Lemons: Joe Mantello Directs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Laurie Metcalf, a carton of organic milk, and Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. (Photo: Emilio Madrid.)

When I heard director Joe Mantello was setting the current revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in a garage, I misheard it as the garage. So I assumed it meant the garage attached to the Lomans’ house. As far as reconceptions of classic American theater go, it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard. But no: It wasn’t the garage, it was a garage. But what set designer Chloe Lamford provides isn’t even a garage—it’s a huge industrial warehouse with a large rollup metal door and piles of debris and dirt everywhere. (That Lamford won a Tony for her set is far more unsettling than anything in the play.) The characters sleep on metal benches, eat meals at a metal table, and walk barefoot on the dirty floor. The structure earns garage-icity when the metal door ascends and Willy Loman drives his car into the warehouse to begin the play. (It ends with Willy backing the car off the stage. Symbolism.) I get that the America Dream is a lie, that Willie’s life is a big empty warehouse (I would argue that it’s actually a small empty warehouse), but do you need to hit the audience with a sledgehammer (and an ugly one at that) to make that point? Salesman isn’t a naturalistic play--there are flashbacks and fantasy sequences; Jo Mielziner’s famous set for the original Broadway production was widely seen as an expressionistic wonder -- but when the stage is so bereft of any hint of visual beauty or interest, you wonder why Willy doesn’t kill himself sooner.

Along the Spectrum: Recent Movies

Tracey Ullman and Cillian Murphy in Steve. (Photo: Robert Viglasky, Netflix.)

Cillian Murphy and the Belgian filmmaker Tim Mielants are a superlative team. Last year Mielants directed Murphy in the beautiful Irish movie Small Things Like These, the best treatment so far of the subject of the Magdalene Sisters, the notorious Irish order that turned pregnant unwed teenage girls into workhorses and then put their babies up for adoption. I loved everything about this film: Enda Walsh’s subtle, precise screenplay, culled from a fine small novel by Claire Keegan; Frank van den Eeden’s moody, delicate lighting; and all the performances, but especially Murphy’s. He plays Bill Furlong, a family man who runs a coal business in an intimate Irish town where the Magdalene convent wields considerable power – they decide which of the local girls gains entrance to their prestigious school. Their backing not only guarantees a better education but guides the students’ path to college and a promising future. So when Bill finds, hiding in the coal bin, one of the girls whose families have dumped them in the convent to sidestep the shame of their situation and she begs him to help her get away, the Mother Superior (Emily Watson) has only to remind him, in a friendly tone, how well two of his five daughters are managing in their school and how much they’re looking forward to admitting the next one in line to secure his silence. (She seals the deal with a generous Christmas tip; this isn’t a prosperous town.) But Bill himself was raised by a single mother, and then, after her early death, by the kind woman she’d worked for as a domestic; he feels his life was blessed by his upbringing at the hands of one brave woman and one with the means and the independence of mind to stand against the social norms of this time and place.

Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford and The Way We Were

I opted to listen to Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, rather than reading it in hard copy so that I could hear her inimitable phrasing – the quality that made me a diehard fan of her albums when I started collecting them in 1964, at the age of thirteen. (The first one I owned, a gift from my aunt and uncle, was the original cast album of Funny Girl, which had recently opened on Broadway; I played “Don’t Rain on My Parade” through so many times that it’s a miracle I didn’t wear down the vinyl.) I was lucky: Streisand’s movie career began the week I started university, when she opened in the film version of Funny Girl, and I saw each of those great early performances – in Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox and The Way We Were – as they came out, on the big screen. What I mostly desired from the memoir was information about, and her personal response to, her early triumphs on stage (her scene-stealing supporting performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale led to Funny Girl), television (where she, Joe Layton and Dwight Hemion reconceived the variety special with the explosively inventive My Name Is Barbra in 1965), LP and film. My usual experience with the memoirs of performers I love is that they’re fun as long as they chronicle the origins of a career but run out of steam once the writer has made the leap into stardom. And this one comes in at a shade under a thousand pages! Plus I haven’t cared much for Streisand’s pop albums and found only a few of her later pictures interesting – though, notably, I’ve never missed one. (Her film career had pretty much faded by the early nineties.)

Mixed Media Report

This round-up includes reviews of Adolescence, Good Night, and Good Luck and Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, as well as a tribute to Charles Strouse.

Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper in Adolescence. (Photo: Netflix.)

