The Dark Knight, A Priest's Take A-

In theaters. Rated PG-13, 152 minutes

It’s not that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight is the best comic book movie ever made, it’s just that it dreams much, much bigger. While the best of the genre examine the seductive qualities of evil and the cost of heroism, the Dark Knight wants to examine the very nature of evil. It’s dark heart. What if, it dares to ask, the scariest thing we can imagine isn’t an understandable desire warped by selfishness or greed? What if it’s not a twisted moral code, different from our own but still understandable and, once understood, predictable? What if it’s not about sex or domination or power? What if true evil is the very lack of these things—a lack of predictability, destruction driven without lust or end. And when we get to evil’s dark heart, we find Heath Ledger’s Joker. It is no coincidence that the heart of evil is also the beating, bruising heart of this film.

Maybe it’s because we now know that every moment with Ledger is like a mist in the morning, a vanishing gift that will soon be gone for good; but every scene without him seems a waste. The possibility that he could at any moment enter the action, could always appear in the next cut, propels the film forward. This is due in no small part to Ledger’s creation—the voice, with just touches of Nicholson’s Joker, the tics, the darting tongue almost snake-like and almost perverse, but ultimately like a forestalled attempt to lick the scars around his mouth—yet owes every bit as much to Nolan’s creation. The key to Nolan’s Joker is found in the mouth of Michael Caine’s Alfred. “Some people just want to see everything burn.” And so we see the Joker, later, burning his half of the millions he’s acquired for attacking Batman. And we, the audience, don’t know what to make of this, because we understand you can’t fight something that doesn’t have an end-game. You can’t fight something not driven by an ideology.

In this The Dark Knight calls us to a more ancient terror. Modernity has striven for 400 years to find answers in reason and science. Psychological determinism has told us that if we grasp the DNA and background of people, their actions, no matter how bizarre or apparently chaotic, are understandable. The Joker scoffs at this notion, making up numerous self-histories, all of which are false. Likewise, Christianity in the Middle Ages and modernity increasingly fell in love with Satan as a rationale figure working in opposition to God, with a determinable telos of damning as many as possible and seducing the hearts of humanity. Nolan suggests that we’ve domesticated evil and made it in the likeness of our domesticated God, predictable, understandable, and, perhaps, misunderstood. But long before the Christian notion of a Satan began to work its way into our moral unconscious, there existed the notion of Chaos, exemplified by the Deep and the sea monsters that occupied it. This is why we can’t look away, because we feel that, perhaps, Nolan is giving us a place at the adult table. That’s he’s telling us things that are True. True about our enemies and about ourselves. We understand Johnny Cash when he sings, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” We know sometimes we break things just to watch them shatter. Sitting next to this villain, Two-Face seems positively childish. Arbitrary chance deciding things? We saw that last year in No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. We know Two-Face’s backstory. We understand he wants (admittedly misguided) justice. This is the domesticated evil modernity has shoveled our way, and in the past this might have scared us, but not after looking into the eyes of the Joker.

So, in the end of the film, when the Batman would like to become a curious Christ-figure, willing to take on the sins of Two-Face because Gotham needs that hero, we understand that Batman has seen his own dark heart in the Joker and knows full well he’s committed those sins, too. He takes the rap in lieu of being punished for his own sins.

As for the rest of the film, the actors are uniformly superb (if Morgan Freeman is a bit underutilized). Maggie Gyllanhaal brings much-needed gravitas to her role. Christian Bale is, again, solid as Batman, although he’s almost an after thought here. His whispering, rasping Batvoice is better than in the first, but still seems a bit ridiculous to me. Keaton is still my favorite, though Bale’s the only one that has brought the necessary physique to the role. The last act does not flow with the rest of the movie and might have derailed a film with a lesser head of steam. As it is, it’s only an annoyance. One gets the feel that Nolan was willing to trade a technically perfect film for a very good one that examined exactly what he wanted to exam. Oh, and the Batbike absolutely rocks. A-