Review: Learning to Love Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989)

For Movie of the Week #3, I grapple with a flawed classic

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Tim Burton’s Batman is a movie I’ve grappled with all my life. I was born in 1992, a few years after it came out, but the film’s footprint remained enormous throughout the 1990s and early 2000s; I grew up with the VHS tape in the house, and I had a toy version of the film’s Batmobile we picked up from a garage sale, and I would always come back to this movie when new interpretations of Batman came around. And for all these years, I’ve continually found myself vacillating on it in multiple directions, sometimes enjoying it, sometimes being bored by it; always loving Michael Keaton, but sometimes feeling like he wasn’t used to his full potential; sometimes being struck by the iconography of and around the Joker, but often feeling underwhelmed by Jack Nicholson’s performance; always loving Danny Elfman’s epochally great score and the film’s phenomenally great production design, but sometimes feeling detached from the story being told around those aesthetics. The most recent time I revisited the film was in 2020 on The Weekly Stuff Podcast, where co-host Sean Chapman and I both agreed the film was full of fantastic elements, but ultimately less than the sum of its parts. I thought I had finally nailed down my feelings on the film and fully articulated them there, and that I could maybe put my long, fraught relationship with it to rest. I was wrong. Four years later, it’s called to me again, in part because I’ve been on a Prince kick recently and found myself newly enthralled by the weird and wonderful soundtrack he wrote for (or, perhaps more accurately, wrote about) the film. But I am also perpetually fascinated by movies I do not have an easy relationship with, movies that play noticeably differently every time I go back with a few years more life experience. Burton’s Batman, whatever else I might say about it, is undeniably one of those movies.

This 2024 viewing is easily the most I have ever enjoyed the film; no doubt this was partially due to having picked up the 4K Blu-ray in a recent sale, which is an imperfect but still absolutely stunning restoration that restores a broader range of colors and a much greater sense of depth and dimensionality to an image that is, unquestionably, one of the most accomplished and ambitious Hollywood productions of the last half-century. This is a film that looks incredible on any format; on 4K, with a resolution that allows one to see every detail of those evocative sets, gorgeous matte paintings, and detailed models, and an HDR color grade that makes the film’s dynamic interplay between light and shadow more compelling than it has ever been on home video, it looks more incredible than ever.

And that really does matter. Because even just a few years removed from when I last revisited it, after the near-total collapse of the superhero genre in a post-Avengers: Endgame world, it is just astonishing to go back to Burton’s Batman and see a superhero film that aspires, at all levels, to be capital-C Cinema. It is so ambitious as a production, so frequently smart and self-assured in how it guides us through this world and introduces these characters, so singular and distinctive in its voice and perspective. It is, in short, made as a movie first, and as a product for a pre-existing fanbase second. That order is typically reversed today, if the first consideration is present at all, but this sense of being a film – an artistic statement and experience unto itself and on its own merits, rather as something existing primarily within a larger commercial, narrative, or metatextual framework – is also the sensibility one gets from revisiting Richard Donner’s original Superman (1978), or Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man (2002). These aren’t necessarily the three greatest superhero movies ever made (Batman and Spider-Man are both outclassed by their sequels, which are very possibly the genre’s two most accomplished live-action entries), but they are to me the three load-bearing pillars that lay the foundations for the genre, because they are the ones that tried to crack the superhero film as films, as cinematic statements, as distinctive works by interesting, individual filmmakers actively responding to, interpreting, and shaping the material, rather than work-for-hire functionaries checking boxes determined by a committee. These are movies from a time before superhero films were really a genre, or before the associated commercial framework had solidified around them, so there wasn’t yet a strict playbook or stringent set of conventions. Without those expectations or concerns filling in the space of the movie, the personality of the filmmaker and a broader set of cinematic and artistic referents get to flourish. These are films only these specific artists at these exact points in their careers could (or would) have made; there is no other path to the unique gestalt of what they are. And so they are pictures that stand tall on their own, and that I love not only in spite of, but in some cases because of, their flaws and imperfections.

