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.

That evil comes in the form of Bane (Tom Hardy), a thick-muscled, gas-masked terrorist who stands in stark contrast to the wiry Scarecrow and Joker of previous films. Bane is as capable of plotting absurdly complex, large-scale destruction as his evil predecessors, but he also has the bulk to go one on one with Batman's own bruising style of combat. His careful calculation does not innately terrify as does the Joker's erratic unpredictability, but Hardy ably works double time as a mastermind and, essentially, his own henchman. Furthermore, Bane's rationality, however severe and intolerant of failure, does prove alluring to the hordes of impoverished average citizens swept under ledgers in this supposed golden age for Gotham, and where Batman once had to contend with nothing more than a handful of devotees, now he must face down an entire army of riled lumpenproletariat.

Nolan's blockbusters are all defined by an inability to trim, and The Dark Knight Rises suffers from more bloat than any of his other, overstuffed features. Before the Bane/Batman conflict even surfaces, Wayne must crawl his way back to fighting form, as well as deal with his ailing company, suffering losses from a mothballed clean energy project. The latter involves the investment of one Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who also doubles as a possible love interest for Wayne. And then there is Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar who specializes in ripping off the rich. Nolan dangles Kyle out not only as a potential love interest but a potential villain to boot. Oh, and then, there is a Gotham police officer, Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an orphan who knows that Bruce Wayne is really Batman because of some kind of orphan Shining and wants Batman to come back after Gordon gets shot. Oh I forgot, Gordon gets shot early in the movie. These plot points stretch the narrative as it is, and Nolan eventually expands each of these strands until the film bursts at the seams. Nolan delights in playing chessmaster and trickster with his narratives, but he has so many pieces to move here that, despite the film's hefty runtime, large details fall through the cracks and time in general passes in the blink of an eye, a key flaw for a film that works best when emphasizing both the arduously slow journey of redemption and the breathlessly tight timeframe in which that journey must be undertaken.

Explanations and clarifications of all these plotlines come through atrocious sound mixing, which buries dialogue and only occasionally gives any force to the more grandiose sound effects and score. The muffled dialogue would matter less were Nolan willing to let the images speak for themselves, but expository dialogue rears its head at every turn. When Cotillard's Tate reminds Wayne of their stalled project, she starts offering so many details she threatens to launch into a history lesson of fusion itself at any second. Characters offer up life stories with the slightest provocation, halting an already unwieldy behemoth. In the film's most unintentionally hilarious scene, one character launches into an overexpository description of a nefarious plan (one filled with already known details and sufficiently visualized with intercut shots of the action being related through speech) as the clock literally runs out of a major threat. But with fewer than three minutes to deal with a huge danger, Batman, Kyle and Gordon all stop and listen to this other character monologue.

Yet if The Dark Knight Rises indulges the very worst of Nolan's tendencies as a filmmaker, it also expands upon his most appealing traits until even the flaws are subsumed into some kind of declarative auteur statement, even if Nolan's style is altogether too banal for such a thing to even be possible. Nolan's blockbusters all mistake scale for composition, but here he gets so grandiose he almost bridges the two. The opening sequence, of a mid-air kidnapping continues to stress the director's fetish for realism in ridiculously outsized stunts, yet for once Nolan embraces the sheer lunacy of what he shoots, setting the mood for his most successful fusion of huge spectacle and vague plausibility yet. Greatly aiding matters is a level of action coherence heretofore unseen in Nolan's work. At last, his close-combat filming achieves a genuine visceral effect because the director holds back just enough to let the audience follow along. Nowhere is this better seen than in the first brawl between Batman and Bane, which highlights Bane's strength and speed against the lumbering Bat and adds a level of savagery to each sick thud the villain lands on a formidable icon who suddenly looks so very weak.