It’s a confirmed truth that British actors can do just about anything, but the consistency and range of performances in the recent four-part English series Adolescence (streaming on Netflix) is so impressive that it may have set a new standard. The style of the limited series, created and written by Stephen Graham, who plays one of the principal roles, and the prolific playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, is documentary realism, and the characters are etched in such precise psychological detail that they register more as figures in an Impressionist group painting come to life than as actors at work. You carry them away with you; I watched the first half at the end of the evening and woke up early the next morning with them still crowded into my brain. (I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d finished the series.) My praise is meant to extend to the young performers, who give performances of unwavering authenticity on a par with the adults. Those of us who love watching English TV drama – and that includes almost everyone I know – have our favorite actors, but the only member of the cast of Adolescence I recognized was Graham, whom I’d admired as the captain of the whaling ship in The North Water and as Jamie Bell’s brother in the movie Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. I assume that my lack of familiarity with the others enhanced the freshness of the experience, but then British actors are chameleons anyway.

More on the Broadway Musical Season: Dead Outlaw, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time

Andrew Durand (left) and Company in Dead Outlaw. (Photo: Matthew Murphy.)

The general complaint about Broadway musicals in the twenty-first century is that too many of them recycle the plots of old movies. But ever since the advent of the sophisticated book musical with Show Boat in 1927, composers and librettists have looked to other media for source material, though during the golden age of American musicals they more often began as straight plays or novels. Did critics and aficionados bemoan the fact that My Fair Lady adapted Pygmalion, Guys and Dolls was derived from a pair of Damon Runyon stories and Kiss Me, Kate was based on The Taming of the Shrew? The proof, as always, is in the pudding. The recent history of the musical would be significantly poorer without Hairspray, The Band’s Visit and, God knows, The Light in the Piazza. Anyway, the evidence suggests that musicals are becoming more imaginative, not less so. This season’s crop included a Korean import about two robots in love, a nineteenth-century whaling tale that ended in shipwreck and cannibalism, and, weirdest of all, the new Dead Outlaw, a rock musical conceived by David Yazbek, who also penned the music and lyrics along with Erik Della Penna.  

Year-End Movies III: The Boy and the Heron and The Boys in the Boat

The heron in Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron.

One of the cinematic high points of 2023 was surely the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s return from retirement with The Boy and the Heron. (His last feature was The Wind Rises in 2013, though imdb.com lists a 2018 short, unknown to me, called Boro the Caterpillar.) Conceived and written by Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron is a gorgeous fairy tale set, like The Wind Rises, during the Second World War. The young hero, Mahito (voiced in the dubbed version by Luca Padovan), loses his mother during the bombing of Tokyo; a year later his father, Shoichi (Christian Bale), moves them into the countryside, where he has opened a new factory. He is now romantically involved with Natsuko (Gemma Chan), who is carrying his child. This will be Mahito’s new home, but it’s alienating to him. Aside from the sudden news that a woman he has never met before, whom he addresses politely as “ma’am,” is about to become his new stepmother, there’s little actual education going on in his new school. The children spend more time working the land for the war effort than in the classroom, and as soon as he arrives he’s bullied by his classmates; his response is to bash himself in the head with a rock, claiming a fall, so he doesn’t have to go back the next day. Yet in unexpected ways this unfamiliar environment links up with the boy’s identity. Natsuko, it turns out, is his aunt and looks eerily like her, and this is the place where the two sisters grew up; the strange, Medieval tower that is the most striking landmark was created by their great-uncle. And a talking grey heron (Robert Pattinson) who gloms onto Mahito insists that he’s an emissary sent to take him to his mother, who isn’t dead at all. The boy’s adventures begin when Natsuko, whom he has seen, from his bedroom window, entering the woods, vanishes, and his quest, at the heron’s invitation, to find his mother becomes, in the mysterious transformative manner of a dream, a search for Natsuko. It takes him into the tower and out again into an island world where pelicans and parakeets are omnivorous creatures the size of human adults (the main pelican is voiced by Willem Dafoe, the main parakeet by Dan Stevens) and where the bent-backed, protective domestics from Mahito’s world are echoed by small wooden dolls that reside on shelves and around beds and operate as totems.

Year-End Movies I: The Holdovers and Ferrari

Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers.

The review of The Holdovers contains spoilers.

