Batman

Jack Nicholson plays a mobster who falls into a chemical vat and emerges with white skin, green hair, and a rictus grin. Renaming himself Joker, he sets out to remake Gotham City in his image but encounters resistance from Batman, played by Michael Keaton.

I saw director Tim Burton’s Batman opening weekend in 1989. I was thirteen and cheered with the crowd when Batman’s plane broke the clouds to hang mid-air against the full moon and form a bat symbol. Even at that age I understood this maneuver had no tactical purpose and terrible fuel economy. I cheered anyway.

The country went bat-crazy that summer. The symbol turned up on T-shirts, cereal boxes, billboards, bumper stickers, and anywhere else Warner Bros. could plant it. I decided it was the greatest movie ever made, a verdict I had also handed down on several other pictures, some of them starring Bill Murray.

Then came the sequels. Joel Schumacher took over, and by the time George Clooney produced a Bat credit card I had filed the whole franchise under camp. Later Christopher Nolan made The Dark Knight, which set Batman and the Joker loose in a real city, and used them to conduct an argument about order and chaos. Burton’s Gotham looked small in comparison. Once you’ve seen Batman chased through actual Chicago, you notice this film’s Gotham is one block. The tourists get mugged there, the Waynes are shot there, the Joker throws his parade there.

I see now that Burton and production designer Anton Furst were building a Max Fleischer cartoon and hiring actors to stand in it. Gotham is all art deco, lit from below, held up by stone giants who lean in as if listening. No building in it could pass an inspection. Burton began as an animator, and his instinct is to freeze people into graphic shapes and let the frame do the acting.

If titles were based on screen time, this one would be called “Joker.” When it opened there was a good deal of talk about how far Nicholson’s Joker wandered from Cesar Romero’s on the 1966 television series, which was still airing in afternoon reruns. Romero even went to the newspapers to complain the film was too violent.¹

Nicholson makes the movie. Seen today, he’s the closest thing to Romero we ever got. Same cackle, same unmistakable pleasure in his own material. He wants the city, the girl, the airtime. He murders people with cosmetics and then runs commercials for the cosmetics. He throws a parade. He carries over the grin from The Shining and The Witches of Eastwick and lets it do most of the heavy lifting. The script hands him one quotable line after another. Snipping Kim Basinger out of a photograph, breathing heavily, he complains that it’s hard to stay in the lines. He might be referring to his own performance.

Keaton was the punchline of the casting announcement, but his performance has aged well. He’s a supporting character in his own movie, disappearing for long stretches. His Bruce Wayne drifts through an enormous house misplacing glassware and leaving a fountain pen in a houseplant, with Alfred following at a respectful distance to undo the damage. But watch him at the press conference when the shooting starts. Everyone ducks. Keaton stays upright, staring at Nicholson, because he has just worked out the Joker’s identity. Taken together, these quirks reveal a man whose concentration is so narrow there’s no room for anything else.

That includes romance, and the relationship with Basinger’s Vicki Vale still feels as forced as it did during my first viewing. But it’s a small blemish, like how her Georgia accent creeps into some scenes and vanishes in others.

Danny Elfman’s score has outlived the film it was written for, and Prince, a choice that looked like a corporate handshake between two divisions of the same company, turns out to be perfect. His songs belong to the Joker and only the Joker. When the gang defaces a museum to “Partyman,” the music and the vandalism are the same joke.

Watching that scene thirty-seven years later, I still get a shiver when Batman crashes through the glass ceiling. Where does he get those wonderful toys?