In the case of Batman and Tim Burton, that means nailing a certain tone and aesthetic, one that is absolutely and definitively right for Batman – and which nearly every adaptation since, in animation, video games, or live-action, has chased in some form or another – but that, in this specific incarnation, could not have come from anyone else. I just love the look of the film so much. When Jack Napier is at the big control center in Axis Chemicals, pulling these giant levers with big ridiculous gestures to make everything self-destruct, it looks like the kind of set Charlie Chaplin would play around on in Modern Times, or that the workers would be slaving away at in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Every place we visit is a grand, gothic studio set, augmented by richly textured matte paintings and careful deployment of light and shadow. Gotham’s art museum isn’t a clean, modern building constructed for that purpose, but a massive, terrifying fortress that looks like a repurposed industrial center or military bunker. The woods Batman drives through to return to Wayne manor is as exaggerated and mythical as the storybook forest Jack Skellington discovers in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The oft-imitated and parodied scene where Joker sees his mangled face for the first time, in the back-alley surgeon’s office, is just a perfect little piece of German Expressionist horror filmmaking.

All of which is to say Burton has constructed a comic-book reality, yes, but one whose cinematic referents are big and ambitious and wide-ranging, and in fact often come from the kinds of movies Batman’s original creators would have grown up watching. I have no use for a ‘realistic’ Batman, as Christopher Nolan gave us; that is a dead-end artistic project. If we must have a Batman, I want him running around a world like this, where the gangsters look straight out of old dime store novels, and smoke billows everywhere, and the crimes are done in exaggerated warehouses full of thick green chemicals, with big geometric leading lines criss-crossing the screen from the sheer architectural density of the sets. Of the Batman directors who have come since, Matt Reeves too is exceptionally good at the general iconography of the character, but with the exception of that outstanding upside-down shot of Batman walking towards Penguin through a fiery car-wreck, I don’t think he generally conjures images quite as good as, say, Batman disappearing up into the smoke after the cops see him at Axis Chemicals, or that absolutely breathtaking shot of the Batwing perfectly eclipsing the moon before falling back to Gotham, moments that truly feel like comic book panels come to life.

Burton’s Batman is often remembered as a pop culture turning point in making the character ‘dark and gritty,’ but I think that’s an incomplete and misleading description. What Burton really achieves here is pulp. Batman is not and never should be ‘realistic’; he is and should be a pulp figure, which is to say a myth for whom darkness and grittiness are aesthetic elements of a broader stylistic attitude, a heightened world where one can practically feel the cheap newsprint texture underneath the images. That does not mean the storytelling cannot have depth; the key to pulp, and something Burton is very good at, is the self-awareness that it is fiction, is artifice in service of spinning a yarn. It can wear darkness as a costume while slyly acknowledging the fundamental silliness of it all (not coincidentally, the great Jack Palance may deliver the single most crucial performance, at least of the first act, in helping establish that tone). And if you can thread that needle, real humanity and insight can come through, along with a healthy dose of entertainment. That is what Burton achieves.

The film’s action set-pieces are not mind-blowing, but Burton is very good at working around the very real limitations of the costume, an imposing slab of molded rubber that looks incredible in profile, and is frequently striking when Keaton is standing still, but which ceases to function whenever he has to move more than a few inches. Burton thus compromises to focus on crafting striking individual images that add together in the edit; at its best, the film’s action plays like a series of comic panels alternating before our eyes. It can feel a little goofy at times – particularly whenever Batman has to run, or turn his body more than a few degrees, in any of those ‘panels’ – but Burton has wisely built a tonal and aesthetic environment where ‘goofy’ isn’t at all a bad thing (and Danny Elfman’s score is, of course, more than playful enough to give those goofy moments a little extra juice).

