A Very Alternative Christmas: Batman Returns (Dir. Tim Burton, 2h4m, 1992)

The alternative Christmas movie is, I think it's fair to say, fast becoming the mainstream. For every Christmas classic, there's now a small cottage industry of clickbait, tongue-in-cheek suggestions, and, in the case of a couple, a (not so) grudging acceptance that Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and the like might just be part of the seasonal fare.The festive season is now as much a period in which we watch action, horror, science-fiction, fantasy, and even comedy movies that are either only tangentally linked to, or happen to take place at, Christmas, as one we watch the accepted "Christmas canon."

Flies in the ointment remain, of course. Babe, Iron Man 3, Edward Scissorhands, and, perhaps most bizarrely, Rambo: First Blood, may well be knocking on the door to be let in, but for now they stay outside in the cold (I, for one, can't start the festive period without Hideaki Anno's 1997 nihilistic finale to the anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, End of Evangelion, a film that a) defuses any dinner-table arguments by making everyone angry at it, rather than each other, and b) happens to take place at some point between Christmas Day and New Year's Day. No, I'm not kidding on any point.)

Between these two poles, between the accepted canon for the period, and the personal choices of the bizarre, the in-jokey and the, to be blunt, completely deranged, lie what can be still called the alternative. films either too dark or weird to be truly accepted, or those who simply haven't capitalised on their curious seasonal lives in the same way that the more accepted ones have. What better place to start than with perhaps the king of them all, the return of one of cinema's greatest incarnations of one of comic books' greatest heroes, in the dark, beautiful, grotesque and yet undeniably festive Batman Returns, in which Keaton's Caped Crusader must battle Danny Devito's villainous yet ultimately tragic penguin, whilst fending off Pfeiffer's scene-stealing Catwoman, whilst Burton, behind the camera, tries to save his film, his vision, of a dark and mature Batman tale from the backlash, and enraged marketeers, or fail trying, in what may still be the best Batman film ever.

Batman Returns is a film of grotesques, and broken people; its darkness is palpable, even compared to the grubby grimy gothic charm of 1989's Batman-gone is the pop-art, the Prince, the stepped-right-out-of-Bob-Kane's sketchbook pop of Nicholson's hyperreal Joker, and Keaton's low-key but beautifully menacing Batman, and polite socialite Bruce Wayne. Whilst some of this visual shift can be put down to the return of Bo Welch, Burton's production designer for the twin gothic fairy-tales of Beetlejuice (1989), and Edward Scissorhands, (1990), replacing Anton Furst. Gotham, and its inhabitants turn darker, spikier, touches of Gorey, of German Expressionism and Fascist architecture, creeping their way into Gotham.

It is also Burton's gothic fascination in full-flow: by 1992, Burton's work had reached a certain trademark that would appear-disappear-reappear in his work for the next three decades; a heavily stylised, starkly lit mixture of 1920s German cinema, the work of Walt Disney, for whom he worked as an animator, mid 1950-1960s science fiction, and a characteristic clash of the Stepfordish suburbian American and the Gothic Outsider, best seen in Edward Scissorhands, in which Depp's odd, but endearing unfinished artificial human first entrances, and then terrifies a middle American town. Batman Returns, whilst on a grander scale, is simply this arrival of the Other written on a colossal scale, told not as fairytale, but as nightmare. In this grotesque city, in this metropolis of jutting spires and sludge filled, dank, polluted sewers and forbidding monolithic skyscrapers lies the true grotesques; the Bat (Keaton), the Cat (Michelle  Pfeiffer), and the Penguin (Danny DeVito)

Batman's shift to the darkness is, it's fair, a not entirely unexpected move-the series, through so many incarnations, has always played with the concepts of gothic literature and cinema-at the very point the Caped Crusader was exploring the gothic hinterlands on screen, his comic incarnation was, in a very real sense through 1990's Batman: Gothic, and other titles, including the aformentioned (see last review) Batman: A Serious House on Serious Earth. As the Bronze Age gave way to the Modern in the late 80s, so Batman began to turn back to its roots, to its mix of detective comics and horror. A Cliff-notes version of this can be see in 1992's Batman: The Animated Series, which, whilst sharing the Gothic visuals of the original Batman'89, took its narrative in a very different direction-but where they share a striking amount of common ground is in their portrayal of villains, not as mere two-dimension foes for Batman to best, but as beautifully rendered, and often affected Gothic figures, fallen on hard times, or made monstrous by things outside of their control.

Enter Danny DeVito. The Penguin, also known as Oswald Cobblepot, is not the first character you think of when dark and gothic comes to mind-in most incarnations, he's a short, long-nosed, but otherwise relatively normal high society mobster who happens to run a nightclub and deal, depending on the incarnation, in the typical vices, and umbrella-based ultraviolence. DeVito, Burton and Stan Winston turn him into the most terrifying thing in Batman cinema history. The Penguin of this universe is a barely human shadow of Bruce Wayne, a child deliberately disposed of by his parents pitted against a man who lost his to tragedy, a drooling, violent, impulsive and -undeniably- perverted creep of a character. We see him terrorise Gotham, his gang of circus misfits running riot in the opening action scene-and yet, the entire film runs on his bathetic existence.

