I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Upon its release, I'm Not There struck me as a hollow experiment, a nifty "what-if" but nothing more. Not helping matters, certainly, was my own lack of familiarity with Bob Dylan, a sacred cow whose enigmatic profile (as evidenced by this fragmentary "biopic") split into so many personalities that I never knew how to approach him. For all its dazzling formal techniques, I'm Not There frustrated me for doing nothing, it seemed, to explore Dylan's real personality. Its much-ballyhooed division of Dylan's various artistic reinventions into separate roles for different actors was its greatest weakness.

Of course, Bob Dylan's refusal to be defined as any one thing but Bob Dylan (and sometimes not even that), is what has made him endure as much as a mystery as a legend. Haynes does not attempt to "solve" Dylan, and if I'm Not There ultimately concludes that there may be no real Dylan under all those smokescreens, it nevertheless paints a compelling portrait—well, collage—of a man who exists wholly within pop culture. The trait that links the six characters representing Dylan's personae is a hint of persecution by those who love him, of devotion and mistrust displayed in equal measure. Even the earliest incarnation of Dylan, a mere child faces hardship, even if he has to invent some of it.

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

Thus far in his slim corpus, each Terrence Malick film has solidified and purified Malick’s transcendentalist belief in the connection of man and nature, even when he shows horrible, destructive acts. The murder spree in Badlands fits with uncomfortable harmony with the flat plains and scattered, gnarled grass lining the sides of Midwestern country roads. Days of Heaven moved deeper into that territory to bask in the glow of our amber waves of grain, yet the mangled love triangle and plot to steal the farmer’s wealth contrasts to the invasion of locusts naturally laying waste to the area. The Thin Red Line builds further on this contrast, presenting even the monstrous environmental and human cost of war as an exaggerated of the destruction inherent in an ecosystem even as it pushed gently and spiritually for an end to such horrors.

Malick’s films, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry, make me want to walk in a field, palms outstretched, letting leaves and blades of foliage brush against my fingertips. When I experience their work, I feel that I can go outside and be jolted by the current running through nature, running through us as well if we’d stop breaking the circuit. Their conceptions of the universe are heady, allegorical and concerned less with what’s before their transparent eyeball than its spiritual essence (even the romance between Smith and Pocahontas feels like an encapsulation of the pure love of nature for those who can tap into its grace). Yet they also are some of the most tactile artists to ever live, offering intoxicating panoramas of nature and the past, present and future it contains. Unlike Emerson, however, Malick lacks the self-absorbed narrow-mindedness that undercuts his own idealism. Malick seeks to capture it all, even when he leaves out one side entirely (as he did in The Thin Red Line). His view of destruction as but one facet within nature is but one example of his more universal belief in the force that connects us.

That Malick would make a film about Native Americans seems so obvious it’s a wonder he didn’t find the inspiration to do it about 30 years before he released The New World in 2005. Perhaps it was for the best, though: by building off the moral, philosophical and natural themes he’d refined to that point, Malick crafted unquestionably the most singular film to chart the English settlement of America and the interaction with the tribes already there. It is not about environmentally indifferent white settler vs. the attuned native, though certainly conflict and discrepancies exist, as do moments of horrific violence that destroy so much that nature csually covers over in a season. Nor is it a Disneyfied version of John Smith’s romance with Pocahontas, a symbolic union of an open-minded Englishman bonding with a purer spirit, though elements of that exist as well.

Steven Spielberg: Empire of the Sun

Empire of the Sun is a greater indicator of Steven Spielberg's capacity to show mankind's darker side than Schindler's List. The latter is a film about a good man among oppressors, a diamond in the rough who stands up for what is right in the midst of unspeakable horror. Empire of the Sun, however, is a film about how good people can turn on each other in an instant, about the corrupt among the downtrodden. Where Schindler's List (thankfully) did not attempt to assign motivations for the German population's complicity in the Holocaust, this effort says more about the human condition precisely because the Japanese internment of prisoners of war doesn't carry the same weight in the public consciousness as the Holocaust.

However, for those who have read J.G. Ballard, the cold observer of extreme violence who wrote Crash among many other chilling works, this internment is no less horrifying. Ballard based Empire of the Sun on his own experiences as a child in conquered China during the war, and there can be no doubt that what he saw formed the man who would later write such disturbing fiction. The subject of lost innocence and the dividing line between liberated childhood and the responsibility of maturity is a common one in Spielberg's canon, but here it carries the darker importance of actually being true.

Spielberg opens the film with a graceful track-forward in a preparatory school, moving deeper into a chapel as pre-pubescent schoolboys sing soprano. Only when the camera cuts back to show plainly dressed Chinese people in some of the pews is the audience given any indication that it is not watching a film set in England.

The entire first act expands upon this idea, the total obliviousness of the British occupants of China in the face of Japanese invasion. The opening, somber text scroll notes the apathy of the British residents of China to the takeover, their arrogance blinding them from the possibility that someone -- especially non-whites -- would or could seize them. The parents of Jamie Graham (Christian Bale) take this view, the father casually chipping golf balls into the pool of his luxurious estate and reassuring his son, "China isn't our war."

Even Jamie fits into the mindset, exploiting the family's Chinese maid into letting him have late-night snacks by telling her she must do as he says. The boy is too young to realize the classism and racism in his words, and already Spielberg undercuts the idea of innocence and nostalgia for an era that raised children to views others as inferior based on ethnicity and birthright.

The cluelessness of the British bourgeoisie is highlight shortly thereafter when all the white families dress up for a lavish costume party as the mood in Shanghai darkens. A fleet of chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce cars drive through throngs of tired, dirty Chinese peasants who mill around restlessly as if they feel they should be fleeing but do not yet know why. The score in this section is haunting, lightly dissonant without being overbearing, perfectly matching the drab cinematography (a precursor to the desaturated tones of Saving Private Ryan). At the party, one guest slurs an educated, erudite Chinese man for being in attendance, as if the thought of Chinese running about in China was unspeakable and obscene.

Only when the Japanese at last strike Pearl Harbor do they fully drop the pretense of leaving the Westerners alone. Bombers descend on Shanghai, sending everyone into a panic and separating Jamie from his suddenly sobered parents as waves of fleeing Chinese pour through the smallest gaps. For the first time since Jaws, Spielberg manages to achieve a pure, raging terror in the shots of Jamie watching his mother swept away as he can do nothing to get back to her. A sense of abandonment runs through so many of the director's films as a result of his parents' divorce, but this condenses all such fears -- be it getting lost in a store or seeing parents separate -- and magnifies them in the crush of stampeding bodies.

As Jamie returns to his neighborhood in the hopes of his parents somehow returning home, Spielberg inserts horrifyingly surreal of the vacant streets in the wake of the mass exodus. Looted suitcases lie strewn about on the streets, mirroring later shots in both Schindler's List and War of the Worlds. When Jamie arrives home, he finds a sticker plastered in front of the door saying the house now belongs to the Japanese emperor, a darkly ironic subversion of traditional imperialism, which saw white casually claiming the land of other races as their own. Spielberg even inserted one such shot at the beginning after his marvelous, wordless setup of place and character, cutting from the idyllic British life to an overhead shot of coffins containing dead Chinese floating in the water as a boat lackadaisically knocks them aside. Late in the film, Japanese soldiers march prisoners across hundreds of miles of terrain, and they stumble across a field strewn with old luxuries -- cars, pianos, gilded furniture. It's a treasure trove, but no one gives a damn, tearing apart these items looking for food and drink.

Most disturbing is the coldly vacant interior of Jamie's abandoned house. Just as his parents ignored the terrifying truth at their doorstep, Jamie appears largely content by the whole situation, sure that his parents will return and enjoying free reign of the house in the meantime. He especially his parents' bedroom. Jamie there discovers his mother's footprint enshrined in spilled talcum powder. First, Jamie regards it with light curiosity, even pleasant fondness, an acceptable facsimile for his mother's presence. Then, his eyes scan over the whole room, revealing more urgent foot and palm prints and kicked up talc, suggesting a struggle. The implications finally hit the boy, who becomes so afraid he knocks open a window so the wind will blow away the evidence. In the process, of course, the draft erases the last vestige of his parents.

Eventually, food runs short, and Jamie heads out to find supplies, only to be robbed by a Chinese teen and taken in by Basie (John Malkovich), an American ship steward marooned in conquered Shanghai. Basie, however, proves more dangerous than desperate Chinese peasants or vindictive Japanese soldiers, immediately trying to sell Jamie to a peasant as a servant. Jamie indirectly gets his revenge when he takes Basie back to his rich neighborhood to loot the place, only for Japanese soldiers to jump out of the house and imprison Jamie and Basie's gang.