There is such a distinctive voice at work here. Even with all the headaches Burton had to contend with in production – from a domineering and unpredictable producer in Jon Peters to a true diva star in Jack Nicholson – the end result is always and unmistakably him. Look at the final beat of the scene in Vicki Vale’s apartment, where she opens the Joker’s box and a severed doll’s hand erupts out of it with dead flowers; it is an image one can easily imagine from any number of other Burton productions, from Beetlejuice to Corpse Bride, but that no one else would put in their Batman movie. There is an authorial touch here that 95% of superhero movies simply do not have. By the time we are in the Gotham cathedral for the final encounter, the film’s plot has more or less completely broken down; and yet the visuals are so good – particularly the hall filled with dusty pews and bathed in evening fog, or the rooftop bells with all their big, exaggerated gears – that I still find myself at least a little bit enraptured. Good atmosphere is its own kind of storytelling; this atmosphere is extraordinary. Plenty of superhero movies have messy third acts (honestly, were one to count them all up, it is probably a healthy majority); most of those messy third acts don’t have the advantage of looking like a lost German Expressionist masterpiece, which Burton’s Batman absolutely does.

That sense of voice also extends to our two main characters, and what I perhaps appreciated most on this latest viewing is just how distinctive the film’s take on both Batman and the Joker is, how sometimes subtly different they are from other interpretations, and how the film’s ultimate failure is not following all the way through on the fascinating characters it builds in the first hour.

I came away from this viewing convinced, more than ever, that Michael Keaton really is the best live-action Batman (at least among ones in this vein – Adam West is perhaps the most extraordinary Batman performance, but it is not, in tone and intention, a peer of Keaton, Bale, Pattinson, et. al.). Burton’s approach to Batman is to make him a mystery, a character who is fundamentally too closed off to be our POV in this world; he is kept at arm’s length from us – Keaton doesn’t appear out of the cowl for 18 minutes – and Vicki has to literally tail him and have her partner Knox do some extra digging to pry the origin story out of him. Our introduction to Bruce Wayne is at the fundraiser at his manor, where we see him quietly reading the room, following Vicki and Knox to get a feel for them before he finally introduces himself. The blocking of the scene sees him absent-mindedly discarding a wine glass and silverware because his brain is occupied elsewhere, with Alfred literally picking up behind him as he goes – a fantastic little piece of visual storytelling that tells us who both these people are and the nature of their relationship. He’s just a bit too weird to ever be our POV; he’s too busy studying the world around him to also be our eyes and ears.

Keaton delivers the exact right performance for this take on the character, one that constantly makes the viewer sit forward and watch his face and eyes for clues. He is completely silent for long stretches of this movie, but you can always hear the gears turning in his head, can practically feel him thinking through what’s in front of him or sizing people up. Look at the scene where Joker announces himself to Gotham by murdering a fellow gangster at City Hall; Bruce happens to be there watching – in fact, we are watching him through Vicki’s eyes as she tails him on one of his trips to the alley where, we later learn, his parents were murdered – and he winds up walking through the spray of gunfire in something of a trance, because he is so fascinated by this cackling white-faced thing in front of him, a foe seemingly risen from the dead with entirely unclear motives. It is a more extreme version of the fundraiser scene. He studies things, and he becomes unaware of his surroundings as he does so. There is no other Batman quite like this. We don’t necessarily see him doing a ton of detective work in this film, in terms of watching Batman follow the clues and make deductions in front of us, but his attitude is quite clearly that of a detective, someone naturally and perpetually inquisitive – and suspicious – about the world around him.

