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.

Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011)

I will not ask why Cars 2 exists because I've seen the merchandising figures from the first film. Nevertheless, it's a question I couldn't force out of my mind while watching this two-hour bore. After a string of ambitious, beautiful films that established Pixar as one of the most respected studios on Earth, they finally sink to the sad state of their bosses at Disney. This isn't a film, it's a preview of coming attractions at a theme park. I didn't stay through all the credits, but I nearly did just to see if it ended with an advertisement to come check out Cars Land next year at Disney California Adventure.

Underlining the sheer cynicism of this film's conception is the near-total lack of characterization. John Lasseter, whose erstwhile evocation of the young, winsomely childlike George Lucas here brings out the mercenary side of the Star Wars creator, transparently structures the film to avoid personal connection in favor of selling toys. Forgettable as the first Cars was, it at least spent time with its characters; Cars 2 throttles past the drama between Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his loving but tiresome best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), preferring instead to get in as many new vehicles as possible to make sure Disney's merchandise wing ends this year in the black.

Brian De Palma: Dressed to Kill

After using his student collaboration Home Movies to grab for that early sense of anarchic satire, Brian De Palma was all set to adapt Cruising, a thriller about a homophobic killer preying on gay bars in New York City. But that project fell through, eventually going to William Friedkin, who captured the gaudiness De Palma would no doubt have brought to the film but lacked any of the warped, witty dimensionality of Hitchcock's disciple. Undaunted, De Palma decided to make his own look at the effects of questioned sexual identity on the psyche. The result combined the disparate aspects of the director's early period into their first cohesive whole, mixing comedy, suspense, and the director's unique ability to at once flagrantly plagiarize and make even the most blatant ripoff something wholly his own.

If Obsession could be directly traced back to Hitchcock's Vertigo, Dressed to Kill clearly owes its nightmarish, violent sexual reverie to Psycho. Yet where De Palma's dreamlike tone in his first full Hitchcock homage matched the oneiric, rending tone of Vertigo in ways that reflected but also stretched and contorted the master, Dressed to Kill completely opposes the realist, spare vibe of Psycho. De Palma's film actually opens and closes with two separate dream sequences, both of which mix recollections of Hitchcock (both feature showers) with De Palma's own films, specifically Carrie.

Psycho showed Hitchcock using ripped-from-the-headlines realism against itself in one of his most brilliant subversions (albeit one slightly undermined by an adherence to psychological summary that Hitch does not ironically undermine and complicated in the way he often did). Meanwhile, Dressed to Kill plays out like the twisted fantasy inside Norman Bates' mind while he commits his crimes, a sleazy yet perversely conservative and quaint presentation that demonstrates De Palma's gift for splitting reality along the illusory. Though shot on location around New York City, Dressed to Kill has the look and feel of classic Hollywood -- even the subways are unreal and attain the same balance between glitz and gaudiness that defines the film's aesthetic.

Immediately establishing that real/fake dichotomy, De Palma opens his film with the same graceful, slow-motion tracking shot into a shower that began Carrie, only De Palma makes use of the then-new Steadicam to add three dimensional movement, no longer forced to move in a rigid line but gently curving through a bedroom into the bathroom beyond. Inside is a man shaving at the mirror and his wife in the shower, and De Palma naturally moves right on past the guy and moves right in with Angie Dickinson. Where the protagonist of Carrie undercut her own semi-erotic soaping with a discovery that revealed her sexual ignorance and fear, Dickinson's Kate, a bored housewife, washes herself with movements suggesting she isn't just trying to get clean. Her scrubbing morphs into masturbation, but suddenly a male figure appears behind her, choking her screams of fear as steam billows and obscures her from her husband's view. Suddenly, De Palma cuts to Dickinson in bed with her husband, revealing it had been not a dream but a fantasy, the severity of her lust an outgrowth from the clumsy thrusting of her inept husband. Kate then goes to see her therapist, but one doesn't need a degree to know that she must be unfulfilled if she's having lustful daydreams about rape.