Up to this moment, Jamie has not allowed himself to process what he's been seeing, but Spielberg bucks expectations by actually enhancing this obliviousness as Jamie is shuffled from a holding area to an interment camp by an airfield. The director roots the atrocities Jamie sees in the boy's perspective, adroitly keeping enough horror off-screen to avoid a PG-13 rating while making the film that much darker by implication and the perverse, rotting innocence. of what we do witness.

Basie, the Fagin to Jamie's Oliver Twist, admires the boy's pluck and exploits the child's attempts to do anything to avoid reality by incorporating him into a complicated trading network that takes the place of money in the camp. In the first camp, designed to separate the able-bodied from the sick, Basie shocks and disgusts Jamie by stealing the shoes of a dying woman to give to the boy, and by stealing potatoes where possible. He's a man with nothing to live for, but Basie will do anything, absolutely anything, to survive. After spending three years in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, though, Jamie is inured to such sights, and he routinely helps out Basie, though he does balance his actions with a concern for the other prisoners' well-being.

He does so to make life seem as pleasant as possible, but we can see the atrocity through his perspective. The two times Basie is beaten by Japanese soldiers, the camera stays on Jamie's face as he watches his ersatz father figure take his punishment. His other parental symbol, Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havens), asks him for help in trying to revive a woman with no pulse. Jamie performs CPR frantically until the woman's straight-ahead stare shifts to look at the boy. He thinks he's saving her, but the doctor rightly says he simply pumped enough blood to the brain for one last nervous twitch. A nurse optimistically offers that the woman got the chance to feel as if she died in England by looking on the boy, but all he, and we, can see is her frozen rictus on her clammy face. In the film's darkest moment, Basie sends Jamie through the camp to set snare traps. Williams' score matches the imagination and sense of adventure with which Jamie takes to the task of sneaking around camp and even under the barbed wire that separates the camp from the airfield. Then the camera moves back to Basie and his American crew watching, revealing that the man really sent the boy in there to test for mines. Worse still, he and the others take bets over whether Jamie will trip one and kill himself.

The subtlest transition of the character from a fresh-faced innocent to toughened teen is in his name. When Basie takes James in, he dubs the boy "Jim," and the name sticks even with the British occupants of the POW camp. Jamie creates an image in the mind of the the upper-class, pampered boy that James is at the start, an effete, charming name for a like person. "Jim" is blunt and masculine, suggesting a person who can do much by saying little. When the Americans accept him following their deplorable mine experiment, the name Jim sticks forever, and James grows from the kindly boy still trying to help everyone out to a cocky brat who uses the same self-absorbed lines the Americans used to tell him on the other British children. It is a testament to the writing, Spielberg's pacing and Bale's performance that the shift is more than just nominal: by the end of the film, you'll think of the boy only as Jim.

The humanity of Empire of the Sun catches in the throat. The only bond Jim forms that comes with no strings is with a Japanese teenager training to become a pilot. Jim's love of airplanes gives them a connection that supersedes their language barrier. Their friendship, communicated only in waves and other signs of recognition, is undercut by the knowledge that the Japanese boy is part of the system imprisoning Jim and the others. What's more, he's training to be a kamikaze. But there's no moment in the film more affecting and beautiful than Jim singing the Welsh lullaby he practiced at the start of the film to honor his friend's graduation. Enraptured that someone he knows is becoming a pilot, Jim can't contain himself, but the song is so sad it speaks to the reality of the situation, that the boy will soon be sent on a one-way mission. Even the internment camp's overseer, Sgt. Nagata, is moved by the implications.

Ironically, Americans ruin each of these moments. The joy of watching his friend become a pilot is cut short by American P-51 Mustangs launching a surprise raid on the airfield. Their arrival brings back Jim's ethnocentrism, and he cheers the planes until Dr. Rawlins makes him take cover, at which point the sight of American saviors brings the revelation that Jim no longer remembers his family. When a sick woman, Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson), dies in the long march that ensues from the camp being destroyed, a blinding light fills the sky as Jim looks over her body. He believes it to be her soul ascending to heaven, only to learn later that it was the flash of the Nagasaki bomb detonating hundreds of miles away, the very opposite of a transcendental moment. How many souls are contained in that light, and could a blast hotter than the sun vaporize not only the flesh but the spiritual being as well? At last, Jim leaves the group to return to the camp, unwilling to hike so far for the slim chance of food, and he finds his friend, who offers him a mango. Then, Basie returns with his gang, and they shoot the teen dead before Jim's eyes.

Some bill Empire of the Sun as a coming-of-age tale, but that's not exactly true. Jim loses his innocence, to be sure, but he does not truly grow from it. As with A.I., the ending of Empire of the Sun is doomed to be regarded as sappy and upbeat. Jim is reunited with his parents as music swells, and at last the family becomes whole again. Yet the boy, even when he at last collapses into his mother's arms, is changed, and his eyes, hollowed out and filled with dulled pain, communicate that this boy cannot return to normalcy so easily as his parents, and something in him is broken forever. He does not recognize his parents, and when he finally does and falls into his mother's arms, he does so less out of joy than the desperate hope that, by doing so, he might revert to a time when everything he's seen wasn't true. If he can act like a normal child, perhaps he won't ever have to fully face what he's seen. This also explains why he pedals a bike around the empty camp in the wake of Basie and co. shooting his friend. He pedals with vacant glee, riding in circles not only to mirror his earlier bike tour through his empty house but also in a subconscious attempt to reverse the Earth's spin and turn back time to when all of this had not happened. Two images near the end sear into the brain: first, Spielberg shows Jim trying to revive his Japanese friend, splicing the image to switch between the boy and a vision of a dead Jamie, still clad in his schoolboy outfit. Second, Spielberg uses the final shot to return to a suitcase Jim took with him out of the camp that he finally threw into a lake when he realized how much it weighed him down. Both of these shots communicate one thing: Jamie died back in that camp. Jim is returning home with Jamie's parents, and it's only a matter of time before their uneasy reunion collapses. That will leave Jim truly alone, as his final response is not to grow up but to harden into chrysalis. Stunted and scarred, no amount of pampering will make him soft again.

The film is, however, a coming-of-age story for its maker, who at last finds a way to make serious movies within his style without rough disconnect. The darker moments of E.T. and The Color Purple too often clashed harshly with the director's old tricks, the slapstick moments of both undermining the severity instead of providing a more complete emotional range. Empire of the Sun may be more dour overall, but it's believable. It's odd to think, though, that this should be Spielberg's darkest film yet, as it's the first one where he finally trusts a child fully to tell a story about childhood. Bale gives one of the great child performances, and I don't think any young actor -- in an English-speaking film, at least -- matched it until Natalie Portman gave her first and best work in The Professional. Like the French dying on their plantation in the extended cut of Apocalypse Now, Jamie is a man without country: he's never even seen England, but he will never be considered Chinese. Bale captures this cultural disconnect perfectly even as he embodies the more immediate concerns of lost innocence and reaction to atrocity. It is no wonder that he would grow up to be one of the most intense actors working today.

The complexity of Spielberg's tracking shots for the first time take on a grace, no longer about speed and liberation but of elegiac observation. The camera gets one last good look at everything before it disappears forever. David Lean originally helmed the project, and when Spielberg took over he saw his chance to make his own Bridge Over the River Kwai. But Spielberg moves beyond simple imitation of Lean's grandeur -- a display of maturity in the face of his open quotation of old serials in the Indiana Jones movies -- into something more personal. The romanticism of Jamie's perception influences the direction, but so too does the reality, and when those American fighters strafe the internment camp as Jim watches with mouth agape, the two perceptions blur into overload. Fear and exhilaration, never that far apart to being with, become one, and in liberating Jim, the Americans also provide the final force that breaks his brain. This is not the Steven Spielberg who made Jaws. It is not even the one who made The Color Purple. This is a Spielberg in full and complete control not only of his craft but what he wishes to say with it. The result is such a dynamic leap forward for the director it took him nearly another decade just to catch up with himself.

The Prestige

Every year promises at least one case where two films hit theaters with remarkably similar premises, and the stale nature of Hollywood programming typically assures a number of films that could be easily swapped for each other. Occasionally, however, the unified thread of two films comes seemingly out of nowhere. It happened back in 1998 when two computer-animated films about ants somehow came to fruition within months of each other, but the most puzzling example of recent times must be 2006's double dose of period films about magic*.

