For the week of June 3rd, Warner Home Entertainment is giving the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher Batman movies 4K upgrades. The best thing about Burton's 1989 blockbuster Batman is that it gave us Batman Returns. That reads as more underhanded than I intended, so let me explain: I rather enjoy the first Burton Batman. Anton Furst's production design has the Expressionistic brutalism of Metropolis or something, so looming and totemic are the streets of Gotham City. And as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Michael Keaton gives what feels like the definitive interpretation of the character. When he's Wayne, Keaton layers in this reserve that we might mistake for haughtiness. In actuality, Wayne is so sick of his "normal" alter ego that he's crawling out of his skin whenever he's not dressed in cape and cowl. But both the film and Burton feel like they're on their best behavior. This movie calcified what would become the modern blockbuster, yet it feels strangely intimate despite the production scope and budget. For all its pomp and circumstance (at one point, the Joker shoots down the Bat-Wing in the middle of Gotham with a handgun), Batman often plays like a chamber piece about two lunatics who can't stop hurting one another. You can sense Burton straining to counter-balance some inspired visual gag (when the Joker poisons people, they die with a grinning rictus smile on their faces) against the requirements of the superhero brand (that lazy ret-con wherein the Joker is also responsible for "creating" Batman; Kim Basinger's boring love interest). Even Jack Nicholson's mad scenery-chewing as the Joker doesn't seem particularly outré. He's just doing JACK™ with the volume turned up to eleven. The whole endeavor is fun, but it's been calculated to within an inch of its life. Buy a ticket; grab an action figure; purchase the fast-food movie tie-in. The film's as much a marketing success as it is an actual movie.
Still, succeed it did, and its $411-million worldwide gross ensured two things: 1) a sequel was inevitable, and 2) Burton could do whatever the hell he wanted with it. Which brings us to 1992 and Batman Returns. As a Batman feature, it's kind of an appalling failure. People criticized Batman for subordinating the title character behind Nicholson, but in retrospect, Keaton has roughly equivalent screen time (Nicholson's showboating tends to overwhelm, much like Heath Ledger's take on the Joker would). But Batman/Bruce Wayne appears in less than half of Batman Returns' runtime: he'll show up, kick a few clown-faced baddies in the head (or explode them into confetti - Batman kills a lot of people here), and then Burton will shuttle him off-screen as quick as possible to focus on something else. And there's the rub - for all its shortcomings as a Batman movie, Batman Returns is a phenomenal Tim Burton picture. Maybe his best: Burton packs the frame with every bizarre idea and setpiece he's ever imagined but could never afford. There's Danny DeVito's repulsive Penguin and Christopher Walken's loathsomely suave Max Shreck and Michelle Pfeiffer's deranged Catwoman (Pfeiffer should have gotten a Best Supporting Actress nomination - it's one of the greatest performances in any comic-book movie, full stop) and a whole coterie of psychotic circus freaks Burton can cut to if the crazy meter starts running low. But it's never just strange for strange's sake. Focusing on all these violent misfits lets Burton make a studio film as personal as anything in Big Fish or Ed Wood. Bo Welch replaced Anton Furst as the production designer, and his work looks like a live-action adaptation of a Burton sketchbook. Skyscrapers twist and bend into impossibly tall points straight out of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!; characters have comically oversized eyes and body types that vacillate between grotesquely obese and disturbingly skinny (Catwoman looks like Edward Scissorhands). And everyone's lonely. And sad. And lashing out because they can't control their feelings. DeVito gives the Penguin this ineffable mix of Trumpian pomposity and outsider alienation: his origin story is a moving short film all its own. And Pfeiffer plays Catwoman as a misfiring bundle of violent synapses - she's a trauma victim who's lost the ability to distinguish between getting off on her actions and recoiling from them. It may not surprise you that her alter ego (nebbish secretary Selina Kyle) and Batman's start dating without knowing the other's secret identity. What will surprise you is that heartbreaking, funny-sad realization when both Wayne and Selina simultaneously realize who they really are, and Selina just slumps into the man she loves and asks, "We don't have to start fighting now, do we?" It's an $80-million comic-book movie about trauma and loneliness. There will never be anything like it again. The weirdest, kinkiest, and most psychologically resonant superhero movie ever made.