Her sexual hunger is such that she even hits on the psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), who calmly turns down her advances. Dejected, Kate heads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where De Palma crafts perhaps the greatest sequence of his career to this point, or at least the best one since "Be Black, Baby." The scene starts simply, Kate sitting on a bench, spying on the men in the place, all of whom are either with a lady or hitting on one. De Palma then reverses the voyeurism when a black-clad man walks up and begins ogling Kate in turn. Completely wordless, the sequence highlights the always moving camera when the graceful movement becomes more complicated and labyrinthine as Kate and the mystery man enter in a cat-and-mouse chase, in which the roles of cat and mouse swap so often it is impossible to tell who is pursuing whom. (In pure De Palma fashion, the director ensures to stop for a moment just so he can frame Kate by paintings of nude women, particularly a giant vagina he frame in the center -- sometimes, the Rule of Thirds just does not apply.) At last, Kate stumbles her way out of the museum, only for the man to throw down her set of gloves that he nicked, luring her into his cab like a trail of bait leading to one of those old boxes propped up by a stick. He drags her inside and begins kissing her and feeling her up, and naturally the cabbie tilts his mirror to get a peek instead of worrying about a woman being pulled forcefully into the car and set upon. But Kate clearly enjoys the situation, all the more so for its element of danger, and she heads back to the man's apartment for a romp to make real her daydreams.

De Palma only gives the audience a brief amount of time to rest before taking the jumbled, ever-reversing structure of the setpiece before obliterating the whole thing by revealing the predatory feeling of the man to be a red herring, undercutting the suspense of his demeanor (and the note Kate finds in his desk saying he has an STD). Kate gets on the building's elevator to leave, only to remember she left her wedding ring in the man's apartment, a cheekily suggestive oversight. Before she can however, the doors open to reveal a tall, blond woman brandishing a razor. Grimly suspecting the man's sinister nature, we are instead treated to the proper villain from out of left field. It's a bait-and-switch worthy of Psycho, and De Palma not only introduces the true antagonist but also the proper narrative a full half-hour into the movie. A prostitute, Liz (Nancy Allen), spots the killer fleeing, but the murderer gets away before anyone else does, resulting in witnesses seeing only Liz standing over Kate's mutilated body holding the discarded razor. At least the characters are bewildered too; it's the least they could do to relate with the audience.


Dressed to Kill takes the purely Hitchcockian moment and uses it to start unifying the sometimes conflicting ideas that have run through his films to this point, ironically through one of his most egregiously strung-together narratives. The film unfolds in self-contained vignettes that add up to a unified whole, but it helps that each of these individual segments is so brilliant, and that they fit together thematically and stylistically if not putting forward a solidly coherent plot.

One of the familiar aspects of De Palma's cinema the director further develops here is his outlandish take on sexuality. Dressed to Kill set off a solid decade of intense antagonism from various feminist groups over the portrayal of sex and violence in the director's films, and even a neophyte like myself can understand where they were coming from with this film alone. I wracked my brain over the cruel moralism of Kate's death, her desire for sexual liberation and fulfillment not simply cut short with an animalistic butchering but preceded with the secondary punishment of venereal disease. Ultimately, however, the entire film exists as mired sexual fantasy, and De Palma is honest in showing that not all fantasies are wholesome (now that would have been regresive). Though I still cannot reconcile certain troubling aspects of the sexual violence against Kate, I would argue that, if her death is meant to be a cautionary tale, it is about the true dangers of the rape fantasies she gets off on, a harsh reminder that it is not a pleasant experience to be abducted and violated, and that sexual assault and literal assault often go hand in hand, even if De Palma does not depict both through the same character.

At the other end of the movie is Liz, who serves as Kate's opposite. Kate, an upper-middle-class housewife whose material comforts cannot overcome her sexual desires, dies at the feet of Liz, a prostitute who uses sex to raise money to play the stock market. Apart from being a hysterical and slightly prescient take on the coming impact of Reaganomics, Liz's relationship with sex and money is the complete inverse of Kate. Liz, comfortable with sex, uses it to aid her financial insecurity, though the hooking itself provides more job security than playing the market, which was a scant two years away from a major downturn. Kate's intelligent, innovative son Peter (Keith Gordon), mired in his quest for revenge, ends up saving Liz from an attack by her stalker, but Liz is so kind and friendly that it never appears to occur to Peter to view her fawning gratitude as a route to a relationship. It's as if Liz is not exactly a hooker with a heart of gold so much as a smart hooker taken to be one with a heart of gold by the male figure. Only when Peter helps Liz use her seductive powers on Dr. Elliott to try to find the identity of the killer does he finally realize her sexual presence.

