BATMAN RETURNS
1992
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Sam Hamm, Daniel Waters, and Wesley Strick
There is no better evidence for the proposition that, at the advent of the 90s, Tim Burton had conquered the world than Batman Returns. In 1989, he'd made Batman, and while I remain adamant Batman is one of the chief expressions of Burton's style—I am therefore practically accusing Burton of being wrong about it—it's indisputable enough that the colossal blockbuster was "one for them," and maybe it only doesn't feel that way because he'd been unable to cut through the production difficulties in time for it to be his second film, that place being filled instead by the pretty big blockbuster that he made out of more in-your-face Burtonesque material with Beetlejuice, so what exactly was stopping him from being himself? Not much now, anyway, and when Warners begged him to come back and make the sequel for Batman, he got "one for him" in exchange (albeit ultimately released through Fox) with Edward Scissorhands, and then made damn sure Batman Returns was another one for him. How things change: to the extent Burton's not making them for them these days, they're barely noticeable at all.
But this is 1992, in the midst of Burton's most commercially, culturally, and artistically vital period, in fact in the most vital period of that most vital period—Returns is smack in the middle of probably the best three films Burton ever directed, one after another—and such were his powers then. So if I've already burned off the readiest thesis to start things off—the formulation that's always stuck with me is, "kind of a lousy Batman film, and also kind of a great Tim Burton film"—with my argument that Batman '89 was, itself, already in-line with the High Burtonesque, then I can only tell you that its sequel is infinitely moreso.
It is in some respects the ultimate Burton movie, or at least the ultimate Burton compendium, somehow binding together—it was only his fifth film—the major themes and obsessions of Burton's entire career, sometimes even originating them, sometimes serving as a playful reevaluation of their meaning, but they're pretty much all here. The monochromatic design. The garish intrusions of color into that design. The misunderstood outsiders. The corpse brides. Christmas. All it lacks is suburbs. The often-pointless classic horror references? That it's got.
Whether that means it isn't good at being movie about Batman, we'll see, though in objective terms, it would struggle to be a "movie about Batman" in the first place; Michael Keaton returns, but so does Batman as the third-biggest part in his own franchise, while Burton's intrinsic interest in the character is no greater, and there are now fewer forces capable of making him pretend; it's even more egregious on this count than was already the case in Batman, which at least gave him dialogue as Batman immediately, even if Bruce Wayne took his time showing up. It somewhat splits the difference: we swiftly receive a superheroic action scene, and of course Batman is the stoic manifestation of the night, but then there's Batman Returns, and you could be forgiven for thinking that, in this 126 minute sound film, Keaton never pipes up till halfway through the thirty-seventh. I'm almost annoyed that this technically isn't true: he does have one line before then, just one, responding—brusquely, barely intelligibly—to concerns expressed by Commissioner Gordon (less a factor here than when I didn't mention him at all, but it's Pat Hingle) about the Red Triangle Gang, and I'm not sure that was worth surrendering Keaton's uncanny, imposing silence for.
That's a microscopically minor example, but this movie that's seemingly indifferent to its nominal subject except insofar as he's useful for its chosen subjects, and that, relatedly, is going to be this dedicated to as many of its director's fascinations as possible—but which is, even with Burton having unprecedented creative control, still yoked to something vaguely like the needs of Warner Bros. as a commercial film studio and toy licenser—is also a giant mess. In that huge space between the often-good-or-at-least-startling dialogue and the emotional story being served, what we'd usually call "a movie," the screenplay's severely shabby, probably the result of Burton using his newfound authority to banish writer Sam Hamm in favor of Daniel Waters, who gave him anything he wanted but whose own script was doctored, or had its elements triaged, by Wesley Strick; nothing especially cohesive resulted. Mostly, it doesn't matter, but it's a film of largely-broken structure and frankly goonish ideas, many outright embarrassing, and I suspect you don't get the inspired weirdnesses, let alone the feeling of rooting around in somebody's id alongside a cast somehow persuaded to tune themselves into that id's wavelength, without some ideas flopping into dipshittery. Even so, my list of objections is long, perhaps strikingly long, given that I'm going to describe Returns as more-or-less a masterpiece, in effect if not always in manufacture.
