If we’re going to get another Batman, we might as well get another brawny, bombastic musical theme to accompany him. For The Batman, composer Michael Giacchino (best known for his delicate work for Pixar) delivers a score that’s right up there with the music of Danny Elfman on 1989’s Batman and Hans Zimmer on 2008’s The Dark Knight. This includes a recurring motif that may go down as the defining sonic signature for the character: brooding, pursuing, a four-beat boot-stomp that emerges from the darkness to overwhelm. Yes, as you’ve likely heard, The Batman is darker than even The Dark Knight. This is a serial-killer thriller a la Seven, set in a decrepit, rain-drenched Gotham dripping with Joker levels of social unease. Joaquin Phoenix’s villain from that film could easily work as the foil for this Batman/Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson), but instead we get Paul Dano as The Riddler, a deeply disturbed societal outcast who expresses his grievances by sadistically murdering corrupt officials and leaving clues for Batman, whom he sees as something of a fellow vigilante. For his part, Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne doesn’t know what he wants to be. Early on, before pummeling a pack of goons within an inch of their lives, he announces, “I’m vengeance.” Yet after two years of fighting crime with little to show for it and no subsiding of his own furious anger (Pattinson delivers a morose, emo-goth Bruce Wayne, but an almost psychotically violent Batman), where has vengeance gotten him? Similar questions bedevil Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), a nightclub worker/cat burgler (you could even call her Catwoman) looking to avenge the murder of her mother. Pattinson and Kravitz bring real heat to their scenes together—there’s a great moment where he holds her against his chest as they’re hiding from a pursuer and their breathing slowly, erotically falls into rhythm. Even at three hours, the movie could use more of her. Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) and cinematographer Greig Frasier (Dune) embrace the rainy milieu with an occasionally smeared lens, yet avoid the CGI-laden bleariness that defined the other Batman films I haven’t bothered to mention. Still, Giacchino’s score is the standout aesthetic element of The Batman, including those instances where the instruments begin at a high pitch, as if they were bat screeches, then slide mournfully into the sort of moans heard echoing in Gotham’s gloomy alleys. With Jeffrey Wright as Gordon; Andy Serkis as Alfred; John Turturro as Falcone; and Colin Farrell hidden under prosthetics as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin.
(3/2/2022)