Then, there's the matter of Bobbi, the transsexual who murdered Kate in sexual frustration and stalks Liz to tie up loose ends. Just as the disturbing nature of some of the sex in the film drew criticism from feminists, De Palma's depiction of a transsexual killer lashing out in violent manifestation of confusion and self-hatred won him a number of complaints from LBGT groups. Yet consider the true identity of Bobbi: in the clearest effort to step outside his piety to Psycho, De Palma does not make the sweet, mother-obsessed Peter the true culprit but Dr. Elliott, the psychiatrist. We hear "Bobbi's" voice on Elliott's answering machine (in the clipped, sleazily slurred tones of William Finley, who may be the first actor to sound like a chronic and intemperate masturbator) hissing furious taunts at the doctor for refusing to sign off on his sex-change operation. When another psychiatrist launches into the expected monologue of Elliott/Bobbi's motives, he confirms that Bobbi really did hate Elliott, the feminine half of Elliott's mind refused its liberation by Elliott, who despite the human empathy of his learned profession cannot extend that same understanding to himself. Elliott's violence arises from his sexual confusion, which in turn is the product of repressive old codes of order that torture him. De Palma slyly uses a real news clip of a transsexual on Donahue that presents the male-to-female guest as someone initially reticent to speak about her life until she says with a smile that she has "always been a committed heterosexual." Elliott/Bobbi does not have that centered self-awareness, so when Elliott's masculine side gets attracted to Kate (and, later, Liz), Bobbi takes over and uses the phallic image of the straight, hard razor to cut apart that which made him erect. If you'll forgive me, that's some ballsy filmmaking.

The Elliott/Bobbi split brings up De Palma's interest with body doubles, previously shown with Sisters -- and an obsession De Palma would continue to investigate, even past the film openly titled Body Double. Elliot's double, Bobbi, is just the man in a wig and women's clothing, but his psyche and sexual lust splits, creating two separate people from one body. This is further complicated by the female police officer assigned to watch Liz (whether to absolve her or prove her guilt is not entirely clear): hilariously, she looks exactly like Bobbi, leading to several misdirections that add suspense and humor. During the aforementioned scene with the Phil Donahue clip, De Palma not only lays hints of Elliott's true identity but uses a split screen to contrast Elliott watching with an inscrutable look on his face trapped between scholarly curiosity and resistance to his dawning new self with Liz viewing the same program as she dresses for "work." Liz, Elliott's target not simply because she witnessed his crime but because she arouses Bobbi's masculine side, distractedly watches as she preens in front of the vanity mirror (which duplicates and divides the image further), highlighting all her feminine elements in preparation for the night's johns. Elliott, meanwhile, surrenders entirely to his masculine side, and the ominous tinge of revulsion in Caine's face could well be Bobby's if he could only look to the other side of the frame and spot Liz.


There are even literal instances of doubles in the film. The close-ups of Dickinson's lathered body as she touches herself at the beginning are actually those of Victoria Lynn, a Penthouse model, effectively teasing the audience with bawdy imagery of a sex icon that really isn't her. Even the Metropolitan is doubled: though the outside is the proper building, the interior shots were recorded in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. These structural, not diegetic, doubles complicate the movie in the sort of half-serious put-on De Palma excels at, raising ouroboric questions of what can be trusted.

That, in turn, feeds into the grandest theme of De Palma's canon: the line between illusion and reality. If, as I argued, Kate's death is less a critique of her "loose" morals than of her dangerous fantasies, the weight of her death is lessened not only by the structure of plot moving beyond her immediately but also by the oneiric aesthetic of the entire film. Never has New York City looked so artificial, not even now in its plastic Disneyfication: slightly saturated colors make the image pop, seductive in its vivid beauty but also repellent in its blatant artificial sheen over on-location shots. And the spatial relationship of the mise-en-scène is always shifting, particularly in a playful but sinister sequence on the subway. A gang of thugs surround Liz on the platform and give chase when she runs, vanishing into thin air when she leaps into a train car with a police officer, who chastises her for making up stories. As the train moves to its next stop, Liz finds herself alone again, only for the gang to show up again and slowly move in for her as she moves from car to car. Just as they close in on her, the blond stalker strikes, proving the thugs meaningless but using them to tantalize and manipulate solely to their own end.

These elements have never fit together so well in De Palma's early, anarchic style, here smoothed out by the lilting but ironic grace of the Steadicam. A dollop of De Palma's humor, so offbeat it may only ever appeal to him, spackles the cracks -- I will cast my vote in favor of any film that can melt an orgasmic squeal into a car horn, or lets Dennis Franz gnaw on scenery as the most stereotypical New Yawk detective who has ever lived. De Palma even turns the psychobabble of the other therapist's summary into a joke when he has Liz repeat it to Peter in a restaurant as a prim and proper old woman glances over from behind Peter in horrified offense. The last sequence, of course, is just another outgrowth of this dark wit, a final scary/hilarious reveries à la Carrie that gives one last jolt before releasing the audience to contemplate its various twists and turns. One of the director's more contentious films, Dressed to Kill delighted me as much as the best of his work to this point. If the fiery debates that greeted his subsequent '80s features had as much merit to warrant a discussion as this, my apprehension over this most-vilified period will abate quickly.

