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.

Warrior (Gavin O'Connor, 2011)

From the second the camera settles on Tommy (Tom Hardy), a former Marine sitting on his father's doorsteps drinking, no one could fail to see that something is wrong with him. Tommy carries scars not only from Iraq but his childhood, and at times it seems as if the ones from the latter affect him more than those of the former. Any good sports movie (and quite a few bad ones) is never about the sport itself, but Warrior is, appropriate to its chosen activity, especially blunt in its placement of the sport as incidental to the real story told through it.

But then, everything in Warrior is blunt, from Gavin O'Connor's meaty, intimate fight scenes to the hyper-masculine dialogue to the borderline shameless appropriations from other fighting movies like Rocky. Despite that thick-headed approach, Warrior routinely subverts expectations and rearranges clichés into something fresh. By casting Tommy as a Marine, the film links the impulses of war and sport (the latter originally a means of staying in shape for the former) as a way for broken people to act out their latent aggression. And by ultimately pitting him against his brother, O'Connor presents us with two rivals equally worthy of the audience's sympathy. What seemed from its marketing to be a formulaic cash-in on a fad instead emerges one of the most even-handed sports films I've ever seen.

With terse exchanges, Tommy evokes a rich history of abuse at the hands of his father, Paddy (Nick Nolte), whose sobriety is given none of the respect and sudden forgiveness it always brings in the movies. Some wounds don't heal, and Tommy viciously undercuts the father's attempts at a reconciliation. If anything, Paddy's sobriety only makes the man angrier, for now he lacks the villain who motivated him; Tommy clearly went to Iraq to get out his fury, but he only returned with more anger and bitterness, and MMA is just another legal way to hurt people in an attempt to beat his pain into something else.

O'Connor contrasts this broken, volatile man with his brother, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), who used to be in the UFC but gave up fighting to start a family. He even works as a high school physics teacher, where he looks completely in his element teaching Newton's laws to attention-deficient but affectionate pupils.  Where Tommy is a hulking mass of quivering, anxious rage, Brendan has leaned, still muscular but clearly someone who has to go to a regular job every day. His face is soft and complacent, but it also sports some slight discoloration soon explained as the result of moonlighting as a fighter in local matches to make extra cash to pay off his crippling mortgage. This completes O'Connor's bleak view of modern America, a place where one must resort to violence either to make money or escape oneself. The interests converge with a major MMA tournament in Atlantic City with a $5 million prize. With the noose tightening around Brendan, he decides to go for broke to protect his family. Tommy, meanwhile, gets wind of the same tournament, and he guns for the prize money to keep a promise to a brother-in-arms, a comrade he clearly views as a relative more than anyone in his own family.

For a 140-minute film, Warrior is remarkably concise. It restricts the interaction between brothers to only a single pre-climax scene, but it's enough. Tommy, his puffy lips giving him the appearance of always recovering from a punch to the face, drawls out insults to the brother he feels abandoned the family when their mother needed him most. Brendan, strong but disciplined and tamed, is more plaintive, apologizing for his naïve, self-centered behavior as a 16-year-old and growing ever more desperate in his pleas as each one falls on deaf ears. Both actors add minute but deepening touches to round out the dynamic between the two brothers. The steadfast loathing in Hardy's eyes silently seizes upon the self-doubt that enters into Edgerton's softened pleas, betraying a nagging guilt that confirms Brendan's culpability. Within minutes, the past, said and unsaid, between the brothers comes out in full, and the conflict that motivates both offers no moral high ground for either party.

Even better is Nolte's Paddy. Audiences by now are used to Nolte's grizzled, almost possessed image and voice, but Paddy offers a more complex portrait of addled gruffness. Though we eventually see the Paddy his children feared and despised—and he proves more than worthy of that hatred and terror—we meet the old man as a repentant grandfather hoping to make peace with both his sons, only to receive curt rejection from both. Tommy is painful enough, returning from a war zone even madder at him than before, but Brendan's denouncement is too much to bear. Nolte has an absolutely devastating scene on the lawn of Brendan's home when he comes to tell his son of Tommy's return and also his own thousandth day of sobriety. Clearly hopeful this milestone will convince Brendan to let him see his grandchildren, Nolte's shaky, cautious smile turns to despairing shock when his son maintains his position forbidding his father to see the kids. Brendan turns to head back inside, and the camera reveals the two children standing in the doorway. In a flash, Nolte's face turns into a horrid combination of agony and ecstasy, his voice breaking with the joy of seeing his grandkids (one of them for the first time) and then crumbling with the pain of having to remain where he is like a stranger as Brendan shoos them back inside, the girls unaware who that strange old man with the funny look on his face is. I've never seen this side of Nolte, and it struck me as much as the later scene of the old Paddy clawing his way back into the open, his red-faced, inchoate gurgling scarier, yet no less tragic a display of powerlessness, than crying at the sight of his granddaughters.

With that kind of pain eating away at the characters, it's no wonder that getting thrown around a cage for a few minutes might be considered a form of relief. O'Connor's fight scenes are gruesomely intimate, the tangle of bulky but lithe limbs mixing the elegance of martial arts with the showboating bestiality of wrestling. In filming Tommy's swift assaults, O'Connor goes for sheer speed, and even then he's barely able to keep up for the blur of flesh that speeds into whatever unlucky opponent faces off against him. Brendan, on the other hand, fights more traditionally, going for the pin instead of trying to knock out people three times his size. O'Connor takes his time with these fights, but he also gets a bit closer, getting into the techniques Brendan must use to even the playing field between him and top-shape fighters. The final fight, naturally, combines the two elements, making for a grisly duel all the more repellent because both characters are so well-defined and sympathetic that seeing either get hurt offers no pleasure.