Elsewhere, Nolan brings back some of the loopier visual stylings of Batman Begins, especially in a tossed-off mini-sequence of Batman and Catwoman prowling the sewers looking for Bane, Catwoman distracting patrolling thugs as Batman pulls some Bat-tastic moves like upside-down grabs and a zig-zagging run in the dark illuminated only by the flash of gunfire. Late in the film, Wayne spends some time in a literal pit of a prison, its Escherian properties clearly dear to the director's heart. Nolan also has a ball when Bane's plan comes to fruition, plunging Gotham into a social uprising that bypasses Occupy for the French Revolution and makes for some of the best images of the entire trilogy. Indeed, nothing else in the film is so evocative, striking, and wonderfully insane as Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) sitting atop a massive dais passing kangaroo court judgments on Gotham's wealthy. For a series that has only gotten more literal-minded as it has worn on, such brief breaths of ingenuity hint that somewhere in that fussy brain of his, Nolan actually has an imagination.

These rare moments of respite become all the more treasured as the plot wears on and spirals out of control. Yet the ramshackle sequencing of the lugubrious plot is, to this writer anyway, inexplicably charming. Writing in total CYA mode, the Nolan brothers attempt to satisfactorily map out not only the various character and narrative arcs of the film but the muddled politics of this saga. The Dark Knight Rises offers evidence to support any reading. Batman, the billionaire hero, intervenes in a populist revolt and sides openly with the police in a street war. However, Bane's manipulation of Gotham's underclass stands in sharp, vile contrast to whatever disillusionment the people might feel. The most admirable, if wildly inconsistent, quality of Nolan's Batman films has been that of consequence, a rare trait of most comic book movies, with their weightless CGI and flippant bombast. Nolan does not come down on any one side of his many contradictory messages but demonstrates how actions ripple out and mingle until blame and righteousness matter less than simply solving a problem that has gotten out of hand. True, Nolan makes this point less through thoughtful examination than simply throwing everything he can at the screen, but he nevertheless ends up breaking down the simplistic good vs. evil conflict of so many superhero movies, including Nolan's last two.

Nolan's best diversions, however, involve the space he gives to his actors. Bale's entropic performance as Wayne/Batman has always been the least dynamic element of these films, but his withered, defeated entrance in this film (and in the aftermath of a fight with Bane) clarifies that iciness as the mark of a man who has been broken since childhood. His literal shattering in this film is not a horrifying twist; it is the inevitable, physical bookend to the emotional devastation from which a little boy never recovered. Oldman, Freeman and Caine make it look almost too easy, especially Caine, who milks a part specifically written to wring tears from the audience for all it's worth. But once again, it's the antagonists who command attention. Hardy adopts a high, almost cheery voice that conflicts with his thick frame and obscured face. Before he sets in motion his attack on Gotham, he jovially praises a boy's on-the-nose singing of the National Anthem to himself ("What a lovely, lovely voice!") And though his eyes generally look well beyond everyone into a thousand-yard stare of simmering fury and cold thought, Bane reacts to the first sighting of the Batwing with a look of curiosity, nonverbally asking, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

If the movie belongs to anyone, though, it's Hathaway, who steals the screen along with Martha Wayne's old pearls with a half-turn and backflip out of Wayne Manor and never gives it back. Hathaway plays up Selina's weaponized sensuality and captures the character's irritation with her own morality, so used to self-preservation that she cannot ever do the right thing without a hint of exasperation. Plus, in the morass of the film's politicking pile-on, only Hathaway manages to fully exhibit a clear social perspective as well as a change of heart communicated in a few glances of disgust and contemplation. Hathaway already proved her talent for portraying ambiguous, unpredictable characters in 2008's Rachel Getting Married, but it is no less thrilling to see her show it in a genre (and for a director) that typically has no clue what to do with women.