The Muppet Christmas Carol

"The greatest story of all time is A Christmas Carol. And there is only one way to make that better, and that is The Muppet Christmas Carol." — Ricky Gervais

Of the four or five versions of Dickens' classic that I enjoy each year come Yuletide, my favorite by far is The Muppet Christmas Carol. Better than any other adaptation of the story, and perhaps any other Dickens story, is the understanding on behalf of Jim Henson Productions that what makes Dickens such a powerful and serious writer is the degree to which he capture childlike joy. What better fit could there be, then, than Muppets, those agents of eternal elation, capable of putting a smile on my face long after I have outgrown so many other relics of childhood.

The film has fun with the mash-up from the start, using The Great Gonzo to play a narrating Charles Dickens, only for his companion, Rizzo the Rat, to instantly call foul on some blue, fuzzy thing posing as the author. The two hang around for the rest of the film, offering half-narration, half-reflexive commentary. "Why are you whispering?" Rizzo interjects as Gonzo intones quietly to the audience. Exasperated, Gonzo replies, "It's for dramatic emphasis."

Remarkably, for all the vibrancy of the Muppets jumping about in their greens and blues and browns, the sets themselves capture the grim, sooty look of industrializing London. The filmmakers understand that if Dickens could make his delightful tales without sparing detail of his surroundings, they should be able to do so too. Besides, of the author's best stories, A Christmas Carol contains the least amount of social misery, its conditions of poverty and urban malaise something that happens around Ebenezer, not to him. In fact, Scrooge is the kind of man who inflicts that kind of despair on others.

Michael Caine proves one of the finest Scrooges put on screen, and he must deal with the added strain of maintaining his dour mood around puppets. So good is he at tapping into Scrooge's bile that he never lets the Muppet aspect of the film derail the power of the story. He's playing straight man, but not to let jokes bounce off him. The merriment and glee that occurs all around him stops cold when it slams into the brick wall of Scrooge's unfeeling aura. The decision to use a human for the villain is a sly move on the creative team's part: as with Tim Curry's Long John Silver in the Muppet version of Treasure Island, Caine brings a menace that just could not have existed if they'd used a fuzzy, wee thing to spit out his bile. I mean, has anyone ever truly feared Oscar the Grouch?

There's no need to go into the story, which everyone knows and is unchanged for the Muppet version. But there's just something wonderful about watching Kermit the Frog play Bob Cratchit, and even more heartbreaking to watch Tiny Tim when he's a sickly puppet frog. I love that Robert Marley is invented as a brother to Jacob so that Scrooge can be haunted, well, heckled at least, by Statler and Waldorf. My only quibble is that the Ghost of Christmas Past looks creepy, with its porcelain doll face and digital alterations, but that's atoned for with my favorite view of Christmas Present, which is not only a masterfully designed puppet but also displays the traits of the character better than most other versions, capturing his rapid aging and his mercurial, in-the-moment nature. And I never fail to smile when Christmas Past shows Scrooge his first job, now altered so Fozzy Bear can replace Fezziwig as Fozziwog and Michael Caine bursts into glee when he breathlessly utters the words "rubber chicken factory."

The great thing about this movie is that, as ever, no one set out to just make a trifling puppet movie but a legitimate version of a classic. Scrooge's story loses none of its emotion, and the design is impeccable -- be on the lookout for nightmarish, even Expressionist skewing of houses in the Christmas Future segment. Paul Williams' songs are fantastic, especially his "Marley and Marley," which uses the haunting as an excuse to return to full-on rock opera mode even as he injects some of his most poignant lyrics, such as "Freedom comes from giving love as prison comes with hate." Yet even it cannot compare to the brilliance of "It Feels Like Christmas," one of my all-time favorite Christmas tunes, capturing the joy of the season better than nearly all of the treacly, overplayed sap on the radio.

The Muppet Christmas Carol has become something of a cult item over the years, but that's only because it so deftly mixes Muppet-style comedy with the lingering power of what is certainly not Dickens' finest literary achievement but perhaps the most immediately visceral. It somehow manages to wink at the audience throughout without bringing the whole thing down with lazy irony. The Muppet Christmas Carol acknowledges that it is following in the footsteps of countless adaptations before it, then it tries to argue that there is still something left to say. It succeeds.

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.

Inception

In Christopher Nolan's previous non-Batman film, The Prestige, Robert Angier says at one point that man's "reach exceeds his imagination" in response to Nikola Tesla's bitter contention that our grasp exceeds our nerve. Tesla, a genius buried for decades in the history books by the inventors who stole from him and led lives of great fame, fell in the estimation of his peers due to his eccentric beliefs about scientific possibility. He proposed ideas that people could not bring themselves to contemplate, and soon he went from being one of the most notable engineers of his day to a footnote to be dug up by the faithful. To him, man's problem was not that science went too far but that it did not go far enough, and the primitive superstition and ignorance of the world hindered us as a species.