In The Holdovers a prodigiously bright but desperately unhappy teenager with a checkered academic history and the sour, supercilious Ancient Civilizations teacher at his boarding school are stuck with each other’s company over Christmas week of 1970, when the campus, a few hours’ drive from Boston, is deserted except for these two, the cook and the caretaker. Initially there are four other “holdovers” but the screenwriter, David Hemingson, employs a wobbly plot twist to scatter them so that he and the director, Alexander Payne, can home in on the teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), the boy, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), and the cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).

White Knight: The Batman

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman. (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.)

In his 1957 architectonic study Anatomy of Criticism, structuralist Northrop Frye sketches a taxonomy of literary heroes. Those of the Mythic mode, he argues, are gods: they’re superior in kind to other characters and to their environment. They defy the laws of nature and possess divine gifts. Examples include Zeus, Bacchus, and Shiva. In a tragic narrative, they die. In a comic one, they rejoin the heavenly realm. (The Christian narrative is neither tragic, nor comic, but ironic: Christ is crucified, yet raised to the Father on the third day.)

The heroes of the Romantic mode are superior to others and their environment only by degree. Their actions are marvelous, but they themselves are human beings. In tragedy, their deaths are elegiac and tied to the decay of the created order (think Beowulf). In comedy, they ride off into a pastoral setting (e.g., the cowboy in a Western).

Following this schema, contemporary superheroes dwell in a gray area between the Mythic and Romantic modes. Some, like Superman, are gods – different from us in kind. Others, like the X-Men, are mortals but possess mutations that give them supernatural powers. And still more, like Iron Man, don’t have genetic enhancements so much as advanced technology, making them more Romantic than Mythic.

Stabbed in the Heart: The Twilight Saga (2008-2012)

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in Twilight (2008).

I confess: I too used to shit freely on Twilight (2008). What started changing my mind is the excellent work of its two leads, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, in their work after Twilight, though never again together after their breakup. This, and not my internalized misogyny against media embraced by teenage girls, is the angle from which I have approached these films, based on the four novels by Stephenie Meyer. And they're fascinating.

Neglected Gem: The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)

Stella Stevens and Jason Robards in Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue. (Photo: Getty)

In a brilliant essay for Critics at Large on women in Sam Peckinpah’s movies, Amanda Shubert wrote that The Ballad of Cable Hogue “distills the romantic spirit at the core of Peckinpah’s sensibility: love without possession.” In the romance between Cable (Jason Robards), who finds water in the middle of the Arizona desert and turns it into a watering hole called Cable Springs for stagecoach passengers, and Hildy (Stella Stevens), a prostitute whom the citizens of nearby Dead Dog run out of town, love without ownership is merely an extension of the transitoriness to which they are philosophically dedicated because they recognize it as the state of things. In the movie’s opening episode, Cable is robbed by his partners, Taggart (L.Q. Jones) and Bowen (Strother Martin) – playing a variation on the bounty hunter roles they created in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch the previous year – and left for dead without water in the desert. He survives four dry days through sheer orneriness while, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, he keeps up a running monologue to God, assuming that his maker has no intention of letting him die of thirst. He finds water just as he’s about to give up, but the sign of God’s grace at the eleventh hour and the sudden twist in his fortune impart an indelible awareness of morality and the fact that we don’t own time, or our own lives. For Hildy, Dead Dog – a town that deserves its name – where she ekes out a ramshackle existence, seeing customers in a room above the saloon, is merely a way station for her; her destination is San Francisco, and being forced to leave brings it that much closer. She stops by Cable Springs and lives with Hogue for a few blissful weeks – what the characters played by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight would call a “time out” from their lives. She wants him to come with her to San Francisco, but he’s stubborn about waiting for Taggart and Bowen to swing through the desert again so he can get his long-awaited revenge. So she goes on without him. She returns for him three years later, this time to invite him to New Orleans, after he’s had that revenge, or something like it; by now he’s ready to run away with her. But fate has other plans, and Hildy is its unwitting envoy: the chauffeur-driven automobile that brings her slides down a hill, Cable steps in, instinctively, to save Bowen, and he ends up getting run over. Hildy keeps him company during his last days, and leaves after his funeral.