Unfortunately, The Dark Knight Rises does not address some of the fundamental flaws of this trilogy. For a director who loves intricate mastermind schemes, Nolan does not particularly stress Batman's intelligence and ability to outsmart his foes, choosing rather to highlight Batman's ability to have 280 pounds of muscle and punch people in the solar plexus. And how sad it is that the one example of long-term planning on Wayne's part—the sonar grid of The Dark Knight—is far and away the low point of the entire saga, a sloppily executed and morally dubious setpiece.  Nolan also lets his plots get away from him, and it is not to his credit that The Dark Knight feels like two films crammed into one and The Dark Knight Rises could be its own trilogy. Finally, this closing chapter builds off Inception to suggest that for all Nolan's supposed ambition as a mainstream filmmaker of ideas, his greatest desire is to helm a Bond picture. The Prestige, with its modest scale, perfectly interlocking mechanics and almost accidental profundity, remains his greatest film, indeed one of the greatest of the last decade. Yet The Dark Knight Rises is certainly the "most" Nolan film, a work that blends his talents and faults until distinguishing between the two becomes a pointless exercise. This near-three-hour film splits attention among a handful of major characters, all but two of whom, Wayne and Gordon, are brand new. It ties up every loose end it can even as it leaves major logic gaps unaddressed. It devotes a huge chunk of time to a political subtext that suggests any insight at all only through a barrage of surface-depth ideas. And frankly, this damn thing makes no sense on thematic or narrative grounds. And yet, on this thin foundation Nolan builds a behemoth, and what charm the film has lies in its ability to teeter incessantly without collapsing.

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.

What The New World is instead is an attempt to come to grips with the awesome power of a new, seemingly limitless region. Relative to the Europeans, the Americas may as well have been a new world entirely, a place totally unaffected by the influence of the world as it was known. Likewise, the Native Americans come into contact with a new people with a wholly different cultural perspective and social ethos (not to mention virulent diseases).

After all, the first shots of wonder belong not to the Englishmen, who view land with a combination of dehydrated delirium and relief, but the Indians, who regard the great ships drifting to coast with stunned curiosity and awed apprehension. The settlers disembark and immediately set about building camp, scarcely stopping to take in their surroundings, the sound of the first felled tree echoing in a nearby field teeming with inspecting Powhatan warriors like the dying screams of a fallen comrade. Only John Smith (Colin Farrell), a mutineer brought to shore in shackles and freed under probation, explores this uncharted land with reverence.

Smith innately understands the future of America, sensing in its vastness the principles of democracy and republicanism that will take root in its fertile soil. As his comrades back at the rudimentary Jamestown squabble over rank and class, Smith finds himself sent to negotiate with the Powhatan king against protests over his low social status, which morphs into tacit enthusiasm as the men consider the likelihood of the natives not pummeling him with a club. Ironically, it is because of their caste system that Smith finds himself thrust into the nature he loves, where he can ruminate “Here the blessings of the earth are beloved by all.” Later, however, Smith comes into some authority, and he immediately imposes dictatorial control over Jamestown when it looks as if he might help the ailing settlement incorporate with the Indians. Malick’s universality flirts with the political here, laying out not only the ideological foundation of America but the contradictions in its actions.

Nevertheless, this preemptive insight into America’s political future factors into the structure of the film, which democratizes the image as much as Godard’s Marxist camera in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. This is especially true of the extended edition released on DVD and Blu-Ray, surpassing even the original “Italian” cut of the film before Malick trimmed it for “commercial” considerations, relatively speaking. That film was poetic to its core, but this longer cut breaks up the stricter focus on Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher, in a mesmerizing performance that should have translated into a much busier career than it did_ to allow for greater contributions from all its players, not just Smith and Rolfe but supporting figures who drift through Malick’s more ambient tone poem like vague trills, ever quite themes or motifs but always distinctive.