For, undeniably, for all his vileness, at least a part of DeVito's performance rests heavily upon a High Gothic sense of the unfortunate, of the maligned, that feels like a superheroic re-run of John Hurt's Joseph Merrick in 1980's The Elephant Man; the film's opening is, in short, the infant Oswald being dumped into the local river by his parents, scared that their malformed son will affront high society, and his slow floating journey to the penguins that eventually become his surrogate family, accompanied by Danny Elfman's slow-motion march is a positvely Hades-esque descent, score and all, into the darker tone the film takes. When Oswald emerges, though, but for a few scenes, particularly his search for his parents, where Burton places perhaps the best shot of the entire movie, the lone figure of Oswald above and the Batmobile below, like some latter-day Hopper painting, the mask of the abandoned and fragile orphan comes off, and in its place, is a cunning and cruel monster. When he is eventually thwarted, he practically throws a reverse Merrick, bellowing "I AM NOT A HUMAN BEING! I AM AN ANIMAL! COLD-BLOODED!" before hatching (ahem) his final plan to decimate Gotham via penguin-mounted rocket launchers, as one does.

He, though, is not alone in his cruelty and villainy, for, behind Oswald's mayoral campaign is the figure of Max Shreck, an enjoyably nasty turn by Christopher Walken as a hard-nosed businessman, keen to set up his powerplant in the heart of Gotham, and puppeteering both sides, using the Penguin as much as threat against his enemy as he does to supplant the Mayor; yet the film never quite shows Shreck as all-powerful, often threatened or backed into a corner by the Penguin-their confrontation, their struck bargin that brings Oswald to the surface a veritable Faustian pact in the middle of the sewer that, of all the scenes in the film, brings the viciousness of Penguin to the fore, and just how tentative this allyship between the odious businessman, with his nefarious plan and the violent subterrean gangster, become apparent as their plans begin to fall apart, with Penguin's plot turning violent and all-encompassing, whilst Shreck himself becomes a cowardly and cornered mess of a man, trying to save his own skin. Perhaps the biggest role, though, that Walken's Trump-lite conniving businessman plays in the film, is in the inadvertent creation of Catwoman.

For between the Penguin and Batman, lies Catwoman/Selina Kyle (P, and it is she that essentially carries the film; she begins as a mere secretary for Schreck, appearing at the edges of the film, but, from an encouter with Batman, at the start of the film, she slowly becomes bolder, despite her mousy and quiet existence, and, unfortunately for her, more suspicious of her boss, ending up with her thrown out of a window. Thus begins her transformation into Catwoman, in an astonishing sequence of transformation that gives much of the film's visual iconography as the now maddened Selina essentially destroys her flat, smashing the lights, so that the neon pink reads Hello THere, perhaps the film's most famous visual element, before tearing up a leather jacket to, in short, recreate herself as a vengeful feline burglar. Her reappearance, rescuing a girl from a mugging, before laying waste to Shreck's Department Store, before making off in front of the warring figures of Batman and the Penguin

What Catwoman brings with her, though, is perhaps what caused the film, and indeed Burton, the most trouble-not that the orignal Batman did not play upon adult situations-indeed, much of the film where the Joker isn't openly threatening Batman and Gotham is taken up with the Joker's infatuation with Vicki Vale, but Catwoman is a very much more adult figure in this otherwise remarkably sexless world-it's something, honestly, that comic book movies, this strange middle-ground between adult violence and issues, and childhood make-believe, still struggle with in a way the printed medium does not. And yet,  Pfeiffer owns this role, her femme fatale heroine's allegiances moving this way and that, whilst firmly fixed on her objective of revenge. Moreover, she, quite honestly, steals every scene she's in, playing one side off against the other, her fatale persona ensnaring both Batman and the Penguin.

Against this mismatched trio, of course, is Bruce Wayne himself; if there's perhaps, one weakness to the film, it is in its very lack of Batman him self, with Wayne's alterego kept largely to the the edges of the film, as the fragile figure of Wayne turns detective, both to uncover the sudden appearance of the Penguin, but also, as a theme that run throughout the film, because the film needs the vulnerability of Bruce Wayne rather than the armoured and brooding figure of Batman. This is a film about the figures beneath the mask, the broken outcasts, rather than the masks they wear, a vulnerable dark gothic portrait of three very different figures, and how they deal with being outsiders and outcasts.

 It is also, undeniably, not a happy film; one can admire its sweeping Gothic scope, its masterful balancing act, and, perhaps above all its central trio. But it is not a film one can love-it is cold, grim, and, for all its Christmassy dressing, it is perhaps the single darkest, and most downbeat of the entire Batman cinematic output. The film would underperform, its fuge of darkness and cold and its more mature tone making it an ill-equipped marketing vehicle-Burton's exit from the series leaves us with a tantalising what-if. But, undeniably, from this gothic wreckage comes, in a word, the best Batman film of, if not the series overall, then certainly the series at its darkest, most towering, and most gothic, a colossal, spectacular and icily cold masterpice of a film


Rating: Must See 

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