Certainly not from Warner Brothers. Once Batman Returns underperformed relative to Batman and inspired a wave of horrified critical opprobrium (here's a summary of the prevailing critical sentiment, circa 1992: "This is so violent and wet and icky and why would you inflict this on me?"), Burton was out, and Joel Schumacher was in for 1995's Batman Forever. There's a common misconception that Batman Forever is a less assaultive movie than the Burton diptych, and I'd like to correct the record. If anything, Forever is even more of an endurance test: it's awash in loud neons and screaming soundtracks (Elliot Goldenthal provides the score; folks like U2 and Seal supply the needle drops) and two superheroes (Val Kilmer replacing Keaton; Chris O'Donnell stepping in as a dudebro Robin) and two villains (the violently overacting duo of Jim Carrey's Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face) and a psychosexual subplot that finds Nicole Kidman's oversexed analyst trying to help Bruce Wayne unpack the murder of his parents, mostly so Schumacher can stage a couple of bizarre dream sequences (that's right - this franchise set a surrealist precedent well before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). The experience is not dissimilar from being trapped in a broken pinball machine. But Batman Forever isn't gross, and that distinction made it more commercially palatable. That said, while I might prefer the Burtons, Forever has its charms. Kilmer is the most underrated Batman, and Schumacher does a great job of aping the '60s Batman's antic, cartoon-adjacent spirit.
However, just as the success of Batman let Burton double-down with Batman Returns, so does Batman Forever embolden Schumacher to make Batman & Robin. And this one is a more indefensible. Batman & Robin is practically a hot-shot of camp: everything is louder and sillier and shriller and crazier. If Batman Forever was starting to buckle under its gallery of superheroes and villains, Batman & Robin crumples the foundation. It is not enough that Batman (now George Clooney) and Robin (still O'Donnell) are working out the kinks in their partnership; no, Akiva Goldsmith's awful screenplay also finds it necessary to toss in Alicia Silverstone's Batgirl because...well, I'm not terribly sure about that one (maybe the Batgirl toy designs focus-tested strongly). The film assigns chief Big Bad duties to Mr. Freeze and tries to give him a tragic villain arc (he's very Dr. Octopus - he was a good man and a great scientist who went mad with grief when his wife contracted a terminal illness)...but then it casts Arnold Schwarzenegger as Freeze and supplies him with an intolerable number of cold puns, thus crapping all over any potential for pathos. Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy fares much better, if only because Thurman knows exactly how to play this evil temptress to the hilt, but the less said about her sidekick Bane (Jeep Swenson, buried under neon tubing and the outfit equivalent of a chain wallet), the better. Even Schumacher seems embarrassed by what he's wrought. In subsequent interviews, he's blamed both the success of Forever and Warner's rapacious merchandising department for forcing his hand on the movie's more critically indefensible decisions (he does take credit for the nipples and butts on the Bat suits, however). More and more, I think Clooney might come out of this looking the worst. He's in Batman & Robin more than Keaton was in Returns, except he's so bland and nondescript that Batman feels like an after-thought in his own movie. How The Most Charismatic Man Alive could seem this milquetoast still astounds, and although Clooney credits this film with helping him purchase a lovely home on Lake Como, I'm not sure if the house merits the footnote of Worst Batman Ever.
Of Batman, Martin Liebman wrote that "The story plays complimentary to the aesthetics, the acting is first-rate, and there's an interesting dichotomy between light and dark, with the villain taking on the outward characteristics of the former and the hero the outward - and also in many ways inward - characteristics of the latter. Keaton and Nicholson play very well against one another and the film is full of terrific support performances." He was less keen on Batman Returns, noting that the film "is nowhere near as good as Burton's original, but DeVito does bring an ominous presence to the screen, even if the character is a little too ridiculous to be taken seriously. The story isn't as tight, either, and pacing is a problem. Still, it's better than what was to come in the later 90s Batman adaptations." Batman Forever, however, Martin called "not awful but it's also a shell of the Burton films, even the lesser Batman Returns. It's too much style, and that style doesn't bring a particularly good aesthetic with it, either. The movie is very much product of its time: big sound, grossly overdone, and anything but subtle." As for Batman & Robin, he argued that Schumacher "cranks [the tone] up to unfathomably ridiculous levels here, and the end product suffers as a result. The movie works as hammy, mindless fun, but it's quite amazing at just what a far cry this is from Tim Burton's masterful 1989 film."