The narration too shifts, moving off more identifying visual accompaniment to borderline free-associative impressionistic collage of sight and sound. It’s never difficult to tell who’s speaking, but the images often move entirely out of the perspective of the narrator into that of another character (or characters), moving beyond even a vaguely political aesthetic into a deeper, more spiritual connection linking everyone.*

That is not to say that the film presents a trite, hippie “We’re all the same deep down” message. Malick, for all his poetic abstraction, has always had a realistic side, and he plainly delineates the two cultures through their interactions with each other. When the Englishmen set down on land, one of Capt. Newport’s (Christopher Plummer) first order is to level trees in the surrounding area to build a fort and to ensure clear vision against any attackers, already exploiting the land for gain. Smith’s time with the Powhatan, learning their customs, their social interactions and their innocence, becomes all the more stunning when he returns to Jamestown and his blissful time with the Indians is thrown in sharp relief against the misery, backstabbing and animalistic savagery within the starving colony.

What Malick finds, however, is a spiritual link binding all these players to each other, as well as to nature. The longer cut contains more microscopic gestures between characters, tiny mirror movements that close circuits to let the current flowing through everything pass between them. Even by Malick’s standards, The New World is a film comprising almost nothing but grace notes, interspersing playful interaction, aching rumination and pillow shots of trees and rivers into each segment until distinguishing between them becomes futile. The narrative takes on a sort of shared consciousness, an impressionistic voyage that ultimately reveals an objective truth about us, an objective truth no one can articulate, not even in Malick’s flagrantly literary internal speech.

Framing that objective connection are the ubiquitous shots placed at such a low-angle that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki practically has to aim the camera straight up to capture any action. This only exacerbates the film’s unabashedly spiritual and religious nature: some of its first shots are of characters looking up to the sky, Pocahontas beckoning to the cosmos with open arms and Smith, hands shackled in forced penitence, gasping up at rain dripping through his hot brig cell on the ship. Sunlight beams down on these characters, illuminating their attempts at sovereignty and collaboration, and smoke and fog always obscure the more violent battles and atrocities like Adam and Eve trying to hide their sins from the Lord. What Malick seems to be suggesting, however, is not the connection of the Indians and/or the Englishmen to God but that humanity is God.



Malick sets all of his films in the past; his most “recent” pictures take place in or after the WWII era. But all of these films feel current, and temporal states often seem beside the point in Malick’s work. This transcends Emerson’s, well, transcendentalism for omniscience, albeit gained through unification and oneness with the world. The aforementioned hints of politics in Smith’s internal monologues and the film’s structure cast Smith as both the symbol of arriving British colonists and for the future revolutionaries who will make a new nation of these settlements. He experiences the present but represents the future, though his actions and thoughts tie him to that distant time so closely that the split becomes less contrast than contrapuntal. The New World may, even judging from its title, concern immersion in the unfamiliar, but it demonstrates how every person has the whole of Earth’s history and future coded into intermittently and involuntarily accessible places within us.**

A common misconception concerning Malick’s films posits that they juxtapose man with nature. Both The Thin Red Line and this film show warfare, while Badlands and Days of Heaven use their Midwestern amber waves as backdrops to killing sprees and intrigue, respectively. However, Malick positions the brutal actions of humanity as a part, however exaggerated and senseless, of the turbulence inherent in nature. Note the preference of ambient noise over scored music in the extended cut and how natural sound nevertheless proves an adequate soundtrack: when Smith loses his Powhatan guide to the chief early in the film, his on-guard wandering through an overgrown field is punctuated by the shrill buzz of crickets, a natural glissando ratcheting up tension. Nature herself starves out the Englishmen, who only truly set upon themselves and the natives when hunger drives them to desperation.

Everything has its contradictions, which is why The New World is so hard to pin down: it captures so much (too much, for some) of the messiness of life. Charting Pocahontas’ evolution from cherubic, mystical savior through romance and diplomacy and ostracism and, finally, comfortable life as the toast of the English court is interpretive and realistic, a fitting split for a film that combines painstaking historical accuracy with outright myth.