I saw The Prestige twice in short order after it first hit home video in late '06. A 17-year-old with no concept of cinematic nuance nor any inclination to examine a film beyond a superficial reading, I enjoyed the various twists and turns of the plot, liked all of the actors and thought that the movie looked beautiful. But once the final twist threw me for one last loop, I emerged feeling I'd nothing left to gain, and the second viewing was an arduous one. A year or so later, shortly after my "awakening" (to use the most pretentious, haughty term possible) but some time before I truly committed myself to film, I caught the other 2006 magic film, The Illusionist, and took far more readily to its twisted tale of romance over Christopher Nolan's examination of professional and personal rivalry.

I couldn't help but think of the film again as my anticipation for Inception grew over the course of last week, and I noticed that, as the various movie blogs began writing a multitude of posts on Nolan in preparation for his latest (especially a terrific blogathon over at Things That Don't Suck). What caught my eye the most was the attention given to The Prestige, with some writers I highly respect not simply rating it at the top of Nolan's canon but among the finest works of the previous decade. Intrigued, as well as giddy with post-Inception euphoria, I picked up Nolan's fifth feature to see what I'd no doubt missed as a half-interested teenager, and I could not have guessed just how much had flown over my head.

What hell it must have been to review this film for a publication upon its release, with nought but a single screening to sort out its labyrinthine plot and an inability to discuss the film without discussing the ending, which one couldn't do in circulated print. Yet the great irony of the difficulty of tap-dancing around spoilers is that the film deliberately spoils itself in the opening. Not only does it contain key shots that will become clear only at the end, the film presents the rest of the ending in open sight, merely changing the mise-en-scène. I cannot go into great detail without stealing at least portions of Bryce Wilson's magnificent post on this sneaky trick, but those who have seen the film might be amazed to see the parallels if they pay attention to the canaries John Cutter (Michael Caine) keeps for his boss' illusions, as well as Cutter's enticing sell of magic. He tells those listening to him, within the film and without, that we subconsciously do not attempt to figure out the trick until after it's completed because we "don't really want to see it. Not yet."

Having now established himself as the great trickster of contemporary mainstream cinema, Nolan positions The Prestige as, if nothing else, the decoding phrase that unlocks his filmmaking ethos, the "keyword" that the two warring magicians constantly fight over to unlock trick-explaining codes. Everything lies out in the open, perhaps to the point that all the objects choke and clutter, but we never notice. If we do, we pass it out of mind, unwilling to spoil the act until it's completed. With a good enough showman, an audience will overlook practically anything. I know that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of Nolan as a filmmaker, but I think it suggests that, even if he didn't enjoy the hype afforded to him, he could still enrapture a crowd to the point that his shortcomings become part of the act, a misdirection that teases the audience further.

Writing about The Prestige presents a distinct challenge, even when one allows for spoilers, and there will be spoilers. The revelation that the beginning contains the ending is liberating, because getting at the ending in fine detail would require such a constant spoiling of each event leading up to it that such a review would be better served by simply pointing readers to where they could acquire a copy of the film's screenplay. Still, there's no way to get at the depths of the film -- and more than any other Nolan film, perhaps even the layered Inception, The Prestige has extreme depth of vision -- without discussing a few elements of the story, and while criticism is always best enjoyed after seeing the film in question, I stress even further the need to see the film before reading anything about it.

From the start, Nolan throws the audience. The timeline jumps so erratically that the primarily linear nature of Memento's reverse storytelling looks like child's play in comparison. In short order, we see a magician placed on trial for the murder of another, falling back in time to a moment in which the deceased performer was alive and had pilfered his rival's journal. The diary then throws the audience back once more, to the beginning of the two magicians' relationship. Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), a working-class grunt with a deep understanding of illusions, pairs with Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), an aristocrat who slums it by making a living out of his hobby. The two work as plants for "Milton the Magician" (actor-magician Ricky Jay), a talented but banal performer whose safe routines bore the adventurous Borden. The entire point of magic, he argues, is that it shows an audience something they've never seen before. For a magician to stick to the same routine for years is no different than a stand-up comedian becoming so stale that an audience, even an enthused one that doesn't realize what it's doing, nails the coffin lid shut by shouting out the punchlines in misplaced excitement.

So, the two set out on their own, accompanied by Cutter, the ingénieur who designs their tricks, and Angier's wife Julia (Piper Perabo). The combination of Angier's charisma and Borden's ambition makes for a lucrative partnership, but a few gently ominous lines about Borden's knot-tying in relation to the water escape trick leads to tragedy when Julia drowns on-stage, unable to free herself from the ropes and break out of the box. Naturally, the act collapses due to the performers' shock and bad publicity. Angier, consumed by grief, not only terminates his friendship with Borden but devotes himself to destroying the other magician.


What follows is a constant game of cat-and-mouse: one magician plants himself in the audience of the other, ensures that he is the chosen volunteer, then shames and wounds the rival in front of everyone. Angier sabotages a bullet catch trick that costs Borden two fingers, and Borden, a master of disguise, comes on stage to "assist" Angier with a collapsible birdcage and triggers the device early, killing the dove and crushing the fingers of the refined, upper-class lady also chosen to help with the act.

Rivalry morphs into obsession, and the thin line separating the two fits neatly into the director's fondness for duality and the evenly matched war between yin and yang. Borden has the talent, the ambition, dedication and skill to make better illusions, while Angier has the showmanship. Their stage names communicate this split: Borden becomes "The Professor," a name that connotes brilliance to the point of boredom, someone so skilled that they cannot relate to the uneducated. Angier chooses the sobriquet "The Great Danton," a name that makes no sense but doesn't need to: it has "great" right there in the title, and magic relies on that ostentation. People don't go to a magic show to learn, they go to see a man in a mustache pull shit out of a hat.

This opens up a subplot that Nolan wisely does not over-stress, the idea that the audience for mass entertainment will always choose a distraction over real art. Angier understandably omits the water escape trick from his act, and Cutter skirts around the real motivation to a theater owner skeptical of the performer by explaining that people want to see such things out of a latent desire to see them fail. Even those who do not openly pronounce a sense of schadenfreude secretly hope to see something go off the rails. When Borden crushes the bird and the woman's fingers, the crowd gasps with artificial concern but makes no move to help the injured lady. The patrons of the bar where Angier shoots off Borden's ring and little fingers openly laugh at the magician's pain, delighted to see him shamed so terribly. Thus, Nolan implicates the audience in the fracas, making them responsible for driving the demand for the magicians to perform more dangerous stunts and encouraging the very public feud between the two because they will accept nothing less**.

Through it all, Nolan uses legerdemain as a way of blurring the line between the two men. Only at the end does one emerge looking more twisted than the other, and everything that comes before it makes "allegiance" impossible: one understands Angier's anger over his wife's death, but his vicious response to an accident makes Borden into another victim. Then, we see Borden slip in and out of an abusive attitude toward his wife, Sarah (Rebecca Hall), that so torments her that the audience can no longer exactly root for him, either. The point of The Prestige is not to divide the audiences into facile "Team ____" camps but to show how such obsessions ruin people. When Angier's assistant/mistress Olivia (Scarlett Johansson, saddled with the only underwritten part in the film), seemingly defects to Borden and insists to the streetwise magician that she's telling the truth about wanting to come to him, he rightly notes, "Now that is a slippery notion in our line of work." We cannot be sure if she is lying, even though the hurt she expresses at having been originally sent to Borden by Angier as if a mere pawn appears genuine.

Johansson and Hall bear most of the film's emotion as the men harden over the course of the narrative, and their constant feelings of neglect and bitterness over being relegated to secondary importance in the lives allow Nolan to step outside what might have been a solipsistic venture to show how others are affected by such quibbles. Never is this more evident than when Olivia is in the room when Angier's hatred moves beyond its original motivation: "I don't care about my wife," he screams when unable to figure out Borden's Transported Man trick. "I care about his secret." Her look of shocked disgust mirrors our own, and it's no wonder she leaves him before he eventually stoops to reusing the water escape and actually invoking his wife's memory as nothing more than a method of enticing the crowd.