So, 36 years ago, at the estate of the Cobblepots, we have an objection already: I'm not thrilled by Burton's decision to reunite Paul Reubens and Diane Salinger from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, not because I don't think that's neat but because it means that Burton never meant to handle even his movie's introduction with sensitive performances, though it's also hard to argue that such isn't pointing towards the character we're about to meet in his infancy. The Cobblepots, then, have had a child, a deformed creature with brutal, atavistic tendencies, and on Christmas they determine to toss this child, bassinet and all, into the sewers of Gotham City. Thus, as the ever-indispensable Danny Elfman imposes mythicism anyway, we follow as the babe makes his Mosaic journey through dark subterranean waters and into an abandoned zoo, here being adopted by the only beings who'll ever understand him. That brings us to our present Yuletide, where department store and public utility magnate Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) hectors the mayor (Michael Murphy) about a new power plant while incidentally humiliating his secretary, Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), though I think it's worth pointing out, she is an awful secretary. Shreck descends to deliver public relations to the proles gathered below, but the crowd is attacked by evil clowns who jump out of a giant Christmas present, carnival cast-offs serving the Penguin—Oswald Cobblepot (Danny DeVito), though he's ignorant of that name as yet—and Batman beats them up or worse, but the Penguin's principal goal was to meet Shreck. The Penguin proposes an alliance with the equally-vile capitalist, and, after a fashion, they shake on it.
For her part, Selina has survived the attack thanks to Batman's terse rescue, and we get a palpable glimpse into her empty, put-upon, horrible life before she realizes she has to return to work, which was a mistake, or at least breaking into her obviously-criminal boss's computer to put together meeting notes was a mistake, because he pushes her out a window, seemingly to her death; but her prior kindness to one cat is repaid by a host of felines who, against their type, breathe the life back into Selina, almost like Pfeiffer has smeared the insides of her mouth and nose with cat food, but either way this isn't remotely the wildest shit Burton is going to have Pfeiffer do, with her mouth or otherwise, not once she employs her even more-incredible seamstress magic to transform a black leather jacket into a Frankensteinian bodysuit and, inspired by the Bat, declares herself Catwoman. Shreck is certainly surprised when she returns, claiming amnesia but obviously now a distinctly more-formidable woman, who hits it off well with one Bruce Wayne.* Meanwhile, Shreck, having helped the Penguin rediscover his genealogy and created a beloved celebrity in the process, has come up with a fun sinister plan to run young Oswald for the mayoralty of Gotham (in a snap recall election, as this Christmas movie helpfully explains) in order to continue their villainous association. To this end, the Penguin's gang undertakes acts of terror to sow discontent, culminating in framing the Dark Knight for murder. Meanwhile meanwhile, Catwoman's "hit it off," in her way, with Batman, and also insinuated herself into the Penguin's plans, despite her own antisocial campaign being directed, primarily if not in any particularly focused manner, against the Penguin's ally. In the end, things fall apart, our villains flailing as they pursue pure revenge, with Batman in the middle.
You see how this might be a tight, cumbersome fit—it's ground zero for overstuffing superhero movies with villains, with two marquee villains but of course actually three, Walken having a part of at least similar scope to Batman's (even given an unnecessary redeeming feature of apparently genuinely loving his blockhead adult son (Andrew Bryniarksi)), that's pretty full of Walkeny goodness, though he's also the owner of the single most dangling of Returns's many threads, with his bizarrely-overexplicated, never-remotely-paid-off-upon power plant scheme to suck electricity or something. (And why electricity rather than something easily-communicated, like the pollution he also expels? I have no evidence, and the absence of evidence militates against me, but I have a theory that Max was, at some point very early in the Waters-led phase of the development process, Maxie Zeus, a C-list-if-that Batman rogue nonetheless subjected to a hardcore one-off reimagination in Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's 1989 Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth, for if there's one Batman comic that Burton would love, it'd be that. Then they immediately recognized that that'd be too cumbersome, even for this, and, chortling, Burton half-renamed him after the actor who played Count Orlok for no other reason besides except he was already named "Max.") Even so, the movie synopsizes lumpier than it plays, and it doesn't actually feel like it's missing beats, or even getting too haphazard, until it stumbles into the mayoral campaign—sourced from one of the 60s Batman show's finest hours, "Hizzoner the Penguin"/"Dizzoner the Penguin"—which has just enough time to establish the basic satirical concept of a supervillainous candidate, rather than have the full measure of fun with the half-hour of gross-out material that would've written itself with this Penguin; furthermore, its need to rope Batman into this only slightly pretends to make sense.**