He is also, to some extent, deranged. Quietly so, in comparison to the Joker, but deranged all the same. The more times I see the film, the more I am convinced Keaton is consciously playing Bruce as a semi-high-functioning sociopath, someone who doesn’t really understand human emotions but is trying to mimic them. He doesn’t lie to Vicki to avoid spending the day together after their first date because he’s a cad, necessarily, but because whatever affection he has for her isn’t ‘love’ as she or the viewer would understand it. My favorite visual gag in the film is the reveal of the ridiculous long table between Bruce and Vicki on their first dinner date – a joke constructed entirely on subverting conventions of shot-reverse-shot editing – but it’s also a scene that speaks to how detached this character is. He doesn’t realize it’s weird until Vicki makes it clear she’s uncomfortable, and when he makes her laugh by saying “I’ve never been in this room before,” it’s obvious he didn’t say it as a joke. After they retire to the kitchen and Alfred regales them with a warm, loving story from Bruce’s childhood, Vicki walks out and Bruce turns to Alfred; “She is great, isn’t she?” he says. He’s seeking confirmation, not because it isn’t obvious Vicki is great, but because he doesn’t really know how to be a person or act around other people, and he needs to double check that his reaction is ‘correct.’ That’s part of Alfred’s function in his life, to serve as a check, to modulate his behavior and reactions. The later scene in Vicki’s apartment – which leads to an extremely memorable confrontation with the Joker where the madness of Batman comes out in the skin-suit that is Bruce Wayne – begins with Bruce trying to come clean to Vicki, and having absolutely no idea how to do it. In those moments Bruce is actively trying to be human and vulnerable, he is more awkward than he ever is in the molded rubber. And I don’t think he’s just trying to tell her he’s Batman with all the talk of “normal people.” Tim Burton has spent too much of his career fascinated by non-neurotypical people for those words to be an accident. He’s trying to explain his bigger psychological holdups, to put voice to that sociopathic quality.

Where Keaton’s Batman is a portrayal I’ve always loved and simply developed a richer relationship with as I’ve grown older, Jack Nicholson’s Joker is a character I’ve really struggled with over time. In that podcast from 2020, I said Nicholson’s work here felt like he was cashing a paycheck – showing up, doing Jack Nicholson things, and then going home (or, more accurately, going to a Lakers game). And as Sean Chapman pointed out there, even a phoned-in Jack Nicholson performance can be plenty entertaining. But Sean also said something in that episode that was in my mind on this viewing, and really affected how I saw the character and Nicholson’s choices this time around: that this incarnation of the Joker takes clear inspiration from the Conrad Veidt character in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs, a huge influence on the original comic book depiction of the Joker, and a story about a man whose face is physically frozen in a laugh. That is also true of Nicholson’s Joker; he isn’t smiling constantly because he’s crazy, he’s crazy because he is forced by deformity to smile constantly. And when Nicholson (and the film around him) is leaning into that take on the character, I think he is as good as any Joker has ever been. Nicholson lays the groundwork in the early pre-chemical-bath scenes for us to see this Joker as a misanthropic grump who absolutely hates having his face this way, and is trying to figure out what to do with and to the world around him now that he looks like this. Joker’s formal entrance, where he emerges from the shadows to kill Jack Palance, is a phenomenal piece of staging on Burton’s part, but the more interesting beat for Nicholson comes in the next scene, when he sits stewing at the desk reading about Batman in the newspaper. “Wait ‘til they get a load of me,” he says, absolutely furious, but his face locked in a smile. He tries on a few laughs for size, none of them sounding natural. If I took that as Nicholson being lazy before, I was wrong; that’s a fascinating performance choice.

And there is more of that kind of material in the film than I have previously given it credit for. Nicholson’s Joker is foul and sarcastic in a way other Jokers aren’t; instead of Heath Ledger’s “this town needs a better class of criminal,” Nicholson tells us “this town needs an enema.” Instead of being incensed when someone calls him insane, he rejoinders with a deadpan “I thought I was a Pisces.” When Batman destroys the poison-gas balloons at the parade in the climax, Nicholson’s Joker is genuinely insulted. “My balloons. Those are my balloons. He stole my balloons!” He doesn’t play it like the Clown Prince of Crime, but as a guy who’s so mad he’s actually kind of dazed; in response, he shoots poor Bob, one of the great henchmen of film history, just to have someone to shoot, and tells the others “I’m going to need a minute or two alone, boys,” completely straight-faced. At his best, Nicholson’s instinct runs in almost exactly counter to every other incarnation of the Joker, from Ledger to Joaquin Phoenix: He underplays it, and instead of aspiring to create a comic book villain who’s larger-than-life, he makes one who feels very small.