Yet Nolan's greatest method of stepping outside the fight long enough to gauge both its absurdity and its universality involves the bizarre but ingenious use of Nikola Tesla. David Bowie not only gives his best performance, a dubious honor in a secondary career consisting mainly of extended cameos. But he tops even his performance as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tesla is the perfect historical figure to feature in Nolan's period piece, as, like the faithful set design, he comes straight out of reality but, like the madness of a magician's war, he has an element of absurdity to him. Nolan flew out to meet Bowie directly after the rocker turned him down, an action that seems less a case a fandom and more proof that Nolan knew exactly what and who the part called for. Bowie certainly knows his way around a silly concept, and his straight-faced take on something as inherently ludicrous as Ziggy Stardust suits him to play Tesla in middle age, no longer enjoying the respect he once commanded but not yet a broken old man lost in his ideas. Tesla's eccentricity bubbles to the surface, but Bowie checks it behind an exterior of aloof propriety. Having become rock royalty, Bowie behaves like a self-made aristocrat, refined but kooky, with the added suspicion that he might lose everything as he was not born into his status.


Tesla exists in the film mainly to supply Angier with a great plot device that will take his magic show to the next level, but he also serves to take the audience outside of the main story to show how commonplace something as ridiculous as professional rivalry turned personal. Tesla hides in a compound surrounded by electrified fence, wary of the goons of Thomas Edison, who eventually find and destroy his lab. Like Angier and Borden, Tesla and Edison were both masters of their shared profession, and together they could have advanced technology even more than they did on their own. Instead, Edison brutally stamped out Tesla, portraying the Austro-Hungarian emigré's alternating current technology as the deadly, uncontrollable work of a madman. Thus, Tesla's presence in the film plays beautifully into Nolan's method of making the fantastical concrete: lest we think this story of fighting magicians be ridiculous, consider that these two innovative geniuses were reduced to slandering each other, too stubborn and greedy to ever concede that the other could ever be right. Amusingly, Tesla grounds the film even though he introduces its most absurd element: the device that allows Angier to perform what is for all intents and purposes real magic, leading Cutter to marvel that a "wizard" designed the trick. The scientist's bitterness over his colleagues' complete rejection of his poetic ideas about science are tucked neatly not only in his caustic quote that man's "grasp exceeds his nerve" but in the letter he sends to Angier with his completed machine. Tesla urges the magician to destroy it, but even in print his plea seems hollow and perfunctory; magicians are the only people left who can get away with showing people something they cannot fathom. To do so as a scientist is career suicide.

Without going into complex detail of the machine Tesla gives to Angier, its side effect brings the theme of duality to an extreme. Where Inception visualized the duality in a person by internalizing it and showing how two projections of the same person could walk around his mind, The Prestige takes one person and multiplies them (here come the spoilers I want to get at). Tesla's machine produces copies of Angier, and only one can survive each show; suddenly, the crucifixion pose of martyrdom that the magician makes at the beginning and is repeated later takes on a chilling implication. Meanwhile, the revelation that Borden's ingénieur and assistant Fallon is his identical twin explains the sharp divide in personality. Suddenly, the occasionally stiff performance Bale gives morphs into his finest work: when he looked half-enthused when Sarah came to him with news of pregnancy and muttered a throwaway line that Fallon should have been there to hear the news, now we understand that it was Alfred's brother who received the news. In retrospect, the performances Bale and Hall give are heart-wrenching, which may feel like a cheat but see how affecting they are as you watch the film more than once to see that there is genuine emotion here. Hall in particular is devastating: Nolan turns the idea of seeing a calm, loving person one day and a monster the next plays as a low-key take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it's Sarah who's left not knowing whether the man she interacts with each day will be the one who loves her or the one who cares for Olivia.

That depth of understanding and character insight amidst the broken narrative makes the best case yet for Nolan as a filmmaker with a grasp on his ideas: where he and editor Lee Smith let too much get away from them in The Dark Knight, but this film grants them the freedom to toy with expectations while still having a clear idea of what each cut means. Borden marvels at a Chinese magician who pretends to be crippled even off the stage, something his then-friend Angier cannot spot because he could not imagine taking his act with him. Later, we see Borden's own commitment, not simply with the nature of his and his brother's portrayal of Fallon but in a key scene where Borden does not take off his mustache at dinner with Sarah because he feels he needs to keep up appearances for those who might have just watched him.

Only after an hour passes does the opening shot, of a bunch of top hats lying in a field, become clear, but by then it's taken on a metaphorical importance, a sort-of magician's graveyard where rival conjurers are sent after destroying each other. By the time the film reaches its final shot, that idea has become cemented in a horrifying surreality, and Nolan has made his film into an unlikely treatise on the lengths artists go to for their craft. On repeat viewings, this theme echoes gently in the shots of those hats, and the refrain of magicians needing to get their hands "dirty," accompanied by later images of the murderous actions of both leads, finds a hauntingly poetic conclusion placed at the beginning of the story along with the rest of the ending.


I use the term 'poetic' in relation to Nolan -- for the first time -- with confidence. The Prestige adheres to his usual, economic style of placing in the frame that which is necessary to convey the scene and scarcely more than that; that is not to call him minimalistic, which would be egregiously off-base, but rather utilitarian. Items pop up in the mise-en-scène that are too ornamental for minimalism, but they serve a purpose beyond mere prettiness. With this film, however, Nolan successfully turns that style toward a slightly more abstract aesthetic to match his far-out subject matter. Who can forget the shot of Angier standing inside Tesla's complex under a blanket of heavy fog, only for the scientist's assistant, Alley (Andy Serkis), to flip a switch and illuminate hundreds of light bulbs unencumbered by heavy, direct current wires, merely free bulbs that grow in the mist as if the souls of those who once owned those cloned hats.

Pay attention as well to the way the director uses the spotlight. Stage lights are hellish things, so bright they blind those on-stage, which has the upshot of preventing nervous performers from seeing anyone in the crowd but the problem of forcing the performer to look head-on into a miniature sun for an hour or two. They also give off intense heat, and even someone giving an undemanding performance for a high school band recital will be sweating within minutes. But the spotlight in The Prestige is cold and soft, extremely bright but in a way that seems to absorb the other lights in a room rather than overpower them. The light recalls the same spotlight, stolen from a cold winter's moon, that shone on Alex in A Clockwork Orange when his reprogrammers "demonstrate" him to a crowd of skeptics. There's nothing enticing about this limelight, only a soul-sucking maw that never looks more horrific than when it catches Julia drowning in the box, surrounding her with an ethereal aura that makes her look like a dying angel. Nolan returns to the power of that shot in the final moment, which adds the weight of its reveal even as Nolan overlaps the same speech Cutter gave at the start, making the true twist of the film that we truly knew everything about it after three minutes.

That Nolan should place the ending of his film right in the beginning should not surprise those familiar with his work. The director routinely bookends his films with matching shots, in which he returns to the first scene with similar, if not exact, mise-en-scène but radically altered circumstances. Memento showed us an unchanged protagonist who’d nevertheless become the antagonist. The Dark Knight ended under similar circumstances, though the hero who’d dipped into villainy understood what he’d become, and the savior seen at the beginning morphed into the shade of the true hero would save Gotham. Inception’s first shot only became clear at the film’s end, once the director had proven that, for him, dreams did not look so different from reality after all (or that he was making a meta-cinematic movie about movies, but that's a subject for another article).

I cannot quite say whether The Prestige is Nolan’s best work to date, not without a few more viewings of Inception under my belt (I think this will still come out on top). But what both films share is a visual adventurousness not characteristic of the director’s other movies and a focus on genre (and genre breakdown and subsequent reconstruction) without letting the themes overpower the movie, as they occasionally did in the otherwise magnificent Dark Knight. Additionally, the two show Nolan’s clearest grasp on densely layered narratives, leaving a trail of crumbs leading through his mazes that the audience does not notice until its unknowingly scuffled some of the trail and must piece a few broken segments back together.

I used to say that I preferred The Illusionist because I felt it better conveyed the feeling of wonder and excitement that magic created, yet now I see that no other film so perfectly embodies the twists, misdirection and density that great illusions require. Though Nolan has always loved his tricks, it nevertheless surprises that he should be the one to capture magic in the actual direction. What's fascinating about magic is that we all con ourselves into believing in it. No magician pulls his illusions to manipulate audience; he fills a need within ourselves that wants to see something strange, even if we know it's not real. So, Nolan really is a con artist, pulling the wool over our eyes to stretch out a three-minute experimental short film into a complex, thematically rich tale of obsession, artistic martyrdom and dualism that is literalized, then made abstract, then made literal once more when the magicians ultimately flip roles, Borden becoming the showman who embarrasses Angier, who, with the aid of "real magic," becomes the artistic genius. But it is only when it becomes clear that neither party truly wins that The Prestige cements its status as one of the strangest but most beautiful mainstream movies of the last 20 years, and perhaps the one Nolan film I could press myself to call a masterpiece.