Angier's modified quote gets at something else, an idea that could stand for Nolan's ethos as a filmmaker. For the magician, Tesla's genius proves that the world is so complicated and full of potential that what sets us back is an inability to process the grand complexity of the universe. With six prior films, Nolan, the most ambitious mainstream filmmaker of his day, has pursued this idea through art. Where other A-list blockbuster filmmakers content themselves to churn out stale, formulated pictures that push just enough buttons to earn a big opening weekend (which is all that matter anymore), Nolan has ideas. To be fair, thus far his reach has indeed exceeded his grasp: The Prestige was a visual tour-de-force and an atmospheric delight, but I've yet to determine whether I find it a convincing examination of obsessive rivalry or simply a top-notch con job, a question I seek to answer for myself soon when I re-examine the film. Batman Begins, while an improvement over the previous franchise films, spent far too much time with its exposition and shot itself in the foot at the end by undermining Nolan's attempt to add semi-realistic verisimilitude to the franchise with a microwave gun and a shocking level of collateral damage. Even The Dark Knight, easily the finest and most ambitious Hollywood epic since the final Lord of the Rings film, lost itself in its politics, conjuring numerous allusions to the War on Terror but leaving a question in everyone's mind whether it was really condemning Bush's policies or supporting them (both sides must omit certain sections of the film to support their points of view.) Despite his drive and his desire to do something will all the money entrusted to him, Nolan has always typically retained his most incisive work for his more intimate films, not capturing the same verve with his blockbusters.

Until now.


Inception will not convert those opposed to Nolan's style, and, despite the raving of the Rotten Tomatoes users over the effrontery necessary to dislike one of the director's films, this does not make them Philistines nor trolls. I sympathize with the complaint registered that a director as literal and detail-obsessed as Nolan is not the ideal candidate for making a movie about dreams. Indeed, for all of the film's twists and turns that lead dream worlds to crumble and distort, Inception only fleetingly taps into an oneiric mood, and the film never takes on an ephemeral tone even in the sustained build-up of the last hour.

Instead, Nolan does essentially what he did with the Batman films: he takes a subject that is inherently fantastical and roots it in a straightforward, crisp aesthetic of semi-realism. While this stylistic choice does not reflect the true nature of dreams, it allows Nolan to take the heist film to a new realm. With Inception, Nolan steps out of the shadow of his biggest aesthetic influence, Michael Mann, to make a heist thriller without boundaries, one that extends to the realm of science fiction and, more surprisingly, the first convincing romantic story of Nolan's career.

Wasting no time attempting to ease the audience into the film, Nolan opens with Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an Extractor, attempting to steal information from a businessman's mind on behalf of a rival corporation. Just as the audience gets a handle on which scenario is a dream and which is reality, the director kicks the chair out from under us, revealing the initial dream to be a dream within a dream and the supposed reality merely the first layer of a dream. Yeah, it's gonna be that kind of movie. Once everyone wakes up for real, we know that the mission has been bungled though the nature and purpose of that mission remains just out of reach. Dom viciously berates one of the members of his team, the "architect" Nash, for slipping up in designing the target's dream world, thus giving the man the opportunity to deduce that he was dreaming and wake himself. The businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), reveals then that he was actually testing Dom and his crew and that, save for the architect whose failure will get all their names on the rival company's hit list, he admires their work.

Saito then gives them a new job, one that could clear everyone's name and allow the exiled Dom to return to the United States. Just as the other company hired the Extractors to steal information from Saito, so too does the man want the team to infiltrate another rival, the son of a dying energy tycoon, not to steal an idea but implant one. Dom's crew say that such an act, the titular inception, cannot be done, that the brain can always trace the root of an idea and it will know that it received a planted suggestion from an outside source. Cobb, however, believes he can pull it off, and he sets out to replace his lost architect and plan a heist that makes the complexities of the Ocean's movies look as difficult as stealing a piggy bank.

One of Nolan's key flaws as a director is that neither he nor his frequent editor, Lee Smith, have the instincts to know when to cut a scene or produce a neatly flowing document. The Dark Knight's editing left some scenes so unresolved that the film screeches to a halt in two or three places. Here, however, the scattershot editing works in the film's favor. As Dom tells Ariadne (Ellen Page), the gifted college grad student he hires as the new architect, dreams have no concrete beginning or end; we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a situation, never thinking about how we got there. Thus, Nolan's habit of simply dropping into shots works to the film's benefit, helping the jumping narrative blend dream with reality even more convincingly.