The Parisian Woman: Those Devious Politicos

Uma Thurman and Blair Brown in The Parisian Woman. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The last time I saw Uma Thurman, she appeared, in a remarkable ensemble, in the 2015 NBC miniseries The Slap, which deserved more attention than it got. Now she’s starring in a new Broadway play, Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman, and at forty-seven she looks more beautiful than ever – that long, sleek frame, that sculpted goddess’s face. She hasn’t done much previous stage work (she played Célimène in a production of Molière’s The Misanthrope at Classic Stage Company in 1999), but she seems just as comfortable on the stage of the Hudson Theatre as she does on camera, and, with Jane Greenwood’s elegant dresses dripping off her, her presence is mesmerizing.

Time Waits for No One

Coming back to Ryerson University to teach a film course for the first time since being diagnosed with cancer over a year ago, I decided to start with a class about the nature of time. Even though I had had the idea shortly before I became sick, it had acquired some poignancy during the months of treatment. Time wasn't just the philosophical exercise I first considered, but a tangible entity that I was growing quite intimate with. I came to see that you can't beat time because – to paraphrase George Harrison – time flows on within you and without you. We may try to organize time through our calendars and appointment books to construct a linear path of going forward through the weeks, months and years. But we can run out of time despite what our daytimer tells us. When we are awake, we are conscious of time passing. Yet we sleep for eight hours a night and it never seems like eight hours when we open our eyes to the morning.

Time is independent of our existence whether we are conscious of it or not. It may be one reason why some of us fear going to sleep at night because it's then that our futile control over time slips out of our grasp. As we enter the world of dreams, time shifts into realms of abstract reality. It's movies that allow us to experience time in that abstract reality, as if we were to find ourselves in a waking dream. Perhaps that's why some people fear movies and choose to attend only some pictures, while avoiding others that may disturb their sense of order. Unlike in the other arts such as literature, theatre, opera and the visual arts, where we can experience a work in linear time – giving us full control of what we read, watch and hear – movies are about surrendering our control to the eye of the camera and the sensibility of the person behind the lens.

Thumbs down!: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!

George Clooney in Joel and Ethan Coen's Hail Caesar!

Hail, Caesar!, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, may be their most lacklustre film to date. The story, set in 1951, revolves around the goings-on when movie star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped and harried studio executive Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has to retrieve him before the plug has to be pulled on the studio's expensive Biblical epic, Hail, Caesar!: The Story of the Christ, which stars Whitlock. Hail, Caesar! has a lot of potential as a screwball comedy, skewering as it does everything from self-centered actors to pretentious directors to the leftist politics of the time but the movie is pretty much dead on arrival. The actors are bored and mostly boring, the set pieces, made up fake movies of various genres, musicals, high comedies, Westerns etc., are flat and unimaginative, and the whole production barely makes a comedic ripple. Remember how disinterested and indifferent the Coens were when they won the Best Picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men? Imagine a movie made with that same spirit of ennui and you have Hail, Caesar! in a nutshell.

Nostalgia For The Future: Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland

I wore a NASA t-shirt to a screening of Tomorrowland with no idea of how prescient that choice of clothing would turn out to be. Sure, the film stars Brittany Robertson as the precocious teen-genius daughter of a NASA engineer, and she chases after her dad’s battered NASA ballcap like Indiana Jones by way of Nancy Drew whenever an action sequence snatches it from her head. But unbeknownst to me, our shared affinity for American space agency branding marked me, like Robertson’s character Casey Newton, as a dreamer – and a perfect subsection of Tomorrowland’s target demographic.

Appreciating Victor Fleming

Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind

“It’s amazing: you ask people as a trivia question ‘Who directed Gone with the Wind?” and nobody knows; you give them a second clue – it’s the same guy who directed The Wizard of Oz – and they say Mervyn LeRoy. Victor Fleming was either a wonderful director or the luckiest son of a bitch in the world.”  – Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Among the big studio-era Hollywood filmmakers whose sturdy masculinity – an affinity for Westerns and other kinds of action pictures, a love of robust characters (both male and female), a comfortableness with the physical and the outdoors, a skill for shaping the distinctive qualities of all-American movie stars – Victor Fleming has traditionally been shortchanged. John Ford has been glorified, partly because he made the most consciously pictorial movies; he was always after art, and at his best he got it, in Young Mr. Lincoln, The Long Voyage Home, How Green Was My Valley. Howard Hawks, who worked in every genre, parlayed a love of raucousness and sass and tossed-off professionalism into a hard-boiled character ethic that infused all his work, whether he was making a gangster picture like Scarface or an aviator actioner like Only Angels Have Wings or a newspaper movie-cum-romantic comedy like His Girl Friday; his movies were companionable and often so speedy (the overlapping dialogue) that they felt wired. Fleming doesn’t get the same kind of respect. One reason may be that he did his best work in the thirties and very early forties and was dead by the end of the decade, whereas Hawks and Ford continued to make movies for another couple of decades; they were still around and working, if not at the height of their talents, when the film studies programs started operating in the sixties. Another reason, ironically, is that the two most famous projects Fleming was attached to, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, came out the same year, 1939, and because they were vastly different and he wasn’t the only director who worked on either – King Vidor directed the Kansas footage in the first after Fleming prepared it, and Fleming replaced George Cukor in the latter – Fleming has been saddled with a reputation as a hired gun.