Remarkably, the Penguin, if not exactly this Penguin (for he did cause some PR problems), had been the studio's request: Warners could set some parameters, and against their initial ask of the Penguin plus the Riddler (Hamm had wanted Two-Face, but nobody cared), Burton could deflect only the one, but he could completely pervert the other. Warners got the exact actor they'd asked for, and, well, who'd have guessed that DeVito would be this down. Returns's Penguin is, to the best of my knowledge, a thoroughly bespoke creation, having—despite every synergistic incentive—very little influence on either comics or screen Penguins afterwards. (The weaponized umbrellas, meanwhile, are iconography largely inexplicable in this film.) He is, however, a supreme Burton goblin, a filthy little man (disturbingly so in his pyjamas), whose flipper-hands are nothing compared to his penchant for eating fish with his mouth open, molesting every woman within reach (kick him in the face, and he'll still huff your sole), and constantly drooling some kind of black, inhuman ichor. DeVito revels in how disgustingly he can behave, the joke being that they barely notice even when he's biting their noses off. Right down to his unusual digits, what Burton's done, with DeVito's extraordinarily generous connivance, is make a reverse Scissorhands, that remains an expression of contempt for the normie, this time with a freak who deserves the scorn that prejudice should've afforded him, but whom everyone instead assumes must be a loveable outsider to wholeheartedly embrace as, previously, Burton'd told us we were supposed to.
That would be cheeky, but nothing so vital except that DeVito understands that, whoever was responsible for the Penguin's dialogue, with it he does make a pathetic monster after all, constantly groping for dignity, prone towards rhetorical flights of nobility that uniformly degenerate into lecherous colloquialisms and cantankerous crabbing, which is abrasive, irritating, and very funny if you can dig it, and almost impossible to take too far (though the visual rendition of the Penguin's radio hijacking of the Batmobile, via a coin-op ride interface, is the film's nadir,*** in addition to being a prime example of how they are galloping through what you'd think would be the movie's A-plot). But "there is no too far" includes, though maybe it just needed to be stressed here, the sublime anticlimax of the Penguin's antagonism, an act of immaculate hatred equaled only by its sheer incompetence, followed by flopping onto his face dead and being attended by emperor penguin pallbearers in an image that burlesques funereal solemnity, and you may find yourself moved anyway—perhaps through the utter humiliation of a villain who deserved nothing less, yet there's melancholy to his inability to even die with dignity. Likelier still, it's because Elfman is no less able than before to impose his dark symphonic grandeur upon material silly enough that it's just denotative to say it's about a man raised by penguins and a woman resurrected and given martial arts prowess by cats. Indeed, he's more able, with his new motifs for the Penguin and Catwoman (one bearing carnivalesque pomp, the other brittly twinkly till it roars; both fundamentally sad), making it, conceivably, Elfman's single greatest film score, start-to-finish pouring seemingly-legitimate emotions into your ears, imbuing a movie that's a comedy a long time before it's a tragedy with actual power.
It may nevertheless be fitting that the Penguin is the sideshow—because this is Pfeiffer's movie, ain't it? That's always been the consensus, and I do not challenge it; there are not so many superhero movies where a respected actor is widely considered to have given one of their best performances, if not their very best (oddly, Batmans and particularly Batman's villains do seem to have a higher than usual rate-of-return), and it's weirder still that one of Pfeiffer's best could be Selina Kyle in Batman Returns, which feels like having cake and eating it taken to its most impossible extreme. It is not quite so remarkable that Catwoman was Burton's addition, and let's be blunt: this is fundamentally sexual fantasy—starting with a gazey exercise in drooling over Pfeiffer at her hottest (assisted in the athletic element of hotness, albeit way less than you'd think—because, like DeVito, Pfeiffer was also shockingly down—by stuntwoman Kathy Long), and obviously it's not hiding that the goal is to turn you on, like, a lot, potentially even without being attracted to women, just rendered horny generally by Catwoman's sexual carnivorism; then sharing with the whole wide world Burton's particular kinkiness, which it's still somewhat hiding behind the sadomasochistic violence of the character and the fetishistic leather and even more-fetishistic white stitching, of really wanting to get with the pallid undead, something clearer thirty-four years and a half-dozen sexy, usually-angry revenants in Burton's filmography later, though, respectfully, none sexier. (On the technical side, Pfeiffer's poise is downright miraculous: you can, altogether non-metaphorically, describe her Catwoman as doing supervillainy in heels and backwards.)
