The Curious Case of Batman Returns

I always believed that “Beetlejuice,” with its quirky combination of horror and comedy, its silly visual effects paying tribute the films of Harryhausen, and its wonderful set design by Bo Welch, was the essential Tim Burton movie. But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it’s “Edward Scissorhands,” with its pessimistic view of normality, or “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and its juxtaposition of Halloween and Christmas, or “Ed Wood” with its homage to passionate yet not entirely conventional (or good) filmmakers. Or maybe it might actually be a rather divisive film, one called “Batman Returns.”

Tim Burton made “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” in 1985, “Beetlejucie” in 1988, and was then tapped to create the highly-anticipated “Batman” in 1989. A huge blockbuster and a highly-entertaining movie, it nonetheless left Burton in mixed spirits of his experience. He would return to direct the sequel three years later only if he was given more control, and more control he was given. The result was “Batman Returns,” a much more personalized and, well, less “Batman” of a movie.

But is it bad, good, or mediocre?

Allow me to use the words of Roger Ebert to demonstrate what is so perplexing about this movie: “I give the movie a negative review, and yet I don’t think it’s a bad movie; it’s more of a misguided one, made with great creativity, but denying us more or less what we deserve from a Batman story.” This is where the first dissonance lies: is this really a Batman movie? Burton is certainly one of its most famous students of German Expressionism in cinema, and his movies are always (except for “Alice in Wonderland”) fascinating to look at, and so is this film. But do I really want Batman to show up in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”? (To be fair, all Batman films are flawed or at least divisive. Some might argue that Prince songs didn't need to be in “Batman,” or the samurais were too boring in “Batman Begins,” or there was too copious an amount of psychology and allegories in “The Dark Knight." I haven’t even mentioned “Batman Forever” or “Batman and Robin.”)

The movie returns Michael Keaton as Batman. There are also two new characters--Danny DeVito as the Penguin, in the style of “Freaks” and “The Elephant Man” as a character forever ostracized from society, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, a role that might still be her best-known yet. The three of them constitute what I think Burton likes most in storytelling: the sympathetic view of outsiders. But even with DeVito and an enormous amount of makeup and Pfeiffer and her toughness and leather, the two characters are considerably less interesting than Jack Nicholson’s role in the previous film as the Joker. The character that really is more interesting is the non-canon role played by Christopher Walken as Max Schreck, a CEO with political interests and a giant lock of white hair, using his various methods to pin the three against each other. (The name of the character is borrowed from the the actor who played the title role in F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” from 1922; Schreck means “fright” in German.) Considerably more ambiguous and enigmatic than the other two villains, why is it that Schreck is more interesting to watch than two of Batman’s most famous villains? "That's what you get when you put Christopher Walken in a role."

Finally, one gets the sense as one often does when watching a Burton film that this is a deeply personal film about what it means to be alone, to be different. Welch's elaborate sets give the impression that something is truly wrong and disturbing with this world; its score by Danny Elfman, who composed all but one score for Burton, seems as if it was written with specific instructions to darken the mood this time around. While not being a Batman expert, I know it well enough to understand that the original character was meant to be more dark and mysterious than say Adam West was and that the comics, particularly those by Frank Miller and Alan Moore (whose “The Killing Joke" provided a model for the first Burton Batman film), have been particularly dark. But was it necessary for a Batman film to be so dark and personal?

Since 1985, Burton has established himself as sort of an “other” filmmaker. He is perhaps known best as the oft-director of his close personal friend Johnny Depp (they’ve made seven films together), or the quirkiness which has already been described; regardless, he’s who Christopher Lee called “one of the great directors of our age.” It’s not entirely clear who his movies are directed towards, but they are certainly appealing to many. Is “Batman Returns,” a fascinating yet perplexing experience, one of those movies?