Speaking of 4K upgrades: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is giving one to the beloved 1984 sports drama The Natural. The Bernard Malamud novel from which The Natural draws inspiration is one of the bleakest, most cynical looks at celebrity that I've ever seen. Aging hitter Roy Hobbs is a deeply unhappy, entitled man who sexually uses and abuses women, and baseball becomes, for him, a prism that magnifies all his worst tendencies. But this Barry Levinson film version? It shares the same name as the Malamud text; it's even got some characters that bear some surface comparisons to the people Malamud created. Other than that, the movie is a fundamentally different beast. If Malamud wanted to excoriate the pitfalls of celebrity, Levinson wants to portray baseball as The Great American Myth, caps essential and irony deficient. His Roy Hobbs (the great Robert Redford) is a noble sort who got dealt a bad hand and doesn't intend on letting fate doom him again, and all while backlit by the magic-hour haloes of Caleb Deschanel's beautiful cinematography. At times, Levinson lets a little of the book's darkness creep in. Young Hobbs has a lurid encounter with the last person he should meet (a terrifying Barbara Hershey), and Levinson shoots the moment like a nightmare. And Robert Prosky and Darren McGavin do chilling work as the film's unscrupulous villains (the venal owner of the New York Knights and a manipulative gambler with a fake eye, respectively). But those beats don't fit against the portrait of Americana that Levinson wants to invoke. The reverence towards the sport; Deschanel's amber photography; Randy Newman's Aaron Copland-esque score: all of these denote the creation of an American myth. And if I'm honest, the shameless corn works more often than it doesn't. It might play as overwhelming - Hobbs' final game runs off a near-fatal amount of syrup - but at least it's honest. Levinson keeps bringing in oddball character actors to leaven the treacle (MVPs: Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth's wonderful Mutt and Jeff duo), and he knows what he's got in Redford. Redford has the stillness of Mount Rushmore: he reacts to every development like it's the first time anyone has had that experience. Redford makes sentiment authentic through sheer force of will. That's a movie star for you.
Also from Warner comes the extended "Encore" edition of Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born. It doesn't matter which version you watch - the film remains one of the most slickly produced and engaging mass entertainments that I've seen in a long time. Credit to the original story (it's the fifth iteration of a story that goes back to 1932 - as What Price Hollywood - and already scored a near-definitive version with the 1954 Judy Garland-James Mason weeper), to Cooper, to his team of talented craftspeople, to the ferocious Lady Gaga, to whoever. If you're going to make a shameless Hollywood melodrama, this is how you do it. The Star Is Born template ranks among the hardiest of Hollywood formulas (troubled celebrity falls in love with/makes famous a talented nobody, only to see their fortunes shift as the nobody's star rises), which means that as a first-time director (and producer, and co-screenwriter, and co-songwriter, and lead actor), Cooper knows he can innovate in other, more surprising ways. Long stretches of this movie have the vibe of a Howard Hawks picture: Cooper hates exposition and he loves watching people work, so he's content to just plunk us into the lives of rock star Jackson Maine (Cooper, doing a riff on Sam Elliott-doing-Ryan Bingham-doing-Bruce Springsteen-doing-Kris Kristofferson that seems hammy at first but grows almost unbearably powerful) and aspiring singer songwriter Ally (Lady Gaga, all authentic and messy and compelling charm) and let us figure out the dynamics on our own. In fact, the best scene in the film isn't Ally's big stage debut or any number of the uncomfortable arguments between her and Maine that dominate the second hour. Nope, it's the great opening setpiece, wherein Maine stumbles into a drag bar so he can go from tipsy to full-on drunk, catches Ally's stunning Edith Piaf act, and then leads Ally through some of L.A.'s night-owl haunts, all the while ruminating wistfully on their various dreams and regrets. The sequence plays like the beginning of Only Angels Have Wings as written by Richard Linklater, so naturalistically does Cooper sketch these two outsized personalities. Had the whole movie stayed at that level, we'd be looking at the best film of the year, but formula has other demands, and at some point, we have to start the film's concurrent rise-fall/fall-rise arcs. Still, Cooper proves so good at mainstream filmmaking that we don't mind. As a director, he favors economy of action and totemic images, but he's just as comfortable transitioning into the kinds of freewheeling, improvisatory exchanges that would make his old buddy David O. Russell proud. We see that energy in that opening act, which loves watching the drag queens banter around Jackson and Ally as much as it does the main characters, or the way Cooper gets this lived-in, relaxed energy from Dave Chappelle (playing that Jackson's best friend) that I've never seen from the comedian. So, yeah, A Star Is Born is conventional, and yeah, it makes moves you will see coming from a tour-bus's length away. But it also just works. Pure Hollywood hokum at its finest.