Likewise, Nolan's clunky, expository dialogue, which makes up most of the script's lines, does not bog down the film but provide a much needed anchor as the director takes us into deeper and deeper layers of the subconscious. Dom's point man, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is always explaining, but that's his job: he does the research, calculates the times, and synchronizes the layers of the dream, so he must carefully go over the details. Ariadne needs vivid descriptions of places to recreate them in the minds of others. Even Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger whose talents of fake identity in the real world allow him to actually take the appearance and voice of others in dreams, needs to know the character of his impersonations. On a psychological level, the further these characters travel, the more even they cannot suss out what is imagined and what is real, and their thick dialogue becomes their only tether back to sanity.


Thankfully, the detailed speech does not extend to Nolan's literal-minded dream state. We learn the "rules" quickly: any pain experienced in dreams is genuinely felt because the brain processes the nerve responses, but those who die simply wake up. In order to pull off the inception, however, the target, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), and the team must be sedated for hours, necessitating a sedative so strong that anyone who dies will not wake up but enter into a limbo state that, due to the temporal state of dreams (which slows exponentially the deeper one ventures), could last decades before dumping a psychologically destroyed person back into the real world where only a few hours have passed. Why any of this is is rightly not explained, because how could one ever provide a sufficient reason?

While the dialogue does gunk up the film in a few places, Nolan counterbalances any potential issue with a rich narrative. Without losing sight of the heist story, the director splits focus to show the dangers of burying into one's mind. Those who enter the dreams of another can manipulate the world, but the subconscious recognizes shifts and projections of people slowly gather around foreign bodies as if white blood cells targeting potential contagions. The more one subdivides the dream state, the more unstable and unpredictable the subconscious becomes.

This is most evident not in Fischer, who has trained himself to withstand Extractors and marshals an army to defend his thoughts, but Dom. Like Michael Mann, Nolan cares for the dichotomy between good guy and bad guy, from the rival magicians in The Prestige to, of course, the fine line that separates Batman from the Joker. But Inception features no villain, nor, to be honest, anyone of heroic action; even Saito bears no animosity for Fischer, and wants only to break up his father's energy empire to prevent a corporate superpower from forming. (In fact, the father issues Fischer confronts in his dreams make for surprisingly touching material.) But lingering feelings of regret and guilt cloud Dom's mind, made corporeal in the dream world in the form of a projection of his wife Mallorie (Marion Cotillard).

Like the vision of the protagonist's wife in Solaris only much, much darker, "Mal" filters in and out of the picture, tormenting Cobb and actively fighting against the team's goals as she becomes his demons. The idea that protagonist and antagonist are merely flip sides of the same person is therefore literalized, with Cobb forced to fight himself in the form of the person he loves more than anything. The fragments of happier times, or seemingly happier times, that Nolan intercuts into the film gradually morph from bewildering shock cuts into devastating snatches of a horrific situation. It's an evolution that relies on direction and acting to sell, and while Nolan cannot match Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio takes the similar unfolding of a doomed, half-imagined free-fall of a relationship that he captured in Shutter Island to another level. Never has DiCaprio given a performance this good; in this film, he plays a man who knows that he's slipping into madness and putting on a brave face anyway. When a Newsweek writer, the same one who wrote about how awkward he thought it was to watch gay actors play straight roles, typed up his latest grab-bag of embarrassing nonsense about how DiCaprio never smiles anymore in his movies (no, seriously), perhaps he was so focused on making an ass out himself yet again not to consider that Dom is doing good not to break down screaming, much less put on a happy face.

Of course, the biggest issue with Nolan's previous attempts to ape Mann on some level is that the Brit cannot effectively work in Mann's milieu. He gets lost when he gets himself in too deep, and "too deep" is where Mann starts. With Inception, Nolan turns to a different, equally precise director for guidance, Stanley Kubrick. Now, as great a director as Mann is, he, and everyone else, is no Kubrick, so if Nolan couldn't match his first hero, he certainly couldn't do so with Stan. Yet Kubrick's style hedges closer to the kind that Nolan has shaped for himself. Like Nolan (and unlike Mann), Kubrick is removed from the action, gazing from afar to collect all the details. Not nearly as detached as the American ex-pat, Nolan is also not as sweeping and holistic, and where Kubrick stood back to survey like a general, Nolan just wants to clear his head enough to get a handle on things. Amazingly, he finally does so with his most twisted, Byzantine film yet. By stepping out of the fracas, he paradoxically manages to travel deeper than ever before into the thick of his gnarled vision and not get lost.