A Manner of Style and a Style of Manners: Remembering Oscar de la Renta

Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta (1932-2014) 

Manners never go out of style, and for that reason Oscar de la Renta, a great fashion designer who was also big on manners, will forever be remembered as a style icon. I came to witness first-hand the man’s elegance, reflected in both his demeanour and his drop-dead gorgeous dresses, on more than one occasion. As The Globe and Mail’s fashion reporter, I interviewed him in Toronto in 2002 at Canadian launch of his fruity-floral perfume, Intrusion by Oscar de la Renta. He autographed the modernist bottle for me. I also travelled to New York several times to attend his fashion shows, writing about them for my paper’s Style section. I remember one of the them vividly, both for what went down the runway and for what was happening behind the scenes. The gossip first.

The Dominican-born designer who became an American citizen in the 1969, dressed Hollywood stars (Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Sarah Jessica Parker), American first ladies (Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama) and wealthy socialites (Nancy Kissinger and Lady Lynn de Rothschild). He was the Oscar who owned the Oscars; his gowns dominated the red carpet. Just before his death on October 20 at age 82, he had designed the wedding dress worn by Amal Alamuddin at her September wedding to heartthrob George Clooney. Oscar de la Renta was always relevant, always au courant. Which would explain why his shows were standing-room only affairs. Even to be seen at an Oscar de la Renta show was enough to make the participant seem a part of fashion. A-listers wanted to be seen in the front row to make their own stylish selves be known through association. Not that C.Z. Guest needed to have tried so hard.

Bob Hoskins: The Thrill of Acting

Bob Hoskins (1942-2014)

Bob Hoskins, who died at the end of April at the age of seventy-one, was known as The Cockney Cagney, and it’s easy to see why. He’s compact like Cagney, a little man with a loud voice, but both men aren’t merely flamboyant: their front-and-centre, pop-up quality reveals an alertness to the world and an intensely emotional interaction with it. They leap out of the gate like champion racehorses because their characters are bursting at the seams. Like Cagney’s, Hoskins’s trademark performances are about class, though in a more explicit and more complex way. Cagney’s characters didn’t generally talk about their working-class roots but they didn’t have to – the proletarian essence was in his somewhat stylized New York accent, his hoofer’s nimbleness, as assertively masculine as Gene Kelly’s, his take-no-prisoners aggressiveness, and in the fact that the actor’s home studio was Warner Brothers, which catered to the working-class neighborhoods that housed many of the theatres Warners owned. Hoskins’s characters have the same qualities (Cockney subbing for New Yorkese), but they address the issue of class all the time. Well, that’s the Brit in them; they’re fighting the battle of the classes that’s at the heart of English drama from the middle of the twentieth century onward. There’s more overlap, too, between these two marvelous actors. Both men’s acting is centered as much in their eyes as in their tight, dukes-up, punching-the-air bodies, though whereas Cagney famously had soft bedroom eyes – Olivier eyes – Hoskins’s eyes had the quality of blazing neon or exploding firecrackers. Both had a depth of feeling that, set against their missile-force immediacy, had the ability to poeticize their acting. And they both acted as if they thought it was the most thrilling job in the world. They got gloriously, extravagantly drunk on it.