*In yet another funny twist, 2006 contained a third magic film, Woody Allen's Scoop, set in modern times and starring both Jackman and Johansson.
**Consider how many people go to see actors shoot at each other and "die" in choreographed explosions compared to the number who will see a movie about a family dealing internally with a relative's death.

Second Thoughts: Public Enemies

[Edited: 7/21/2012]

The majority of mainstream critical opinion largely matched my initial reaction to Michael Mann's Public Enemies -- that it was an overlong, undercooked mash-up of the epic detail and design of Heat with the digital realism of Collateral and Miami Vice. Some reviews, however, have already flagged it as a modern masterpiece. Spirited, well-written defenses can be found all over the Web, with some of my particular favorites located at Kevin J. Olson's Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies and Doniphon's The Long Voyage Home. They, among others, argue that the disjointed minimalism of Public Enemies works to its benefit, not detriment, that the seemingly underdeveloped characters remain largely two-dimensional in our perception because Mann is using them to undermine the more romantic notions of the gangster genre.

Upon a second viewing, and after revisiting a number of Mann's other films and especially Miami Vice, I can appreciate and, to an extent, accept that argument. Public Enemies strikes me as the gangster equivalent of Jarhead: an attempt to demystify the allure of gangster violence the way Jarhead sought to deny the belief (stated within the film) that all war films inherently celebrate conflict due to their visceral content. It's a bold gambit, and a risky one, as Mendes' film went so far in the other direction that it perversely fulfilled its mission statement by being simply boring, a charge leveled at Mann's latest by its detractors.


Public Enemies opens in true Mann fashion, with only the sparest dialogue over shots of gangster John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) arriving at prison and hastily edited visual cues that reveal how he's already organized his escape with his incarcerated gang. The escape, as it must, goes awry, Dillinger's perfect plan foiled by the predictable influence of unpredictability. One of the gang loses his cool and beats a guard, resulting in the shooting of another guard and the subsequent alerting of the rest of the prison. As the crew makes a break for the getaway car, tower guards shoot and kill Walter, the only gang member Dillinger displayed any personal connection toward during the breakout, and Mann lingers on Dillinger as he watches the life fade from his friend's eyes and, at last, releases the man's hand as the car speeds away.

This moment references the protracted deaths in Miami Vice, which all seemed to drag out because of the digital video and the way it captured movement (bodies fell more slowly, it appeared), yet Mann ends with moment with curt finality, the body suddenly halting after being dragged along by the car. Dillinger pulls a gun as he closes the door and presses it to the throat of the man who botched the escape, before throwing him from the car and leaving his limp body on the side of the road as suddenly as he'd just seen his friend die. This immediate perversion of the romanticism of the previous death, combined with the look on Depp's face -- his eyes are as lifeless as the ones he stared into -- shows the real Dillinger under all the Robin Hood myths. Here is a man who compartmentalized emotion and dissipated it instantaneously, a man who would kill without a moment's hesitation.

This abrupt, immediate dissection of a mythos is then applied to FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), whom we meet chasing Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) through a field before dispatching him with a well-aimed rifle shot. Purvis has the same brooding look on his face as he watches Floyd bleed out, and he too steels himself from it, dumping whatever he felt just as quickly as it entered into his mind. I found the film soulless when I saw it in the theater, and I still think that's true; what I missed, perhaps in the thrill of finally seeing a Mann film on the big screen, is that it's because its lead characters have no souls.

The casting of the two leads reflects upon Mann's cheek. Depp, one of the most vivid, complexly cartoonish actors in the biz, plays his role entirely straight; his eyes have conveyed rakishness and danger before -- the Pirates of the Caribbean films come to mind -- but never with such cold intensity, not even when he played the tortured barber out for revenge in Sweeney Todd. He looks like a caged animal in Public Enemies, always looking for a way out even when things aren't so bad. Dillinger enjoyed a massive cult of personality during his robbery spree, sparked by his Robin Hood-esque refusal to take the money of customers, only the bank's. Mann, however, sees him as nothing more than a pathological criminal, driven to rob as if a biological need and willing to kill anyone who might threaten his safety.


Bale, coming off a string of blockbusters that were turning him into the growling, tough-guy hero of the new generation, plays a character every bit as blindly committed to simple-minded, borderline fascistic notions of justice and the law. Purvis stands up for J. Edgar Hoover (a deliciously campy Billy Crudup, who appears to be channeling all of Hoover's fetishes and kinks through his clipped, high-pitched whine) and meticulously follows the book on catching felons even though it's still being written. He believes in a code of ethics in his work, yet he displays a remarkable ability to dash that code in a moment's notice to catch a suspect. Dillinger naturally attracts our attention, with both the benefit of owning more screen time and of the seductive nature of crime in general, but Purvis is the true Mann protagonist: a man who violates his strict moral code despite placing utmost importance upon it. Bale here is Batman and John Connor used to ironic purpose to highlight the dubious ethics of lawmen given liberties to pursue criminals without oversight, an implicit political statement that Mann never forces onto the narrative.

The closest we get to character exposition from either comes from a romantically terse exchange between Dillinger and Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat-check girl who catches the robber's eye. When he punches out a customer and invites her to come with him, the two engage in that pat nonsense of "I don't even know you!" that comes with such whisk-you-off-your-feet moments, but Dillinger manages to sum up his life in a burst of dialogue that might be the first truly romantic thing he's ever said in his life: "I was raised on a farm in Moooresville, Indiana. My mama ran out on us when I was three, my daddy beat the hell out of me cause he didn't know no better way to raise me. I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey and you... what else you need to know?"

It's an attitude that pervades the picture as a whole: Mann is less concerned with what motivates these characters than how their actions define them, and that brief speech manages to be oddly charming while working as a sly dig at all the movies who take two hours to explain a criminal's behavior as the product of a bad childhood and greed. We're never given a reason for Dillinger robbing banks, nor even moments that show him taking pleasure in a large haul; yet the clinical way he runs his robberies, the way he lets the customers keep the money they have on them to build his mythos and to win over the hearts of ordinary citizens who might protect him simply in numbers, and his curt behavior in everyday situations reveal a calculating psychopath who knows how to manipulate things to his advantage. Likewise, Purvis, also clinical, betrays his code of conduct because he wants to succeed at his job, and if Dillinger will kill anyone to save his own skin, Purvis will cut any ethical corner to track down a criminal.


Yet each man has his limits. Dillinger, icy and murderous as he may be, clearly cares for Billie, and obviously not for any boost in social status either. He loves her so dearly that he even listens to her life story, and Mann places the sound of Billie recounting her childhood over shots of the two making love, signifying that allowing someone to delve into their past -- something Dillinger doesn't believe in -- is an act of spiritual unification and adoration every bit as physically romantic as sex. Purvis also displays his humanity with Billie; when the feds capture her and one agent beats her for information, until Purvis can no longer sit by and acquiesce to the loss of his morality and stops the torture.

Mann's films typically feature a confrontation of sorts between the "hero" and "villain" (that line is usually blurred) -- Miami Vice sitting at one extreme, where the entire film is about interactions between cops and criminals before the final battle, and at the other is The Insider, which derives much of its tension by assailing Jeffrey Wigand with unseen forces -- and Dillinger and Purvis do have a conversation about 50 minutes into the film, as Dillinger sits in a cell awaiting transfer after the cops catch a lucky break. The two establish an instant kinship with each other: neither derives much pleasure from his line of work -- only the more psychotic members of each side, such as Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), express any delight -- and they share an unspoken bond when Dillinger brings up death and the way you can see life drift from the eyes. The diner scene in Heat revealed basic truths of Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna and how they related to each other, and this scene works in the same fashion: Dillinger cuts to the heart of their differences by noting that Purvis likes to take criminals down from a distance, picking them off with a rifle shot after a plan comes together and the bad guys are outnumbered, while John is in the middle of a fracas, planning as he goes. They're both empty-hearted killers, but Purvis attempts to distance himself from this self-understanding.

The proximity of this confrontation to the similar pre-showdown battle of wits in Heat reflects the manner in which Public Enemies serves as a stylistic and thematic mélange of the director's filmography. It contains the same highly detailed crime procedural found in Heat, the minimalism of Thief, the grainy romanticism of digital forays Collateral and Miami Vice, the faithful period recreation of The Last of the Mohicans and the unorthodox biopic structuring of Ali. It builds to an overload of Mann's various styles, and, frankly, it doesn't always work. Surprisingly, the picture looks sharper on Blu-Ray, the shifting digital and film shots not clashing so violently as they did in the theater; however, I still find myself wanting to take in this world and being constantly denied.

