Closet Cases: Batman Forever Braveheart Congo Meet the Feebles Johnny Mnemonic

review by rob gonsalves

director
Joel Schumacher

screenwriters
Lee Batchler
Janet Scott Batchler
Akiva Goldsman
story by
Lee Batchler
Janet Scott Batchler
based on characters created by
Bob Kane

producers
Tim Burton
Peter MacGregor-Scott

cinematographer
Stephen Goldblatt

music
Elliot Goldenthal

editor
Dennis Virkler

cast

Val Kilmer (Batman/Bruce Wayne)
Tommy Lee Jones (Two-Face)
Jim Carrey (The Riddler)
Nicole Kidman (Dr. Chase Meridian)
Chris O'Donnell (Robin/Dick Grayson)
Michael Gough (Alfred Pennyworth)
Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon)
Drew Barrymore (Sugar)
Debi Mazar (Spice)
Rene Auberjonois (Dr. Burton)
Joe Grifasi (Bank Guard)
Jon Favreau (Assistant)
Don 'The Dragon' Wilson (Gang Leader)
Ed Begley Jr. (Fred Stickley)

mpaa rating: PG-13
running time: 122m
u.s. release: 6/16/95
video availability: VHS - DVD

other joel schumacher films
reviewed on this website:

- batman and robin
- 8mm
- falling down
- phone booth
- a time to kill
- veronica guerin

The key to the first two Batman movies -- 1989's Batman and 1992's Batman Returns, both directed by Tim Burton -- was their gloomy ambivalence about the hero. Committed to a huge project he didn't initiate, Burton showed no interest in the catharsis of crime-fighting; his Batman was a loner haunted by the random murder of his parents, doomed to keep playing the event in his head, sworn to protect the innocents of Gotham from the horror that shattered his life. (Burton and his screenwriters took a page from Frank Miller's 1986 revival Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.) And Michael Keaton, feeling a bit removed from this strange hero (but relating to his intensity), embodied Burton's depressed ambivalence: you saw it in the way he held his body -- stiff and pinched, even when he wasn't in costume. Even in 1989, Keaton knew he was too old to run around in a cape, and he gave Batman the weight of uncertainty. Burton and Keaton's Batman movies are really about two misfits trying to make sense of the all-time misfit: a man preserving peace through violence, upholding the law by breaking it.

The new Batman Forever dispenses with all that bothersome complexity. Despite its stabs at hipness, it's the campy no-brainer we were afraid the 1989 movie would be. Pinch-hitting for Burton, Joel Schumacher (Falling Down, The Client) tries to make Batman Forever a shoot-the-works bash, a deliberate departure from Batman Returns, which many found "too dark." But if this director has a personality, it hasn't snuck into any of his movies. Burton's controversial gothic gloom is gone, with nothing to replace it; Schumacher has overcorrected and made Batman too light. The director has no talent for action (every fight is shot so close in that you can't see what's going on) or for spectacle; generally, he gives us a brief establishing shot of each big, pricey set, which we never see again, and the camera never pauses to take in details. And what we do see gets drowned in pastel strobe lighting. (If I were the set designer on Batman Forever, I'd be pissed.) However, Schumacher (who started out as a costume designer) does show you every contour of the new rough-trade Batman and Robin suits. (For a daffy moment, we seem to be watching superhero fashion porn.)

Val Kilmer steps in as Batman this time. He's a fine actor -- rent Tombstone if you doubt -- and he performs smoothly, but the script gives him nothing to play; Batman is reduced to chintzy one-liners and even chintzier flashbacks to his parents' funeral. Kilmer's scenes as Bruce Wayne don't connect with anything he does as Batman. Unlike Keaton's Bruce, this Bruce isn't a lonely rich man adrift in his vast manor (like a four-color Charles Foster Kane) -- he's a slickster, a shrewd businessman. With the normally outgoing Keaton, you sensed the tension of the actor's restraining himself, trying to flesh out a pained man who hadn't developed a knack for small talk. (There was a sadness in the way Bruce's attempts at conversation petered out in the first Batman.) When Kilmer wears the Bat-suit, there's little difference between him and Keaton from the nose down; the continuity of those pursed lips is a mixed blessing, because sometimes I had to remind myself it was Kilmer, especially since both actors have the same aurally enhanced Bat-whisper. And because this Batman (unlike Burton's) isn't conceived as a quiet, embattled man seething with pent-up violence, Kilmer's performance has no tension. The virus of Gotham's sin hasn't infected him.

Critics accused the earlier Batman movies of forfeiting the action to the villains, who were more flamboyant than the hero. But Keaton provided a center of stillness, without which the glorious excesses of Nicholson, DeVito, and Pfeiffer would have lacked context. Kilmer isn't allowed to hold the center; he has too much competition from eager co-stars trying to wrestle it away from him. Four major characters introduced in a sequel are at least two too many. In Batman Forever we have the duelling ids Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), and, as if they weren't enough, the long-awaited Robin (Chris O'Donnell) finally hits the big screen. Somewhere in the margins of the movie, Nicole Kidman's Dr. Chase Meridian tries to light Batman's fire, but the BDSM-doppelganger sexuality shared by Batman and Catwoman in the previous movie spoiled us for this Kim Basinger-type damsel-in-distress stuff. (Chase is shown to be a good fighter, but she hardly uses her skills.)