From Lionsgate Home Entertainment comes the idiosyncratic character study Gloria Bell, with its great Julianne Moore performance. It's the specificity with which Moore assays the title character that lends the film its sneaky power. Throughout the film, people are always telling Gloria how great she looks; one of the best moments finds Gloria beaming after an elderly divorcée can't believe Gloria hasn't had any work done. But Moore and director Sebastián Lelio utilize the character's looks in ways far more complex than simple star quality. Rather, Gloria's appearance acts as subtextual development. Gloria is fifty-four, divorced (for almost twelve years), and when she's not triaging claims in her mid-level insurance job, she's dabbling in yoga and after-hours club dancing. Her looks, then, play like an involuntary defense mechanism, a way to seem vital in light of both her advancing years and a culture that's increasingly indifferent to women like her. In its own subtle way, the film takes on the tenor of a grand tragedy, so ruthlessly does Lelio stack the deck against his heroine. God knows he loves Gloria and all the ways she tries to put her best foot forward. But he also sees the toll incurred as Gloria cares for her loving-but-distant children (Caren Pistorius and Michael Cera) and negotiates her new relationship with an emotionally unstable paramour (John Turturro, giving one of his best performances). Lelio can't help but wonder which of these elements will break her. That description makes the film sound a little like Taxi Driver, and to be sure, a climactic scene finds Gloria meting out vengeance with a high-speed weapon (albeit not the one you might expect). Yet by and large, Gloria Bell eschews overt shocks for a kind of stunned, dreamy inevitability. Natasha Braier's smeary camerawork and Matthew Herbert's electronica score prove as gently disorienting as Gloria's late-film foray into marijuana usage. We're in the same haze as Gloria, which proves devastating during the final shot, a long, unbroken take of Gloria dancing to her pop namesake: Laura Branigan's 1982 confection "Gloria." The song is everything she's not - glib, charming, defiantly shallow - and as Lelio holds on Moore's flailing rhythms for an unbearable amount of time, we see the whole film in microcosm. Gloria is unrestrained, desperate for connection. But either no one notices her panic, or no one cares. It's a toss-up as to which is worse.
Finally, we end with the revisionist western The Kid, director Vincent D'Onofrio's reimagining of the last interactions between Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke) and Billy the Kid (Dane DeHaan). There's the germ of a good idea here. Not long after the film starts, Garrett arrests Billy and starts hauling him off to the hangman. Much of the film, then, unfolds on the trail, as Garrett and Billy negotiate various unsavory characters and their own tortured past. They were friends, once upon a time, and that shared history complicates what might be a more straightforward prison transport. DeHaan plays Billy as a grinning, slyly menacing rogue - he's not convinced Garrett can carry out the deed, and so he seems almost pathologically unconcerned about the posse that's captured him. And Garrett is so tortured about leading his friend to the gallows that he's prone to violent outbursts over the smallest of indignations. It's not Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (screenwriter Andrew Lanham isn't the most accomplished crafter of dialogue), but the moments that focus on Billy and Garrett are sturdy enough. DeHaan is very good, and Hawke is quite a bit better than that; he has internalized Garrett's self-loathing so thoroughly that we always know he's lashing out at himself whenever he's screaming or threatening violence. Had we just stuck with Billy and Garrett, The Kid might function as the B-movie version of 3:10 to Yuma. But here's the thing: The Kid really isn't the story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. No, the title mostly refers to young Rio Cutler (Jake Schur), a fourteen-year-old kid who murders his abusive father and goes on the run with his sister (a very good Leila George, daughter of D'Onofrio and Greta Scacchi), fleeing their brutal uncle (a terrible, wholly unthreatening Chris Pratt). It's during their journey that we meet Billy and Garrett, and as such, we see these two dynamic characters exclusively through the eyes of Schur's far less dynamic protagonist. It's a near-fatal choice. Every time we cut to Rio (which is often), the movie just deflates. It certainly doesn't help that Schur gives one of the worst, most affected child performances that I've ever seen. Schur has been tasked with carrying this film, and he's completely out of his depth. There's such an odd tension between the apathy of his facial reactions and the histrionic melodrama of his line deliveries. I couldn't fathom why a person as talented as D'Onofrio would cast such a leaden presence, and then I learned that Schur's father is Jordan Schur, former president of Geffen Records and the producer of The Kid. Glad to see nepotism is alive and well.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the intermingling of real historical and fictional characters becomes arguably less believable once Grant reenters the fray and Sara becomes a damsel in distress. Seeing both Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett through Rio's young eyes is the film's saving grace and gives the story (story credit goes to director Vincent D'Onofrio and Andrew Lanham, with Lanham providing the actual screenplay) a rather distinctive perspective. That said, the film perhaps resides too firmly in pretty well-worn Western tropes (wagon wheel ruts?) to ever totally deliver on its premise. That said, there are some really appealing performances here, with Hawke a wonderfully grizzled and somewhat put-upon Garrett, and DeHaan an equally appealing and not especially villainous Billy. Schur anchors the film very well as young Rio, though George has little to do as Sara other than look frightened. D'Onofrio captures some extremely picturesque western vistas that probably unavoidably evoke the work of John Ford."