But maybe none angrier, and hence the keeping of the cake: this is a tremendous human performance from Pfeiffer, too—is the porny character grounded in feminism anyway? actually, yes, not even unsophisticated about it, because her antiheroic persona is her own self-loathing, and taking it out just about as much on women. The bummest notes are in mousy Selina-as-we-find-her, which is just the screenplay overegging it; though Pfeiffer's overcoming it (outstanding prefiguration of her latent viciousness during the gang attack), and there are no further bum notes after her fall, just the spectacle of Catwoman and the disintegration of the "real" (?) Selina-that-remains, affording Pfeiffer a long, could've-been-twice-as-long-and-still-wouldn't-have-outlasted-its-welcome breakdown that's shatteringly unmanicured and unprecious about its subject. (Elfman is, again, of inestimable help.) This is where her performance stays—except she probably gets hotter as the Catwoman mask sustains damage and her hair falls out of it, and her eye makeup gets smeared, this is all crucially important formalist film criticism I'm doing, I assure you (halfway-seriously: this is in no small part what the movie's "about")—even as it feels like a significant portion of it was done on a fucking dare, Pfeiffer encompassing multitudes, somehow combining deep, raw emotion with a character that's an almost-literal geekshow, though even with the highest warning, I should never spoil Pfeiffer's most outrageous feat.
Catwoman is the principal avenue for the movie even involving Batman as more than a guy who shows up to punch people (there is a framing of the Penguin as an anti-Bruce Wayne, which reads impeccably, but is more structural than any actual part of the drama—even when the Penguin, now the anti-Moses, determines to kill the firstborn, "Bruce Wayne" doesn't come up; hell, "Catwoman and Penguin" is a natural team-up only to the extent the monstrous feminine plays, not in that many scenes, against the monstrous masculine). But if it's no sin for a Batman story to be mostly about Batman's villains, and I don't think it is, this is good Batman. Just in generic terms, it's nice to have a supervillain posing a physical challenge to a superhero, and the Pfeiffer/Keaton screen pairing is stronger than it might deserve to be—I don't know if she knew this, but Pfeiffer was 86'd from consideration for Batman because of Keaton, because Pfeiffer was a recent ex; but for nothing but having experience licking Keaton's face, and potentially having the desire to stab him, it works—and Keaton brings out the other most humane moments of Pfeiffer's performance at that masqued ball (their pointed "masklessness" is clever), a scene you could lift out and pretend that Pfeiffer and Keaton had merely starred together in a prestige drama about a romance threatened by mental illness, before the rubber duck car blows up the floor.
If this gets at "Batman," perhaps it doesn't until the last few shots and very last lines of the film—that Burton, or Warners, is sandbagging extremely hard in the very final frames anyway, though I understand why you'd want to leave the kitty door open—concerning Bruce chasing a misapprehended shadow down an alleyway that turns out to be a cat, just a cat, that he takes in, that in more-bitter-than-sweet tones explains what this experience has meant to him, while recontextualizing Selina's death ride in terms of mysticism and transmutation, honestly beautiful stuff. But before that we have by far my biggest gripe with Batman Returns, Selina's climactic scene (Returns has multiple climaxes because it's almost multiple movies smashed into each other, but this isn't my gripe) that showcases the reemergence of something that has never been part of these movies, Batman's stiff-necked moral code. (One reason Hamm was fired was his insistence on realigning Batman with basic Batman 101 shit.****) Sourly, it's slightly like 2026's Supergirl, though thankfully this movie has had two hours in front of it to keep it aloft, and has entertaining scenes and characters you care about, but we're treated to this pretty phony speech from Bruce about how Selina mustn't cross the line into murder and kill Shreck, when Batman has, not even in the previous movie, but previously in this one, deliberately (ironically!) incinerated one henchman with his Batmobile's rocket exhaust and gleefully blown another one up with dynamite, and there is no way this Bruce does not heartily endorse Selina's execution of this plutocrat (for they're all anti-Bruce Waynes here) who's been a cancer on Gotham's soul. I let it slide, because for all I know this was a mandatory studio note that Batman couldn't spend both of his movie's climaxes either 1)incapacitated or 2)with his back turned, saved only by his enemy's ineptitude.