Later incarnations of the Joker, most notably Ledger’s, position themselves as anarchists while having far too intricate a master plan to be anything of the sort; Nicholson’s Joker is genuinely, and compellingly, aimless. He winds up positioning himself as a sort of macabre performance artist, saying to Vicki in the museum scene: “I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. See? I am the world’s first fully functioning homicidal artist.” Vicki waits a beat before replying with the obvious question: “What do you want?” Nicholson thinks for a second before donning a sardonic shit-eating grin atop his permanent smile: “My face on the one-dollar bill.” “You must be joking,” Vicki replies. “Do I look like I’m joking?” Nicholson shoots back, his face completely stoic and serious except for the giant ear-to-ear grin frozen on his face. That, right there, is a perfect scene, the fulcrum point of what could be the most compelling take on the Joker we’ve ever had on film were it not for some poor choices made down the movie’s home stretch.

It's no secret that Burton’s Batman was beset by plenty of on-set drama and second-guessing from producers and the studio. Sam Hamm wrote the script they entered production with, but large swaths were hastily rewritten on the fly by a number of writers (only Warren Skaaren is credited next to Hamm). I think you can basically pinpoint the exact moment those rewrites start affecting things, and it’s in the scene at Vicki’s apartment where Nicholson first says the “dance with the devil in the pale moon light” line. It comes 84 minutes into a 126-minute movie, and it points to a fundamental rupture in structure. There is an adage in screenwriting called the ‘rule of threes,’ which is the idea that an important idea should have three stages on the way from planting to payoff: an introduction, a reinforcement, and a resolution. This scene in the apartment is the reinforcement: the moment Bruce hears the line and we realize it has additional meaning for him. The resolution, of course, is him throwing it back at Joker and revealing that Napier is the man who killed his parents, the murderer’s identity given away by the catchphrase. But there is no introduction. If saying these words is a lifelong habit of Jack Napier, then we need to hear him say them in the first act, before he dives into the chemical vat and becomes the Joker. Instead, it feels like the last-minute addition it is, suddenly steering the movie into an ill-advised revenge story where Joker turns out to be the one that killed Batman’s parents, and Batman gets a chance to settle the score.

I don’t know if this idea could ever work – if Batman takes revenge on the man who killed his parents, what is his larger purpose for being Batman? – but I do know it doesn’t work here, in no small part because right up until the moment “dance with the devil” first escapes Nicholson’s lips, the film had been building a much richer, more interesting contrast between these two characters. Look at the way Burton intercuts between the Joker’s ‘origin’ scenes – first seeing his face in the mirror, killing Jack Palance, “wait ‘til they get a load of me” – with Bruce’s first date with Vicki, which gradually goes from awkward to sincere. It is a clear A/B comparison: The damaged and deranged world of Batman, represented by this angry monster who arose from the sewers after falling into a vat of toxins, versus the world of Bruce Wayne where a real shot at domestic bliss clearly exists. These characters need not be literally bound by fate to be in clear thematic conversation with each other. Joker is an aspect of Batman’s id; if you listen to the accompanying Prince album or watch his music videos, particularly “Batdance,” Prince clearly got that, as it’s a very real, very compelling undercurrent in his songs and staging. The film winds up taking that duality and making it painfully, implausibly literal, and not only does it rob the characters of so much rich complexity, it leaves the movie with nowhere to go when it reaches the third act.

The problems with Batman’s climax have been well litigated, including by those involved in the production; if it feels like the movie doesn’t know where it’s going once Joker is leading Vicki and Batman up the cathedral steps, that’s because Jon Peters had the set built and the script changed without Burton’s knowledge, and even Burton himself didn’t know what would happen once they reached the top. That those final scenes work at all – that they hold together in terms of visuals and continuity and basic cinematic rhythm – is a testament to Burton’s prodigious talent. But for a movie with as many rich veins as this one, it is inevitably disappointing that the ending is a slugfest on the roof where the only real tension is practical: Who will live, and who will die?(Which of course is not much of a tension at all, because Batman is not going to die in a Batman movie). There should be stakes for Bruce Wayne’s soul here; conquering the Joker should mean conquering some aspect of himself, should mean wrangling some piece of his id and reconciling disparate parts of his identity. And the Joker’s aim should be bigger than killing The Batman; he should want to destroy or overtake some part of the hero’s essence. The climax of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is thuddingly literal in this regard, and Batman’s final encounter with the Joker there isn’t staged with 1/10^th of the invention or showmanship Burton brings to bear here, but it does, at least, get this specific job done – we understand there are bigger stakes than the bodies of these two men.