But if Public Enemies serves as a grab-bag of Mann's corpus, it also is perhaps the one film in his catalog that most concerns the cinema or, more accurately, the effect of the cinema. The people who endured the Great Depression, as many do now in our current financial predicament, escaped to the theater for respite. Furthermore, this was the age before television, when people received news either on the radio or as newsreels that preceded features at the movies (when Dillinger is transferred by plane, Mann shows reporters waiting at the end of the runway and even provides a POV shot of one of their cameras filming the landing). Ergo, criminals like Dillinger could easily appear larger than life, as normal citizens only ever saw them on screens bigger than themselves. Many supporters -- myself included -- of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers cite the film as "ahead of its time," yet we see here that the public's love affair with violent criminals stretches back decades, perhaps further -- when cops drive Dillinger to jail, citizens line the streets to wave ecstatically at him. One of the key scenes of the movie, in which Dillinger heads to the local theater, which displays his mugshot on the screen before the movie and asks the audience to look around for the criminals "among you." It's obviously a typical PSA, written out by the Feds and delivered to theaters to announce to their patrons, and the scene works less as a moment of suspense and more as a perverse sort of wish fulfillment for Dillinger, who gets to see himself on the big screen before the movie comes on; in a way, he got top billing. Of course, Dillinger dies just outside the Biograph Theater, after seeing Manhattan Melodrama, during which he clearly envisions himself as Clark Gable (whose character was, ironically, modeled after the gangster).


That brief romanticizing of Dillinger through cinema, while ultimately revealed to be hollow, informs some other scenes, most specifically the one where he strolls into an FBI office and walks around in the room dedicate to his case without being caught. The sheer effrontery of his actions betray a man who, for all his cold danger, is starting to buy into his own myth. There are even a few shots that utilize the same golden hue as the Godfather films, and for the same purpose: such shots establish the legend of the character even as Mann gently subverts it with the terrible truth of that character. Mann fills the screen with death, but he never exploits it, instead using it as a drawn-out yet blunt method of breaking down the allure of the criminal life. Those shots of Purvis and Dillinger watching men die at the start telegraph this, as does the end of the astonishing Little Bohemia shootout -- how great is it to actually see the smoke from gunfire fill a room in a realistic fashion? -- a sudden caesura that replaces the bursts of Thompson and BAR fire with a shot of a gangster's final, ragged breath, visible in the cold, floating in the air like a soul leaving the body.

Yet Mann clearly has the same dalliance with the romanticism of crime that Dillinger has, and he devotes a brief but telling couple of scenes to the changing face of crime in America. The betting pool controlled by the Mafia, who eliminate competition and establish a single betting operation for the entire country, represents the death of individual crime, even among organizations like the mob. Dillinger is a dying breed, his charisma derived in part because he was so unapologetically a criminal where later gangsters always tried to pass themselves off as "legitimate." He doesn't have a waste management front or a friend in Congress; he's just got a Tommy gun and a collection of contacts he met in prison.

The name of the film is Public Enemies, yet the ad campaign only featured Depp and Bale: in the film, the FBI receives more scrutiny and scorn than Dillinger. Purvis is just as dangerous as Public Enemy Number One, just as loose with his morals and just as willing to take extreme measures to get what he wants. This is not Mann's indictment of police so much as a snapshot of a time when criminals and cops were identifiable, when cops didn't need to go undercover and criminals didn't need to hide behind loopholes: Purvis hints that the line between the two is about to blur, his showy, fashionable dress and distanced behavior edging near our perception of a mob boss. Hoover, whom Mann reminds us never served in any field capacity in apprehending criminals, introduces draconian tactics to fighting crime that greatly infringed upon rights and liberties, calling into question the worth of a police force that also strong-armed the innocent. Perhaps, then, Mann suggests that the de-mystification of crime also affected those on the side of the law.

As it happened with Miami Vice, I find my opinion significantly altered, but I am not prepared to call Public Enemies the rousing success the way I would Mann's previous feature. As his other digital/film combos, he wants to place us into the action without gimmickry and to let us experience emotions as they come. But Public Enemies is about two characters who don't know how to process emotions normally, Dillinger because he spent his formative years in prison for a grocery shoplifting that didn't warrant the punishment, Purvis because he's so thirsty for glory he's set aside his humanity. This creates a dissonance between Mann's intentions and the nature of the characters that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, leading to occasional lulls. Nevertheless, I understand now what Mann was trying to do, and, like Miami Vice, I can confidently say that I'll be revisiting it for years.

The Dark Knight

Has enough time passed for the hype and the resulting backlash surrounding Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight for a reasonable evaluation to be made. This wildly ambitious follow-up to the inventive but largely by-the-book Batman Begins certainly struck a chord with audiences -- this reviewer included -- to the tune of over a billion dollars worldwide, but as so often happens, enjoyment turned into poetic waxing, which framed those who didn't enjoy it as much as the herd as virulent haters until, at last, the lambasting riled enough of those people to the point that they did become haters. I saw The Dark Knight six times while it was in theaters, and I say that less an expression of personal triumph and more a lament of that inner flame of geekiness that shall never die. However, I have not watched the film since the end of 2008, so I trust that I've stepped aside from the film long enough to make my definitive opinion of the film: it is, for all the hype, indeed a masterpiece (of genre if not cinema as a whole), albeit one with some key flaws. [This review contains spoilers because, let's be honest, if you haven't seen it by now you don't care anyway.]

Christian Bale's Batman is a justifiable bone of contention (well, not so much the character as the voice he uses), but he brings more to the always-neglected alter-ego of Batman, Bruce Wayne, than all of the previous actors combined. His Wayne pauses for the reflection afforded in comic book films only to Spider-Man, but Nolan and Bale leave out the 2-D camp of Raimi's franchise, instead tackling a traumatized young man's attempt to reconcile his desire for good with the mounting consequences of his actions.

Batman's impact on Gotham is evident an early scene where men dressed as Batman (copybats?) and armed with guns attempt to take down a deal involving Scarecrow before the real Batman bursts in to save the day. Bats ties up his would-be helpers alongside the villains and heads back into the night. "What gives you the right?" asks one pudgy vigilante, "What's the difference between you and me?" Batman dodges the question, but that's the underlying issue of the film, one compounded to the umpteenth degree by the emergence of the Joker.

Superhero films present the hero as the only one who can stop the bad guy, that Lex Luthor or Doctor Octopus or whomever will subjugate all the normal people of the world if the superpowered or at least most-inventive person does not stop them. The Dark Knight's biggest triumph is that it destroys this notion of the necessity and fundamental justice of vigilantes. Nolan, along with his brother Jonathan and their writing partner David S. Goyer, posit that a figure like the Joker exists because of people like Batman. The Joker is nihilism incarnate, a combination of Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Hannibal Lecter and insectile tics, and he comes to Gotham not to help criminals reassert themselves -- the first action of the film is his elaborate heist to steal mob money -- but to provide a sort of cosmic balance to the city. When he receives half of the mob's collective money pool, he burns it without hesitation, simply to prove that he does not need such material incentives.

Joker quickly dispatches mob bosses and high-ranking law officials alike, and his unrestrained brutality enrages Bruce. He blames the mobsters who hired this beast to kill Batman, neglecting to note that they did so as much out of fear as anything else. Alfred (Michael Caine) is there to cut through this nonsense: "You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."

The Joker has always been the perfect foil for Batman, in that Batman differs from his archenemy only because of his code of ethics. Joker sees how ridiculous those rules are, and so he tears through the world like a whirling dervish, killing as many criminals as police officers. The entire crux of their conflict in this film is Joker's desire to force Batman to see the contradictions in his moral code -- after all, how is it that stopping just sort of killing someone is considered inherently heroic? Indeed, all of the Joker's attacks are carefully structured to get under Batman's skin and hopefully provoke the masked hero into revealing the darkness within.

Largely, he's successful. In the course of the film, Batman tortures a mobster for information by throwing him from a height he knows to be nonlethal, indiscriminately causes millions of dollars of damages to the city, beats the Joker to within an inch of his life and even designs his own personal wiretapping system that uses every cell phone in Gotham as both a tracking device and sonar. In the film's best stretch, starting with an inspired chase through Gotham leading through an interrogation between Joker and Batman and its ultimate result, brings this idealistic conflict to a head. I say interrogation between the two characters, because the scene reveals as much about Batman as it does Joker and his plans. With his friend Harvey Dent and his love Rachel tied up in separate warehouses filled with explosives, Batman finally comes undone and starts beating Joker to a pulp. The villain just laughs as he tells Batman, to Wayne's mounting horror, that the hero can do nothing to frighten him.