Monumentally Dull: George Clooney's The Monuments Men

George Clooney and Matt Damon in The Monuments Men

It’s an unusual criticism to make of a movie that it doesn’t aim low enough. But that’s the problem with The Monuments Men, George Clooney’s new movie about a team sent by FDR to Europe in the final years of the Second World War to root out the art the Nazis stole from the countries they conquered and protect any more of the cornerstones of western civilization from being damaged. Using as source material the non-fiction book by Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Clooney and his co-writer/co-producer Grant Heslov – his collaborator on Good Night and Good Luck and The Ides of March – have set about to make a wartime adventure in the square style of big-studio entertainments of the fifties and early sixties, but they’ve done it without an ounce of cheeky wit or romance. Clooney has made the movie with a sort of middle-brow integrity, but what it really needs is showmanship – an instinct for melodrama, which he lacks entirely. He and Heslov start with a sensational story and a tantalizing cast – the seven “monuments men” are played by Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin and Clooney himself as Frank Stokes, the head of the mission – and then strip the movie of just about everything that might have made it fun to watch.

Mastery of the Art: Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Alfonso Cuarón has made only seven full-length movies in twenty-two years, and his latest, Gravity, is the first he’s released since Children of Men in 2006. Gravity justifies the long wait. It’s exquisite and terrifying, a journey through space at 0G, or zero gravity, that Cuarón, the production designer Andy Nicholson, the editor Mark Sanger (co-editing with Cuarón himself) and his favorite collaborator, the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, have made simultaneously abstract and grippingly real. (This is one of those rare films that demands to be seen in 3D.) Visually it’s as breathtaking as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but without that movie’s self-consciousness or ersatz philosophizing. The film I thought of more often while I was watching was Brian De Palma’s unjustly maligned Mission to Mars from 2000.

Bad Faith: The Dark Knight Rises

As fans of superhero pictures (and that’s most of the world, evidently) know, the Batman series divides into three categories. There are the Tim Burtons, Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), with their magnificent, High Romantic Anton Furst designs and Michael Keaton as a brooding, mysterious Bruce Wayne – a portrayal that, in a better world, would have made him an actor to be cherished forever. Burton put a premium on character and let the stories unravel like fairy tales. The Joel Schumacher entries, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997), were extravagantly (but not wittily) overdesigned; they were like arcades, or gay roller discos, and they underused their stars, Val Kilmer and George Clooney respectively, so that afterwards you couldn't remember anything they’d done.

Then Christopher Nolan took over the franchise in 2005 with Batman Begins, which he also co-wrote with Davis G. Goyer. Nolan brought art-house credentials (Memento, a wildly overrated puzzle picture that didn’t make basic plot sense) and a grim relentlessness that I would have said was precisely the wrong kind of approach for a comic-book adventure. And the concept was misconceived. Bruce (Christian Bale), like the character Michael Keaton played in the Burton pictures, has never been able to move past the pointless deaths of his parents, before his eyes, at the hands of a mugger, but it isn’t grief that motivates this Bruce; it’s guilt. As a boy, Bruce was so terrified of bats as a result of falling down a well on his dad’s estate that, when his parents took him to see the operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat), the prop bats on stage distressed him and he asked to be taken home early. They encountered the mugger on a deserted street outside the opera house; if Bruce had only been able to control his phobia, his parents might be alive today. So when, years later, returning to a Gotham City overrun with gangsters and all manner of corruption, he chooses to disguise himself as a bat, it’s his way of conquering those childhood fears and doing penance for the fact that his inability to handle them led his parents to their deaths. (The real corruption – or at least stupidity of a monumental order – must have been at Warner Brothers, where this plot premise made it past the pitch stage.) But first there’s a long sequence at a Tibetan monastery, which seems to belong in some other movie altogether, where Wayne is trained in martial arts by mystics (the westerner among them is Ra’s Al Ghul, played by Liam Neeson, whose goatee is more expressive than his performance) who turn out to be the League of Shadows, fanatics with a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah God complex, dedicated to wiping out cities overrun with evil, like Gotham. So Bruce has to defeat them – temporarily, at least – and stage an escape before he can return to battle the more homegrown evil in his own hometown.

Bruce Wayne and his murdered parents in Batman Begins 

The chief villain in Batman Begins, though, is the sinister Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who, as The Scarecrow, poisons his victims with a psychotropic aerosol that maddens them and projects their worst fears onto his burlap mask. Perhaps I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but I consider it a sign of bad faith in a director of a comic-book movie that he thinks nothing of putting his audience through the same misery as the characters entrapped in their cruelest fantasies – like the maggots foisted on a screaming Katie Holmes (as Bruce’s childhood friend Rachel Dawes, now an ADA of impressive moral fiber and courage). By the time Crane had pumped enough aerosol in the streets of Gotham in the climax to send paranoid zombies after Rachel and some unfortunate little boy, I was looking around for something to throw at the screen.