And here’s the thing: Right up until the moment it all falls apart, this is actually a really tightly, intelligently structured film. I used to feel it was a little awkward that it takes 18 minutes to meet Bruce Wayne, but watching it again, I think that choice is a real strength. The movie starts with a Batman vignette (one that, in a savvy touch, evokes the death of his parents without being identical), then goes about introducing all the component pieces of Gotham City – the stew of corruption and stagnation from which Batman arises. Those opening scenes establish dual societal issues that require attention from both Bruce Wayne and Batman: the 200-year celebration and the city’s financial woes, for which Wayne throws a fundraiser, and the Grisham crime family and Axis Chemicals flashpoint around which the criminal investigation turns. In the middle are our journalists, Knox and Vicki, investigating Batman and the surrounding criminal environment, which takes them to Wayne manor, where we then meet Bruce at the fundraiser (who, overhearing the details of the Axis raid, suits up and goes out as Batman). That first half hour is actually very tight in setting up and knocking down narrative dominoes, and making Gotham City feel like a real living, breathing place to which Batman is actively responding; we get a sense of the whole picture. The following act, revolving around Joker’s cosmetics campaign and climaxing with the action at the museum and subsequent Batmobile chase, is similarly tightly plotted in cause and effect. Each movement of the film builds up a broader set of intersecting conflicts that both Bruce Wayne and Batman are positioned in the middle of, and it is not just dramatically engaging but sociologically smart.

So when I say you can feel the exact point the script starts to splinter, I mean it: This is not a movie that’s a mixed bag from beginning to end, but a pretty astonishingly constructed cinematic engine that suddenly breaks down when a wrench is thrown in its gears. If Burton’s Batman had a better third act more consistent with the preceding two, if it really landed its punches and followed through on its specific, idiosyncratic takes on Batman and the Joker, it would be in contention for the title of best superhero movie ever.

As it stands, Burton’s Batman is instead a sometimes great and always fascinating cinematic object that is overwhelming as a piece of craftsmanship, and impossible for me not to respect as a genuine attempt to make a real movie instead of manage a brand or extend a property. I enjoy it less as a beginning-to-end linear experience that fully holds together than as a big audiovisual playground that is entrancing to explore – to poke around at not just the iconography and cinematography and Elfman’s amazing music, but also the performances and careful command of tone. There is something about the way the movie fails to follow through on the portrait of Batman it sets up that, while very frustrating on one hand, is also strangely inviting on the other, because it forces the curious viewer to lean in further on the next viewing and look at how much Keaton is putting in, and how well Burton is supporting him in the visual storytelling, for a very particular take on the character. Because it never quite resolves, we are left to pick up the pieces of what they were trying to accomplish, and that is, in its own way, compelling. The film is a ‘failed’ work, in some sense, but one with so much raw talent and so many good ideas that it winds up more interesting than plenty of ‘successful’ films. There are certainly a number of Marvel films that follow through and hold together more tightly than this, but I’ll take Burton’s Batman over nearly any of them. There is a reason I’ve been grappling with the film for most of my life, and at a certain point, one has to take a step back and be humble and admit that there are things in the movie responsible for that ongoing fascination, for my inability to ever just shake it and move on. I’ve said many times that the older I get, the axis I care about is less ‘good vs. bad’ than ‘interesting vs. uninteresting.’ This Batman interests me, and has held my interest, in some form or another, since I was very young. For that, I love it.

And luckily, we don’t actually have to guess what it would look like for Burton and Keaton to put the pieces together, because three years later, they did - and the resulting film, Batman Returns, is about as good a movie as this genre has ever produced. We’ll get around to that film eventually, because it’s absolutely one of my favorites.

But NEXT WEEK: We are celebrating the release of Alien: Romulus by looking back at the previous Alien film, an under-appreciated modern classic, Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant.

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