Still, there are some aspects that grated. Brendan's side occupation naturally runs afoul of the school administration, but O'Connor shows even the people who punish Brendan rooting for him to win in front of students, and the constant cutaways make for nothing more than a cute distraction. Furthermore, as much as the film succeeds for its directness, some parts are just too on the nose, especially Paddy listening to an audiobook of Moby Dick throughout, its physeterid tale of obsession and self-destruction conveniently breaching now and again at just the right time. Having said that, Nolte does capture some of that Ahab madness when Paddy falls off the wagon, but that only makes the use of the book on tape more obvious.

Overall, however, Warrior typically sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the genre. The film's originality didn't hit home until the penultimate match, between Brendan and a legendary MMA fighter named Koba. In most other sports movies, this would have been the climax, our hero pitted against some undefined, massive obstacle, a vaguely foreign Cold War reheat propped up to be beaten by a fresh-faced American to (somehow) bring honor to the nation. But Koba is just the last thing that standing between a long-delayed settling of scores, one transfixing because the players involved seek not personal or national glory but some kind of breakthrough between each other. Besides The Wrestler, no sports movie has made me care so much about its characters since Hoop Dreams.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

Expanding upon the style that brought him international fame with 2008's Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson makes a chilly, claustrophobic character drama out of John Le Carré's classic spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. This is even more impressive considering that the film primarily takes place in vast sets colored in warm, oaken browns (albeit the kind Joyce used to signify death and ossification). Alfredson's vampire film similarly used its expansive white space to actually constrict the frame, and here he goes one step further, swapping out intense but myopic angst for loyalty fears with global consequences. Where youth merely think the whole world is against them, it truly could be if one of these spies slips up, hence why the members of the organization seem to spend more time monitoring each other than anything going on in Russia.

Reveling in his period setting, Alfredson nevertheless, as he did with the 1981-set Let the Right One In, transcends it, presenting Soviet fears and immaculately recreated fashion and design while also crafting a self-contained world with those tools that speaks to more universal, timeless issues. Stylistically, Alfredson has made perhaps the quintessential spy aesthetic: he particularly uses his early-'70s setting for the preponderance of smoking, with numerous shots blanketed in nicotine fogs. But then his elegant camera pulls back to reveal almost Tatiesque structures of giant, voyeuristic windows, also relying often on reflections and even 180-degree rule breaks to stress reversals and the possibility of double agents. To match Le Carré's narrative of ferreting out moles, Alfredson literally uses smoke and mirrors, neither of which can obscure those massive, transparent windows that bare everyone's personal lives to all surveillance.

Boiling down Le Carré's dense text to its gist, Tinker Tailor concerns the possibility of a Russian mole inside British intelligence in 1973. Before his (natural, it should be said) death, the head of the "Circus," codenamed Control (John Hurt), suspected one of the higher-ups in the organization of feeding information to the Kremlin. A botched mission to recover the name of that person in Hungary only confirms something is wrong, but before he can do anything else, Control finds himself forced out of the service by the same ambitious up-and-comers who roused his concerns over a leak in the Circus.

With Control's passing, the civilian overseer of the Circus brings the old man's friend, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), out of retirement to investigate the case. Originally written to be the realistic "anti-Bond" by the actual spy Le Carré, Smiley lets Oldman display another facet to his acting. Known primarily for his explosive, grandiose screen presence, Oldman here plays a mild, calm, unremarkable man who looks almost genetically predisposed to bureaucracy. With a soft voice and glasses so huge they actually mask his eyes and recast his flat, unexpressive lips as toad-like, Oldman looks like a grandfather, not a master spy capable of sussing out a double agent without even setting foot in the Circus. Yet Oldman merely subsumes his old intensity, never having to raise his voice or even whisper forcefully to let the audience know that his look of banal normalcy is a carefully calculated front. It's the most gripping performance the actor has given in ages, all the more impressive for its thorough restraint.

Reducing the novel to a two-and-a-half-hour film necessitates a sharp cutting of plot, turning an already complicated story into a potential labyrinth of unspoken clues. I confess I got lost a few times along the way before finding my way back and wondering how I'd ever gotten sidetracked. But Alfredson never lets the overall atmosphere fade, and indeed the structure becomes useful for more than just parading around an all-star cast of British talent. It places the entire work in opposition to the Bond mythos, of an id-driven übermensch who could shoot and screw his way into the most impregnable fortress. The spy work of Tinker Tailor is a group effort, with each person responsible for different things and also affected by their own hangups, desires and fears. One character (played by a youthful-looking but harrowed Tom Hardy),  not only has to deal with being listed as a defector but with the disappearance of his Russian lover Irina, whose peril wracks him with worry.

That mingling of the political and the personal is where the film best succeeds. Alfredson frames the narrative in unexpectedly emotional terms, exposing national affiliations to be just as narrowly focused yet passionately felt as the longing and teenage anomie of Let the Right One In. Even his visualization of Smiley's wife's adultery is more mournful than outlandish, and its importance to the final reveal only seals the link between turncoat treason and intimate backstabbing. I actually found myself on the verge of tears with a murder in the dénouement, an act framed from start to finish not with tension but sorrow, a grieving for inflicted pain that includes the regret of the revenge itself. This approach tempers the fun the director has with the plot's convoluted structure and his voyeuristic dollhouse aesthetic, giving it a serious bedrock that makes its charms more fully rewarding. In a year with so many huge statements from artists, Alfredson's film is a subtle subversion of everything we expect from its genre, one made all the more irresistible for its focus on character over mechanics.