A technically brilliant film

Christopher Nolan heads the handful of major new directors who've emerged this century.

Beginning with the complex thriller Following, produced on a shoestring in London, he's made a succession of masterly movies - Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins and The Prestige - each a piece of sophisticated storytelling pursuing recurrent themes, among them questions of identity and of deadly games played between brilliant men where issues of morality become blurred.

His new film, The Dark Knight, is the sixth blockbuster in the Batman franchise launched by Tim Burton's ground-breaking Batman 20 years ago.

Previous Batman films - Saturday morning serials in the 1940s and the 1966 cinema spin-off from the camp TV series - had treated Bob Kane's caped hero as a two-dimensional, strip-cartoon star.

Burton's two films turned him into a complex brooding figure, no longer the protagonist of a comic book, but of a graphic novel.

After Joel Schumacher attempted to recover the camp and lighten the tone in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, Nolan brought back the sense of doom and gloom.

Nolan's Gotham City is as dark as anything devised by Fritz Lang. Most of his film takes place at night after opening with a briskly directed daytime bank robbery, the first of a succession of violent action pieces that are broken up by brief scenes of verbal agonising.

The robbers wear clown masks, a device introduced by Kubrick in The Killing and followed by Monte Hellman in Cockfighter (where the thieves are all concealed by Richard Nixon masks) and Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break, with the criminals donning the masks of various presidents.

The bank is owned by the mob and the operation, in which half the staff and most of the thieves are killed, has been masterminded by the Joker (Heath Ledger).

He's the infamous enemy of Batman, played comically by Cesar Romero in the TV series and with extreme menace by Jack Nicholson in Burton's film. Nicholson's performance is a difficult act to follow and our reactions to this film are seriously affected by Ledger's untimely death.

Gotham City, it seems, is in a worse than usual state. The mob (an alliance between Italian-Americans and the Russian mafia) has taken over and Police Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is at his wits' end.

It appears that the new District Attorney, fearless, upright Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), is the man to clean up the town, and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), the rich bachelor head of Wayne Enterprises, is backing him.

It is evidently the way for the sombre Wayne, no longer a 'society playboy', to take the pressure off his alter ego, Batman, the vigilante as social saviour, and be replaced by a human face.

But the Joker has a different project. His initial aim is to destroy the mob. 'This town needs a better class of criminal,' he quips.

But his objective isn't to aggrandise himself financially or socially. It is to undermine society, to destroy all concepts of conventional morality. He plays people off against each other. He creates social situations (a public choice between blowing up a boatload of convicts or a ship of ordinary citizens, a private one of a man choosing between the death of a son or a wife) that make a mockery of altruism.

His chief targets are the dedicated do-gooder Harvey Dent and, of course, Batman.

The upholders of law and order are a dour collection, the organised criminals a dull lot. It is the Joker who dominates the pack, a colourful, larger-than-life figure who describes his ultimate encounter with Batman as the meeting between irresistible force and immovable object.

He is the Lord of Misrule, he's Lucifer, the man from nowhere incapable of being bribed or appeased. 'I'm an agent of chaos,' he boasts, physically destroying the city, shattering what remains of its sense of community, corrupting its leaders.

This is a post-9/11 Manichaean view of the world. To confront this menace, Batman is reduced to torture of the sort Dick Cheney and the CIA have embraced and to a massive extension of public surveillance.

This destruction of privacy (immediate access to every cellphone in the city) is operated by Batman's version of Q (Morgan Freeman), who handles Wayne Enterprises' weapons research.

He's one of the only two people who know Batman's identity. The other is Wayne's English butler Alfred (Michael Caine), a voice of sanity, though he's more like a Cockney minder than the impeccable valet played by his predecessors Michael Gough and Alan Napier.

The film is unquestionably dominated by the Joker. As he goes about his lethal business, he makes much of the pains inflicted on him during a troubled childhood.

But he's really the personification of pure evil and malevolence whose credo is expressed by one of his earliest statements: 'I believe that that which doesn't kill you makes you stranger.'

As played by Ledger, he's no circus clown. The lank hair is that of a mad scientist, the streaky white make-up and extended red mouth the face of a raddled whore.

He's a cross between the leering, crudely charming young Marlon Brando, a Stanley Kowalski gone around the bend, and the young, less sentimental Jack Lemmon in his truculent, brow-wrinkling, petulant mode.

When he disguises himself as a nurse to visit the disfigured Harvey Dent in hospital and blow the place to pieces, he brings to mind Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like it Hot.

The Dark Knight is a clever, loud, technically brilliant film, superbly designed by Nathan Crowley and dramatically lit by Wally Pfister. Whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter.

It ends with a homage to Shane as Commissioner Gordon's fair-haired little son shouts plaintively after the departing Batman, who's leaving Gotham City as an act of self-sacrifice. Thus a further sequel is being set up. I hope before then that Nolan will make something more unconventional, less pyrotechnic.