Appropriate to Nolan's left-brained vision, the Kubrick influence can be most readily seen in literal form. Nolan takes from the director the setpiece that allowed his character to seemingly walk upside down and float in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nolan uses the old school setup with a few digital touches for a thrilling fight in a hotel hallway as the movement of people in one state alters the gravity of the entire world of another. The long hallway itself could be a vague reference to The Shining, but the execution is all Nolan and the second-most exciting thing he's directed since he flipped a semi.


Nolan has never made a perfect film, and he doesn't start here. Even for a film about dreams, some plot-holes crop of when some aspects of certain dreams don't jive with the rules we've been given. Too, a few expository scenes are simply too weighty with lines, especially one where Page's character, only just introduced to the fold, starts asking extremely personal questions about Dom's life and demanding answers from him that heap on the plot and backstory. But there's something dull about perfection anyway, hermetic and removed. Pauline Kael once wrote, "Great films are rarely perfect films" and, with a few exceptions (Citizen Kane, nearly all the upper tier of Kubrick's filmography), I'd rather watch a film made a few missteps while reaching for something that pull back just to ensure immaculate design of a lesser movie. However much Nolan might fail to meet the goals he sets for himself in most of his movies, he still reaches, goddammit, and that means something these days.

But let us not worry about whether Inception is a masterpiece, for to do so would only fuel a hype machine already barreling out of control. Greatness only comes when a work of art sits in the mind long enough to take full root, and the constant search for modern masterpieces is less important than finding the movies that really grab you. For what it's worth, I would not likely consider Inception a masterpiece, as it has little to say about the human condition, or even the nature of dreams. But it's proof that even the maker of the third-highest grossing film of all time can still go on to make his breakthrough.

A hodgepodge of inspirations as much as the director's other films, Inception jumbles together a variety of genres, philosophies and artistic influences.The complexity of the film's sources may be lost on some, like Patrick Goldstein, who mocked a review, a positive one no less, for referencing both Jung (which is pretty standard in a film about dreams, no?) and the classic French heist film Rififi. Goldstein's rant devolved so quickly into hysterics and a desperate plea for critics to maybe know a little less about their subjects so that they might reflect the common man that I suspect he invited some members of the Rotten Tomatoes community to come to his office so he could pander to them real-time as he was writing. Perhaps if he was not simply trying to drum up page views, he might have put any effort into his piece at all and at least countered the statement with a reminder that Rififi unfolded in near-silence, while Inception uses Nolan's heavy exposition, but then that would be an actually relevant comment on the movie itself, which I suspect Goldstein didn't even see before his screed on the importance of maintaining a consensus and keeping the hype machine chugging.

That is my main concern for the film's future, that people will not examine it -- whether they ultimately like or dislike their findings -- and instead view Inception in the stifling vacuum created by marketing, in which movies suck the money out of our wallets and the synapses of our brains, numbing us to a simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" reaction; everyone blames Siskel & Ebert for this, but at least they backed up their reasoning. Analyzing the twists and turns of Inception may not reward in the same way that readings of the humanist works of an Ozu or a Kiarostami lead to greater understanding of not only the movie but life, but why not have a go at sorting out some of Nolan's dreamscape?

Some fault The Prestige for caring more about fooling the audience than letting the magic infuse the film, a contention I occasionally agree with (thus I am always switching my preference for magician-based films of 2006 between Nolan's more science-centric thriller and The Illusionist, which better captures the intoxication and beguiling charm of being hoodwinked into seeing something wonderful). But The Prestige was not about magic but illusions, standing previously as the director's finest outpouring of his love for legerdemain. Nolan loves to pull a fast one on us, not because he thinks himself superior but because he's got some cheek on him. Not all con jobs are mean-spirited, and the director appeals to our desire to work out that which stymies us. Some, as they do when shown a magic trick, will demand to know the secret but will give up when the magician playfully wags his finger. Others will study the move until they can perform it themselves, and it is those people to whom Nolan caters.

Inception is his greatest swindle yet, in the best possible sense: by leaving its imagery on the table, existing outside even the most expository dialogue the film has to offer, the director imparts his vision onto us and entrusts the audience with taking from it what they will. Inception's truncated final shot sent a groan of withheld resolution from the crowd, but the tease only implanted the idea of the film deeper into their minds, and the appreciation pouring out of the crowd as they left the theater reveals that Nolan's trickery is not cruel. It's a sign of respect in a field where no one seems to believe in the maturity of an audience anymore, and the taste of the stereotyped "masses" that Goldstein defends so pathetically might hedge closer to that of the critics' if the mainstream treated them with respect. "You musn't be afraid to dream a bit bigger, darling," Eames says to Arthur as he brandishes a ludicrous weapon during a shootout with hostile subconscious projections, and the line may be as much a challenge to everyone else currently using up hundreds of millions of dollars of studio money to no artistic end as it is a offhand bit of British cheek.