“That fort is not the world,” Smith says at one point, subtly critiquing the Western bent even of films sympathetic to the Indians at the centuries of hardships they would soon endure. It’s a lesson Smith—and, later, Rolfe—forgets, seeking to bask in Pocahontas’ unique energy even as he molds her into someone he can make his own. This is more true of Rolfe than Smith, who does try his best not to let the other Englishmen “contaminate” her with their base, simple needs in their starved madness, but both men see her spiritual power through Western lenses. Each sees in her a chance for a new start: Smith sees her as the path to becoming a new, good man after his pirating days, while Rolfe views her as the only means to heal his broken heart from his English wife's death. Their desires for individual new lives, of course, serve as a microcosm for the second chance America represented to those who could brave the voyage; in that sense, tying together colonial idealism with the romantic longing between the two Johns and Pocahontas is not only artistically valid but logical.

Pocahontas herself learns Smith’s message when she eventually goes to England with John Rolfe (Christian Bale), arriving in an Old World that’s new to her. Malick thus expands on his view in a cyclical fashion, returning to the same shots and motifs with different players, altering the meaning. Reflections of actions, ideas, even of nature mirrored in the waters of the Virginian swampland visually prefigure the cycle of birth, death, separation, reconciliation and exploration that gyrate through the film. The director even subverts visual expectation by not only beginning on a ship arriving but ending on it too, even if the former accompanies birth imagery and the latter death knells. Additionally, ending with another arrival suggests that the story is not done, that a new iteration of the cycle will begin with new players, using our modern awareness of the repeated atrocities of colonial and native exchanges to fill our imaginations as to the outcome. However, if this film is so rooted in what came before, not only in terms of its cyclical movement but in the context of all cinematic depictions of colonialists meeting and battling Native Americans, how is it that everything in it feels as if it’s being viewed for the first time?

This extended cut, adding 22 minutes to the debut Italian cut and nearly 40 to the theatrical version, pushes the film over that hump separating it from loose-narrative romance into the purest embodiment of Malick’s Emersonian ethos, as well as the best response to the ethnocentrism within Emerson’s and Whitman’s supposedly universal view, never shying away from the contradictions in Smith’s ultimately trite interpretation of the magnificent world around him. By incorporating more of the characters and finding the right balance between human and nature (which is not to say that they are evenly split, only that we get a better sense of place within this gorgeous and intimidating world), Malick finds a more holistic view of our connection to nature and the history and future each of us carries inside.

I do not mean to say that the extended cut is “better” than the theatrical: both have their strengths. I find in the theatrical cut a certain thrumming force that vibrates to my frequency and lapses me into a trance. But I have a better idea of what’s being communicated in this longer cut without being sucked out of the experience of Malick’s film, and in fact I feel more connected to its pulses than I was before, more able to get my bearings inside its hypnotic flow and see where I’m going instead of being swept along. I shall be interested to revisit the theatrical version to see just how much the elongated shots and deeper levels of personal interaction alter the meanings, to see nature confounding these people, even those stereotypically placed at one with it. Malick can get seemingly infinite mileage out of this film, his tweaks opening up whole new connections and altering entire perceptions.

One of the tattoos on Smith’s body says “Carpe Diem,” which may be the simple moral at the heart of this story. When the characters surrender not only to the power of nature but of each other, they become one with the present and experience life in all its beautiful chaos. Death is always the least poetic aspect of a Terrence Malick film, a tragically blunt act that disconnects that figure from the force tethering all flora and fauna and leaving those alive to reel at the shockwaves. (This supports the idea that Malick frames his religious reaches around a God of man and nature and not a conventional Judeo-Christian reading). The New World, a film set 400 years in the past, resides more firmly in the present than just about any film I can name,*** and if it hits dead-ends at times and has to reverse out of them, isn’t that a byproduct of living in the moment and following the flow wherever it leads?


*And by filtering its semi-idealized aesthetic through the innocent eroticism of Pocahontas’ mesmerizing effect on all those around her, Malick recalls Whitman as much as Emerson.
**Though I’ve resolutely avoided as much Tree of Life chatter as possible, that film appears to expand on this point even further, moving beyond the planetary scope of this film into the universal.
***Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is all that comes to mind; it too works with a cyclical intimate epic of life and death.