“The Dark Knight” exceeds its hype

Wow. I totally blew off my work day Friday to go see the matinee, and it was completely worth putting myself behind the 8-ball work-wise, which I will be all weekend as a result.

The director’s first “Batman” flick, a couple years ago, was an excellent superhero origin story. This movie is more like a German Opera – dense, dark, thoughtful and depressing. Grand. Spectacular. Larger-than-life in ambition but still tragically all too human in emotional scope.

Even despite all the pre-opening hooplah, most of it centered around star Heath Ledger’s for-the-ages portrayal of Batman’s nemesis The Joker, I didn’t go to this film expecting to be moved. Impressed, wowed, maybe even knocked out, but not sucker-punched when I wasn’t looking, which is what happened.

Somewhere around the mid-point, just when I started thinking “Geez, maybe this thing is a little long; I shoulda stayed home and got my work done,” something turned resonant. It began to matter more than a summer popcorn movie ought to. “Iron Man” was more pure fun, “Wanted” was more of a pin-wheeling carnival ride, but this felt like a film that should have been released around Thanksgiving, with all the high-minded, award-seeking ‘meaningful’ films that are designed to leave you thinking about them, and/or bummed or days. (“There Will Be Blood” and “No Country For Old Men” come immediately to mind.)

This isn’t a superhero flick with a message, this is a snapshot of the crumbling moral infrastructure of American society as it teeters on the slippery edge of Nietzsche’s abyss that happens to star a man dressed up like a bat. A morality play on steroids and mind-altering drugs.

I never noticed Ledger in any of his other flicks, but in this one, he astounds. His performance is every bit as powerful as you’ve read; it almost makes me want to go back and re-watch “Brokeback Mountain” to see if maybe I missed something while I was squirming in my seat at the subject matter. As movie villains go, his performance in “Dark Knight” will go down in film history alongside Hannibal Lector in “Silence of the Lambs” and Leatherface from the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” After awhile, you fall into his performance and his horrific outlook on human nature begins to make perfect sense.

Director Chris Nolan’s Gotham City is as dyspeptic a vision of a decaying American metropolis as Ridley Scott’s “Bladerunner” was a prescient one. Dark, ugly and feral, inhabited by well-dressed, well-heeled swine on both sides of the law, it would take a hero as damaged as Christian Bale’s Batman to summon up the give-a-shit to want to save it. Any reasonable Super, hero or villain, would just burn it down and start over from scratch, advice that actually is given in the film at one point by a very unlikely source.

Everyone impresses, but no one more so than co-writer (with his brother) and director Christopher Nolan. This is his vision, true to (comic book wunderkind) Frank Miller’s gritty take on Batman from 1986’s graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns” but without the laughs. Even Miller’s Joker pales in comparison to what Nolan and Ledger have wrought.

I never give plot details in my reviews. They inevitably ruin something for someone – usually me – and this movie has enough plot for two films without feeling like it should have broken up into two discrete features to do all its business justice. It is a relentless, emotionally pummeling experience with enough eye-candy to justify its high-summer release, but the kind of after-the-show resonance that you’ll be sorting out the pieces of this flick in your mind for weeks to come.

Toward the end of the film, there is a grace note where the filmmakers hold out a sliver of hope for the decency of the Average Joe that stops just short of feeling false, but cities aren’t run and big decisions aren’t made by Average Joes. They’re made by corporate cocksuckers and well-connected heels who don’t give a shit about Average Joes; who eat Average Joes for breakfast and pick their teeth clean with the skeletal remains.

Ledger’s Joker – hell, this whole film — is an all too apt metaphor for a decade that has given us both Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. This movie feels at once like a hellish extrapolation of where society is headed, and a backroom peek at the powers-that-be that are driving us to the edge of that terminal abyss.

Best movie of the year so far, hands-down.