aged very, very well. Its lineage proceeds from skid-row cinema to the JD flicks of the ’50s to Herzog’s Stroszek to Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue — Hopper is rather famously in River’s Edge, by the way, as a one-legged freako and possible killer who isn’t even the craziest galoot Hopper played in 1986. Hopper’s presence links this movie to his earlier portrait of bottom-dog life in numbed-out America. A double feature of Out of the Blue and River’s Edge is contraindicated unless under strict supervision.

I should probably deal with Crispin Glover here. Throughout River’s Edge, Layne is meant to be the “leader” who decides for everyone else what’s going to be done and tries to enforce it. Glover’s relentlessly externalized and stylized performance says that he thinks Layne is a cartoon, so he plays him without any human shadings except fear and the will to power. He’s basically the Joker to Reeves’ wounded stoner Batman. I could entertain arguments pro or con Glover’s performance, but ultimately it just doesn’t seem organic to the piece. What happens to Layne doesn’t matter to us, and maybe it’s right that it shouldn’t matter. And maybe Glover, to his credit, sensed that, and made Layne a cartoon devil to indicate that the character isn’t human on the same level as Matt and the others with still-alive morality. The effect, though, is to leave the movie lopsided. (Pauline Kael, in her negative review, put it succinctly: Glover is “giving an expressionist performance in a movie that’s trying to be ‘real.'”) You can tell that Matt and the others capitulate to Layne because it’s in the script, not because he’s persuasive or intimidating.

Samson sits next to his victim, a teenage Frankenstein not knowing why that flower petal didn’t float. We gather that murder made him feel alive, for a while, but then the adrenaline wore off and he resurfaced to a reality where everyone around him was dealing with the consequences of his action, so he didn’t have to. Layne is cut from the same cloth as those who want to protect rapists, because why ruin this young man’s future? Matt, who is almost comically courteous to Clarissa even post-coitus, is of a quieter but stronger fabric. Layne will speak for the soul-dead living; Matt will let the dead speak for herself. Like Out of the Blue, River’s Edge is depressive but piercing — it stings and leaves a bruise.