This all happens within the Burton aesthetic in its decade of ascendence, though—notwithstanding, needless to say, Stan Winston's effects makeup for DeVito, or Ve Neill's "regular" makeup for Pfeiffer, or Bob Ringwood and Mary Vogt's costume design all over—I could find the movies on either side of it, and in some respects even Batman, slightly higher peaks. Burton's personal control over Returns meant he could bring his Scissorhands crew with him, including production designer Bo Welch and cinematographer Stefan Czapsky. There's an overwhelmingness from the former especially—that'll happen when your next movie is $30-60 million more expensive! and, to wedge it in somewhere, if they gave out Oscars for animal wrangling, Jesus, it'd have been a shoo-in—though Welch is somehow still hemmed in, possibly by his own predilections as a designer (walking with Christmas Future, there's his similar Whoville), though the "firstborn of Gotham's first citizens" neighborhood that's clearly a shithole must've been some kind of miscommunication.
I can't say I don't still love his Gotham City and its gaudy filigree, especially the redesigned statuary that seizes upon the previous film's decaying Soviet Deco impulses to turn the heroic laborers into outright weeping slaves, but not as much as Anton Furst's Gotham—both films' cities were stagebound, of course, but the square Welch's built where so much of the action takes place is strangely claustrophobic, not even attempting to convince as Evil Rockefeller Center*****—though he's doing wonders elsewhere, at least, especially the Penguin's wonderful penguin house lair, which is also where Czapsky's most complex lighting ideas necessarily come in, if we accept that the lighting ideas about Batman and Catwoman and their matte-black-on-glossy-black sex-fighting were entirely baked-in by Ringwood and Vogt already. What always works is the sensation: with three Christmas movies for Burton in a row counting The Nightmare Before, Returns is the one that can wholly embrace winter, and few films have ever felt more slushy and wet, and not that many were afforded starker, crisper color design for the guy who likes his black-and-white, or, as noted, black-and-black-and-white.
There's a school of thought that while Burton's entire filmography, such as people care about it, is adjacent to horror, he's rarely made true horror, which I understand though this would be a key example of why I disagree; this is the Burton movie that feels most of the Universal horror that was so formative to him—in an era where Burton has been succeeded, insufficiently I find, by Guillermo del Toro, perhaps it bears reminding that in Universal Horror, the monsters are scary and they die—including all those times he referenced Universal monsters explicitly. It's horror enough: not just the grotesqueness, but the psychosexual aggression of it. Now, it's obviously dysfunctional, and as I observed with Batman, camp—now nakedly so, and while it didn't shake the world to its foundations as had Batman, it was still a big hit, so it's Burton's fault that Warners didn't think there was anything wrong with Batman Forever or Batman and Robin. But I treasure it, this IP allowed to become such an unfettered and glorious mess.
Score: 10/10
*It has occurred to me that across two Batman films, Bruce is kind of a lazy boyfriend, the billionaire's go-to move for a first date being "a crummy dinner with him in his house."
**Not that "Batman runs for mayor against Penguin" "made sense" on the show, but it is hi-larious.
***Alternatively, the programmable batarang bit, except I give this one leave because it reads to me as Burton viciously parodying the toy commercial it looks like and probably was; it's Goddamn awful, anyway, until the poodle lady's dog puts such a funny button on it.
****Hamm's major surviving contribution could be having Bruce complain in dialogue about how somebody changed his Batman script to have Alfred (Michael Gough) let Vicky Vale into the Batcave. I do wonder whose contribution it was with, secretly, the most-unserious aspect of this screenplay, Bruce using the cool secret passageway and Alfred taking the stairs and getting there at basically the same time.
*****I also hold him responsible for the "tombstone" DeVito just about Goddamn knocks over.
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