So who wins? Chris O'Donnell, the current cover boy of choice, gives a faintly embarrassing "I'm a tough guy now" performance. Near the end, Robin gets all duded up in his fabulous muscle-bound costume and then does ... not much. Despite Rick Baker's yin-yang make-up, Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face couldn't be less interesting. He does the same flatulent mugging he did in Blown Away and Natural Born Killers; since he also did amazing and subtle work in last year's Cobb and Blue Sky, I'll forgive whatever he thinks he's doing here. It's up to Jim Carrey, and as soon as the camera singles him out, the movie's energy level soars; not much later, he takes over completely. Carrey gives the expected Tasmanian-devil performance, but he also lets us share his glee at playing his first villain in a summer blockbuster. His manic vibrancy -- he comes up with a terrific diabolical laugh when he kills off his prissy boss -- cuts right through the movie's muddle.

It helps, too, that Carrey is the only actor in Batman Forever who gets to shape his performance -- progressing from bitter nerd Edward Nygma, who experiments with brainwaves, to the megalomaniacal Riddler, who beefs up his IQ at the entire city's expense. By contrast, Two-Face is abruptly thrown into the plot right at the beginning, so that Jones starts off hammy and never varies. We don't get to meet him (as we did in the comics) as a crusading attorney disfigured and warped by an accident he blames Batman for, though this is explained in a news clip that barely registers. Two-Face seems like an afterthought, and I wondered why the filmmakers didn't just save him for the next sequel.

Batman Forever is boring and near-unwatchable; its title sums it up with cruel accuracy. But I can see why millions of people will go along with it. It's a Batman movie, and it's there, and the trademark pop visuals (what little we see of them -- the editing is wretched) make it a must to catch on the big screen. Yet I'd hate to think that people honestly accept this rhythmless blob as entertainment. Joel Schumacher may be going for the freewheeling, boldly colored escapism of the Batman comics of the '50s, but Dick Tracy already did that sort of thing as well as it can be done. Even Batman's dark nights of the soul are filmed in Schumacher's vapid, Michelob-commercial Flatliners mode. Batman Forever has no heft, no specific mood; it's the latest big, aggressive summer non-movie. It invites comparison (and not flattering, either) with the '60s Batman TV series, which achieved the same level of proud, idiotic awfulness without having to spend $100 million.

Braveheart is the dark-green, brutal, and very long saga of William Wallace (Mel Gibson), the 13th-century Scottish revolutionary who fought to take his land and his people back from the British. This is the second film of 1995 (after the oafish Rob Roy) to illustrate how mean the Brits were to the Scots, and for three hours, punctuated by ferocious battle sequences and shopworn romance, that's all Braveheart is about. This movie and Rob Roy were filmed independently of each other, so it's a troubling coincidence that both films do a fair amount of gay-bashing -- literally, in this case, when the effete lover of the prince is chucked out a high window for a cheap audience laugh.

Touches like that tend to invalidate Braveheart's dedication to the oppressed, but somehow I doubt that Gibson, who is also the director, cares overmuch. He's too busy turning himself into a blue-faced warrior-martyr, and in the last reel, when Wallace stoically endures torture after torture, the movie's masochism level gets abnormally high. (Gibson certainly loves to be tortured in movies -- is he trying to prove he can take it like a man?) Braveheart is supposed to be about Wallace's struggles for his people, yet nobody is allowed to hold the screen except Gibson; the Scots are a noisy, blurry rabble in the background. Gibson also gives himself two leading ladies (Catherine McCormack and Sophie Marceau), who are pretty but forgettable. And did I mention that Braveheart is very long? Gibson has no feel for the complexity, the imagery, or, above all, the rich characterization of a true epic. The movie is like a relentless three-part miniseries. I kept wanting to fast-forward to the battle scenes, which do pack a wallop (Gibson stages them like a kid playing with toy soldiers) but are so revved-up and macho that they're rather revealing. Is Mel Gibson that self-conscious about wearing a kilt? Why doesn't he just come on before the opening credits, present his heterosexual credentials by showing us a photo of his wife and six kids, and be done with it?

Don't get the idea that I'm impossible to entertain. Congo, which features killer apes, an erupting volcano, intrepid jungle guides with machetes, a lost city loaded with diamonds, and a lovable domesticated ape who "speaks" through some form of virtual-reality gizmo, has the kind of plot a group of boys playing with action figures in the backyard might dream up. Director Frank Marshall, hitting his stride after the tepid Arachnophobia and Alive, delivers a satisfying chunk of imitation Spielberg (with whom Marshall has worked as a producer). Perhaps he could have tossed in a giant ant or two, but that's all right. When the likable heroes were delving into the lush threat of the Congo, I settled in, happily relaxed, as the unapologetic adventure pulp unfolded.

In Meet the Feebles, a 1989 adults-only puppet movie now making its way to art houses, a long-snouted animal of indeterminate species engages in "nasal porn" with a cow, and a jilted hippo consoles herself by emptying the shelves of a pastry shop, then emptying a machine gun into most of the characters. You can't say you've seen this before. Meet the Feebles is like an unholy fusion of Jim Henson and Ralph Bakshi, and sometimes the nonstop nastiness gets monotonous (the squeamish should stay home). But Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director who went on to make the ecstatically gory Dead Alive and the fevered, Oscar-nominated Heavenly Creatures, works with a punk-rock glee that pushes this far beyond a dirty Muppet parody. There's a beautifully realized swipe at the Russian-roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, of all things, and Jackson finds lyricism in the unlikeliest places -- a giant spider wrapping its legs around a car; the glow of a stage light shimmering off a pool of puppet blood. Meet the Feebles could have used a little more visual variety: Most of it unfolds inside the squalid theater where the Feebles (like the Muppets) are rehearsing for a live TV show, and the picture quality of the exterior scenes is very spotty. But you have to love -- I have to love, anyway -- a director who gives one of his characters a show-stopping song extolling the virtues of sodomy. The movie deserves its probable status as the cult favorite of the decade.