Equally as important as Joker's attempt to corrupt Batman, though, is his quest to do the same with District Attorney Harvey Dent, revealed upon repeat viewings as the film's true protagonist. Aaron Eckhart's performance was largely overshadowed -- as was everyone else's -- by both the mastery of Heath Ledger's performance and the increased pressure/praise placed upon his death, but he's almost on the same level. Dent is the positive side of Batman's vigilantism; while Batman breaks the law and many sets of ethics that go beyond written legality, he can also inspire truly good men and women to action. Dent finds a way to bring up half of Gotham's organized criminals on charges at once, and in his handsome and charismatic face Gotham has a legitimate path to a brighter future, one not forged by an unstable billionaire getting out his demons on the faces of Gotham's criminals. But the Joker's actions bring out Dent's dark side as well, and when Joker's deathtrap kills Rachel and leaves him with a half his face burned off, something deep within Dent fully snaps. He's the tragic hero of The Dark Knight, or one of them at least, a shining hero brought to madness and ruin by the story's end. Some fans were disappointed that Dent dies at the end, but he could not have continued to live in Nolan's semi-realistic view of the Batman franchise. Furthermore, by the end he exists as the Joker's prize trophy, proof of the fine line that separates people between good and evil; he'd served the story as far as it could go.

Batman, on the other hand, has the possibility for self-realization. When he proudly presents his wiretapping device to Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Fox responds with revulsion, threatening to quit on the spot, only agreeing when Wayne tacitly informs him that he will destroy the device once he finds the Joker. As he stands over Dent's corpse at the end, Wayne makes the choice to preserve Dent's legacy and Gotham's budding sense of hope by finally accepting responsibility for his actions. Yes, he's also taking the blame for Dent's killing spree to preserve his friend's image, but Batman comes to understand that he's royally messed up, and allowing the city to align him with the villains is what they need to find a true morality.

If it does all of this so well, then, what are its flaws. For one thing, Christopher Nolan needs to learn a thing or two about editing. Some scenes, particularly a sequence near the end involving two boats full of fleeing Gothamites pitted against each other by the Joker, run far too long, while others cut out without any regard to narrative. Case in point: when the Joker crashes Wayne's fundraiser for Harvey, he chucks Rachel out the window, causing Batman to leap out and save her and then...what? It just ends. We can infer that the Joker assumed that his work was done there, even that he guessed that Dent was Batman after watching the cowled freak jump after Harvey's girlfriend so quickly, but when it comes to storytelling there's artistic ellipsis and flat-out laziness, and this scene clearly belongs in the latter category.

There's also the matter of Rachel Dawes, substituting Maggie Gyllenhaal for Katie Holmes but doing so little with the character it's hard to notice either way. Wayne's potential love interests never have anything to do in the Batman films, precisely because Bruce Wayne is too traumatized to think of anything other than his quest to clean up crime. Oh, he'd like to, sure, but something will always get in the way. The writers know this, which is one of the reasons, I suspect, they decided to kill her. Her death destabilizes both Batman and Dent, but in some way it plays like the writers liberating themselves and the franchise from the convention forced upon it. Nevertheless, they could and should have taken the time to flesh out her or any of the grand total of two women in this film instead of presenting both as plot devices.

These are major flaws, yes, but I still find myself enjoying The Dark Knight more than almost any other film made in the last decade. I devoted no space to Ledger's performance, because at this point I wonder if anything more can be said. To call it a tour de force is almost underselling it, as he so inhabits the core of the character's being that the more impish iteration that Nicholson played seems cartoonish in comparison. The film's detractors tend to love him too, but they shout that no one would care about this movie if not for his performance. I've discussed this argument elsewhere so I'll not revive it here, but let's all consider for a moment that many of the people who say this then point to Iron Man as the superior film, utterly refusing to apply their own logic to a film that is carried wholly by Robert Downey Jr. Ledger's performance is transcendent, yes, but it's one cog in a larger machine. Apart from a boxed-in Gyllenhaal (it's not her fault) and the Batman side of Bale, everyone in the film gives bravura performances, including wonderful minor work from character actors such as Keith Szarabajka (Holtz from Angel) -- and let's not leave out Gary Oldman, who brings levels to Commissioner Gordon rarely seen in any of the comics. Nolan films some scenes a bit sloppily, but Wally Pfister's cinematography is beyond reproach, and he largely distracts us when the editing becomes an issue.

A conservative columnist named Andrew Klavan brought down the wrath of the Internet when he wrote a rave about the film interpreting it as a validation of George W. Bush's presidency, that its hero justifies the use of extreme techniques such as torture and and wiretapping to stop evil. The funny thing is, Klavan's right, just not in the way he thinks. The Dark Knight is a crime epic, with Dent on one side, mobsters on the other, and Batman and Joker in between. Batman fights to capture the mobsters, while Joker works to simply push the line deeper and deeper into Good's territory until no one bothers with petty morality and contrived rules. Batman's techniques are not worthy of praise: they are what moves him almost past the point of no return. If anything, The Dark Knight makes its message too obvious, that the letter of the law must be followed even when times are desperate, otherwise we'll slip into anarchy. Furthermore, if we accept Klavan's belief that Batman stands in for Bush, then we must also consider how Batman inspires the Joker. If we extrapolate plot and interpretation, then Bush is directly responsible for the terrorists he fights. In that sense, Klavan just might be more on the money than any other analyst; how many terrorists did the Iraq invasion create as opposed to how many were there beforehand?

When Gordon explains to his young son that Batman is "the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now," he's acknowledging that both Batman and Gotham are corrupt, that the Caped Crusader's destructive justice is what this town has brought upon itself. Yet this ending is not wholly bleak, as in the end, both Batman and the residents of Gotham display a willingness to accept a sense of responsibility, and that this is merely the darkest part of night before the break of dawn.


**Post-script: I couldn't find anywhere to put this in the actual review, but I love that Alfred, when presented with a boat full of gorgeous young dancers to "watch over," is merely cheesed that rubbing them down with suntan lotion just means more work.

Public Enemies

There may be no major Hollywood director as underrated as Michael Mann. Only Martin Scorsese can claim to capture America's seedy underworld better, and even the master lacks Mann's attention to detail. He's far from a "style over substance" director, though; masterpieces like Heat and The Insider take the time to examine their characters outside the superb action sequences. Sadly, that character examination is sorely lacking in his new film, Public Enemies, in which his characters are so calculatingly shot that they might as well be a part of the beautiful backgrounds.

Maybe that's the point: too many films destroy our mythic figures by applying cheap psychology to them, and Mann is trying to spare us yet more talk of abusive fathers or warped moral codes. Such explanations are hinted at, but they're delivered through lines that mock such conventions, as if the movie buff Dillinger is as sick of them as we are. Yet a film with a known outcome needs some sort of revisionist analysis to justify its existence, especially one clocking in at two and a half hours.

As a result, Johnny Depp and Christian Bale – two of the most brilliantly off-kilter actors in the business – never get to sink their teeth into their roles, those of infamous gangster John Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Pruvis, respectively. These men, as with the cop and robber in “Heat,” are perfect foils for one another: Dillinger robs banks because he cannot accept authority, while Purvis is trying to prove the usefulness of the FBI, which is still in its infancy in the ‘30s. Both spend a great deal of time staring into the dying eyes of fallen comrades, only furthering their resolve.

However, Mann spends so much time playing up both sides as heroic archetypes that neither ever becomes interesting. Heat worked because both the cop and the robber were trapped, tragic victims of their own pride and world view. Pacino and De Niro's characters were perfect foils because they saw in each other a kindred spirit, the only person who could fully understand their turmoil. There is no equivalent to the diner scene in Public Enemies, nor is there even a successful juxtaposition between the two: we merely see the Robin Hood-esque robber and the agent who is no less heroic for taking him down.

Dillinger and Purvis duke it out in a Depression-era America painstakingly researched and perfectly recreated that it would look as real as anything you’d see on your own street corner even without the documentary-like direction. But that camera work, combined with the sharp detail of digital cameras, makes the film feel more like a technical exercise than a visceral crime epic.

Nevertheless, Mann has a gift for pacing, and Public Enemies zips along despite its padded length, which lapses into a loop of planning-robbery-aftermath. Its action scenes, the best of which being the shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge, jump out of nowhere and, true to heists and crackdowns, are over as soon as they begin. The little details of Dillinger's heists, from letting the customers keep their money to tying hosting to the getaway car to discourage any gunfire, give these scenes a sense of visceral realism. True to form, Mann makes the gunfire loud and the muzzle flashes blinding -- be sure to bring some aspirin with you, just in case.