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.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Poor Woody Allen. No matter how many classics he makes, so many will dismiss them as unfunny for not stacking up to the madcap absurdity as such early hits as Sleeper. What so many fail to understand, even among his supporters, is that Allen, though he came to prominence as a stand-up comic, is first and foremost a dramatist. The humor in his work typically comes from his neurosis, an incessant need to point out the flaws in real time and to obsess over them so much that the flaws seem trivial as he makes mountains out of molehills. He and his characters worry so much about the right thing to say that they end up revealing everything they seek to keep hidden, albeit in lofty, philosophical terms.

Such comedy overflows in Hannah and Her Sisters, a film with three major story arcs, all propelled by characters voicing their insecurities and doubts to the audience as they struggle to find some semblance of happiness in their lives. They let us in on their relationship woes, and their awkwardness around members of the opposite sex is funny because it is honest and not exaggerated past the point of believability. Voiceovers shift between typical narrations and internal monologues: in one marvelous scene, Allen's character, a hypochondriac, mulls over the news that a CT scan revealed a spot on his brain and slowly thinks himself into a panic.

Mickey (Allen) is Hannah's (Mia Farrow) ex-, though he's still on reasonable terms with both her and her new husband, Elliot (Michael Caine), whom Mickey likes because he too is under-confident. Hannah is the center of the film, not in the sense that she's the main character and she fuels the narrative but that she is the core about which the stories of others revolve.

Elliot, resentful of his wife's self-sufficiency and success -- she's an actress who just got excellent write-ups for her work in A Doll's House -- leads him to drift away, and soon he finds himself taken with Hannah's sister Lee (Barbara Hershey), who herself is in a failing relationship. Max von Sydow makes a memorable appearance as Lee's ex-, a reclusive artist who shut himself off from everything but Lee, which makes their breakup all the more painful. Caine's performance is surprisingly moving, considering he's engaging in an affair with his wife's sister because he resents how strong she is. He agonizes over how to end his marriage and wait a while before pursuing a real relationship with Lee, to the point of being incapable of thinking of anything else.

Hannah's other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest) is everything that the level-headed Hannah is not: a recovering coke addict, she runs a catering company with her friend April (Carrie Fisher) while they both hope to land auditions for parts. Though they're friends, the two are always in competition with one another, especially when a smooth-talking, opera-loving guy meets them at a party and takes the two out on the town. She's fiscally reliant on Hannah, something her sister doesn't mind now that it's not going to disappear up Holly's nose but which Holly deeply regrets. Holly's constant failures have left her as neurotic and insular as any of Allen's characters, and she even mentions to Hannah that she, the person nicest to Holly, is the only one who can really make her feel bad about herself.

In contrast to these serious (though often funny) segments, Allen's Mickey provides chunks of comic relief. When that CT scan suggests that the hypochondriac may genuinely have a serious ailment, his internal conversations break into a frenzy, only for the doctors to confirm that nothing is wrong. Now, I often wonder why, in film, someone who loses his faith typically finds it restored after something terrible occurs, but Allen turns it on its head. Receiving miraculous news actually triggers an existential crisis, which leads him to seek religion even though he maintains there's no God. Hilariously, he attempts to convert to Catholicism and mentions their strong moral codes when at the start of the film he, the producer of a sketch comedy show, argues with Standards and Practices for wanting to air a bit about the child molestation charges brought against priests.

Allen practically pioneered the anti-rom-com with Annie Hall, that genre that seeks to actually display love honestly, which severely scales back the laughs to be had into the bitter, real sort that accompanies the pain of relationships. But there is a lighter note to Hannah and Her Sisters, one that might seem contrived in other films but fits naturally here because the characters grow organically. That's what makes Allen -- when he connects -- the most powerful writer in the industry. He can run from laughs to tears, absurdity to stone-faced drama so effortlessly within a single film

Before now, I'd rarely, if ever noticed, Allen's skill with a camera. Gentle tracking shots follow these characters as they pace slowly, mulling over their torment, and his Bergman worship is visible not only in his casting of von Sydow but in his static close-ups that ruminate over the actors' faces that perfectly match their internal dialogue. These shots add aesthetic warmth to this ultimately tender story, and Hannah and Her Sisters must surely rank as one of the director's finest efforts. It reminded me, as Duck Soup did Mickey, that there is something worth living for in this world, and it's art.