If only the actors had something to do, they might have filled the gap between these brief but overpowering shooting matches. Marion Cotillard, in her first role since her Oscar win for La Vie en Rose, is completely flat as Dillinger’s main squeeze, and Billy Crudup brings nothing more to the role of J. Edgar Hoover than a bad accent. Mann has an under-appreciated knack for getting great performances from his actors, be they master craftsmen like Al Pacino and Daniel Day-Lewis or more star-oriented players like Tom Cruise and Will Smith (who genuinely earned his Oscar nomination in the otherwise unremarkable Ali). Only Stephen Graham’s manic portrayal of Baby Face Nelson breaks free of the cage that holds everyone else; Dillinger lives the gangster life for the media that turn him into a sensation, but Nelson is just plain crazy, and Graham pulls it off beautifully.

I don't want to suggest that the film is boring, mind you; the shootouts only continue to prove that Mann is the finest action director working today. But what's with the shaky-cam? The reason why the battle in Heat remains one of the great cinematic gunfights is the simple fact that you can tell what's going on. In an age where action editing consists of forcing a first-person perspective on the audience to the point that we can no longer make out all the vast special effects, I was looking forward to Michael Mann showing the kids how to do it right. These scenes vacillate between the artful camera work that defined his old action sequences with the hands-on digital approach that informed recent work like the brilliant Collateral and the misfire Miami Vice, and they left me wanting more even as I was absorbed in the moment.

In the end, “Public Enemies” is a technically resplendent film that never shifts out of first gear until its chief action sequence, only to shift down again as soon as it’s over. Mann always was too fond of his scripts, which sometimes paid off (Heat) and sometimes derailed what might have been a decent flick (Miami Vice); this most definitely fits the latter. Well, assuming this film has a point at all, because I've yet to figure out why Mann made it at all. As it is, it’s certainly worth your money as a popcorn flick, but too much of this film, right down to its title, is uncharacteristically and tragically generic.

Terminator Salvation

Funny as it may seem, technology has rendered the Terminator franchise irrelevant. Even as we increasingly automate our industries, the sheer existence of the Internet throws a monkey wrench into the bedrock of the story: if Skynet is now a virus instead of some bank of supercomputers, then its power is limited only to the number of computers it can corrupt. But as we saw in the abysmal Terminator 3, Skynet still stooped to nuclear war, which is ridiculous for two very important reasons: 1) nuclear annihilation isn't big on the fear list in a post-Cold War world and 2) Skynet is only hurting itself. In the original films, it had a reason to nuke mankind: as a centralized computer, it had a solid position to defend. But a software program spread via the Internet is only hurting itself with nuclear bombs, as they destroy computers not only with the blast itself but the electromagnetic pulse that emits with a detonation.

This has been irking me since the last installment of the franchise, but I must admit: watching Terminator Salvation, it was the last thing on my mind. What did occupy space in my cranium were thoughts like "Did they really just say that?" "Has this guy ever even worked with a home video camera?" "Christian Bale, who is selective when it comes to scripts, picked this?" I had some other thoughts as well, but none I would share in civilized company.

Terminator Salvation doesn't ask much of the audience, at least not when it comes to the plot: in 2003, a death-row inmate dies. Cut to the present-future, and he's alive again. Despite not knowing where or when he is and what all the robots running around killing people are, he fights. No one questions this. Swap out some names, rinse, later and repeat, and you've got the movie.

But McG is asking a lot of us when he subjects us to the most blatantly obvious commercial for action figures since Transformers, which doesn't even count since that's based on toys to begin with. He has a high standard to live up to in the shadow of James Cameron, but whatever pressure he might have felt, that doesn't excuse his choices.

Salvation seeks to explore the war we caught glimpses of in the other films, but fails to establish a mood. I was surprised to discover that the film did indeed have a cinematographer, as the film at no point has a clear sense of placement, lighting or shadow. Characters appear in dead-center as opposed to obeying the rule of thirds, which might seem rebellious if it didn't look so clueless.

The inmate in question is Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), who emerges from a slumber or a coma or -- oh, who am I kidding? They tell us he's a Terminator in the trailer. Well, at least he doesn't realize he's a Terminator, and he stumbles across the wasteland of old Los Angeles until he stumbles across -- whaddya know -- young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). Marcus, of course, doesn't know what a Terminator is, but he can fix a broken radio almost instantly and rewire a car that hasn't run in years. Reese is happy just to be leaving the death trap, and he tags along without a moment's pause.

Meanwhile, John Connor is a high-level officer in the Resistance -- not, as the first three films would have us believe, the leader. He's played by Christian Bale, who growls the growl of the growly growler, a growler who's stared death in the face. And growled. When things get really tense, he yells. Late in the film, he gives a speech about the need to retain humanity in the war, lest they become like the machines, in his growly anti-human voice.

McG contrasts the stories of Connor and the father he's yet to meet, bridging them via Marcus. Marcus ends up with Connor after some giant gatherers take Kyle prisoner. The machine in question is a marvel of idiocy: it's over 60 feet tall, Lord knows how many tons, but it manages to sneak up on Kyle, Marcus and a group of survivors in a broken down building. I'll repeat that: a 60-ft tall robot that moves on land snuck up on someone. Also, despite its size, it can only pick up two people at a time. After collecting a number of prisoners, it dumps them in a facility that apparently produces sparks. These are only the tip of the iceberg of the many absurdities Skynet perpetuates: if they hate humans so much, why are all of their ground units anthropomorphic? And when Skynet unveils its new T-800 line at the end, its face looks suspiciously like Arnold's. Now, this is not a new flaw, but why does Skynet use one human model to create units to infiltrate human cells?

The human side doesn't make much more sense. The first two installments of the franchise depicted a future in which mankind is on the brink of annihilation and they're lucky if they can cobble together a gun to shoot. Population is down here as well, but somehow the Resistance have an air force. Where the hell do they get the fuel for the planes? Did Skynet seriously not torch the oil fields in between the nuclear strikes? Have they become the Rain Man of dystopic, rebellious robots?

Maybe I wouldn't ask so many questions if the action scenes were any good, but McG's haphazard direction ruins that. He's got some halfway decent visuals, but he just throws things on-screen that he thinks are cool with no regard to impact. And it doesn't help that the sound drops with nearly every explosion and every gunshot. Seriously, I rarely take the time to note this, but I stayed through the credits to spot the name of Nigel Albermaniche, the sound editor. I'm always willing to give filmmakers endless chances to prove themselves -- I keep seeing Michael Bay films, don't I? -- but it is my sincere hope that this man never works in entertainment again. I have never heard such terrible sound mixing, and I've seen The Room. I almost feel sorry for the guy, as earlier in the day I saw Drag Me to Hell, which boasts the best sound I've heard in years. I've never been great at discerning good mixing, but that film was stellar. It only makes this half-assed fizzle all the more pathetic.

However, I would have forgiven Albermaniche had he done us all the favor of dropping the sound when the characters spoke. I knew I was in for a long ride in the opening prison scene, where a scientist stricken with terminal cancer (Helena Bonham Carter, delivering just enough lines to collect a nice paycheck) convinces Marcus to sign over his body: he agrees provided he can kiss her. When he pulls back, he whispers "So that's what death tastes like." Oh God. Later, the writers display a total lack of regard for continuity: someone says that Connor is "the prophesized leader of the Resistance." First of all, John Connor is not the 'prophesized' leader of anything, because that isn't a word. Second, how can he be the prophesied leader? No one other than John knew this was coming. And he's been a part of the Resistance from the start, so he didn't just come out of nowhere. It's like they simply thought that the not-word 'prophesized' added gravitas. And they're delivered by actors who clearly don't care: Bale is so one note that he nearly undoes a career of unpredictability. Common, the worst of them all, is almost certainly reading his lines from a cue behind the camera.

In retrospect, I should have seen this coming: a celebrated franchise from one of the all-time great science fiction writer-directors in the hands of an established hack who insists on calling himself "McG." But in a time when America can elect a black president, I allowed myself to hope. Now my heart is cold again. I'm giving this half a star, and that's entirely for Anton Yelchin. He's the only one who delivers his lines convincingly, and he actually seems like a kid who grew up in a post-apocalyptic world. The rest is a wash. What is the point of this film? It ends in the same place it started: with John Connor fighting robots. It won't revive interest in the franchise, because people still love the old films. At best, it makes Terminator 3 look like a passable film, which it isn't. That's how bad this is. If this is where humans are taking art with the advent of new technology, then no wonder the machines want to rise up and kill us.