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                                                                                CINEMA, Page  69

Battier and Better


Batman Returns is a funny, gorgeous improvement on the original
and a lesson on how pop entertainment can soar into the realm
of poetry

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Patrick E. Cole and Martha
Smilgis/Los Angeles and Georgia Harbison/New York


    Scared, scarred Selina Kyle is trudging homeward after
another wretched day as secretary to the mighty Power & Light
lord Max Shreck when she bumps into a fellow in a black cape.
"Wow! The Batman!" she apostrophizes. "Or is it just -- Batman?"

    The 1989 movie Batman, director Tim Burton's first go at
the Bob Kane comic-book character, earned well over $1 billion
in its theatrical and video release and in a boffo merchandise
blitz. Yet, however imposing its grosses, however many kids in
developing countries wore T-shirts with the logo that is
supposed to look like a bat in a halo but inevitably suggests a
gaping mouth with five rotten teeth, the film was wan, jangled,
lost in meandering murk.

    That one was "just -- Batman." Now Burton has made Batman
Returns, opening Friday on more than 2,500 screens, and it looks
as though Warner Bros., which produced the film, got its $55
million worth. It is a funny, gorgeous, midsummer night's
Christmas story about. . . well, dating, actually. But hang on.
This is the goods: "The Batman." Accept no prequels.

    Like a superhero for cinema, Batman Returns arrives in the
nick of time. Movies are in big trouble. The magic is gone; the
danger is missing. Genres that vitalized the box office a decade
ago -- the sci-fi epic, the horror movie, the adult comedy --
look sapped. Top directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin
Scorsese remake their own or other people's movies. So does
everybody else. Lethal Weapon 3 and Patriot Games and Sister Act
may bring millions into a cool theater on a hot evening, but are
audiences getting the fresh kick that good films are supposed
to deliver? Movies today are like the Bush Administration in its
fourth year: aimless, exhausted, myopic. They lack the vision
thing.

    The first Batman seemed a symptom of that malaise. Batman
Returns is an antidote. For a start, it's alive, not an effects
showcase in a shroud. Daniel Waters' script delights in
elaborate wordplay and complex characters. "The characters are
all screwed up," Burton notes. "I find that much more
interesting." Returns tops the first movie's shrill wrestling
match between Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack
Nicholson) with a funnier, more lithe and daring villain: the
Penguin (Danny De Vito). He is a vicious troll with a righteous
grudge: his rich parents dumped him in the sewer when they saw
he had flippers for hands. Now he wants to be loved and, even
more, elected -- mayor of Gotham City. In DeVito's ripe
performance, Penguin is a creature of Dickensian rhetoric,
proportions and comic depth.

    But this brisk, buoyant movie gets its emotional weight
from an entirely other conflict: the tangle of opposites
between -- and within -- two credible people. Wealthy orphan
Bruce Wayne (Keaton again) -- the "trust-fund goody-goody," as
Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) calls him -- is also Batman, a
trussed-up do-gooder who cannot reveal his identity. Selina
Kyle, the single woman with a lousy love life, is also the
vengeful kitten with a whip: "I am Catwoman! Hear me roar!"
Bruce and Selina are drawn to each other's worldly wise grace
and the hint of hidden wounds. They are attracted by the fear
of what they might find. And when they don their business suits,
as Bat and Cat, the animal comes out. Dr. Jekyll and Sister
Hyde. Hansel and Grendel. Fatal Attraction meets Beauty and the
Beast.

    "We're all animals in some way," Burton observes, and he
doesn't mean it pejoratively. "One message of the film," says
Waters, "is that the warped tensions underlying every
personality should be embraced, not ignored." Unleash the beast.
Otherwise you will be schizo, a stranger to others and to your
other self.

    So the passwords for Batman Returns are duality and
isolation. "People-in-masks is pretty key," says DeVito of the
movie's theme. These people are what they wear; Bruce's closet
is filled with a dozen Batman costumes. All four main
characters, Bruce and Selina, Penguin and Max, are isolated from
themselves. They live in mansions, railroad flats, towers and
sewer caves -- haunted houses, anyway, dwellings of the
different. "You're a well-respected monster," Penguin says to
Max. "And I am, to date, not." But all are at one time
respected, at another time not, and always sacred monsters,
removed from the city whose destiny they control. It's
appropriate that the film is set at Christmas, the season of
would-be togetherness and, for many, the time of deepest
desperation.

    That could have been the mood on the Batman Returns set.
It was chilly enough: 38 degrees F for the 12-hr. working days.
Annette Bening, set to star as Catwoman, ducked out when she got
pregnant, and Burton scurried to hire Michelle Pfeiffer. Anton
Furst, who designed Batman but was not working on the sequel,
died jumping off a roof and plunged the crew into melancholy.

    If Burton felt these burdens -- or the onus of topping
himself after four films (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice,
Batman, Edward Scissorhands), all of them critical and popular
hits -- he didn't show it. No screaming, no broken crockery.
"He's the most un-Hollywood person I've ever met," says his
co-producer, Denise Di Novi, who believes Burton's breakthrough
came with Scissorhands, another Christmas phantasmagoria about
lonely creatures making sad magic in the snow. "He connected
with himself," she says, "and his art became much more
intimate." Now, without Batman producers Peter Guber and Jon
Peters hovering, Burton would make his own film. "You see
glimmers of Tim in Batman," Di Novi says, "but this movie is all
his."

    Burton's gift is to make movies about beguiling outsiders
-- the dead couple reclaiming their home in Beetlejuice, the
deformed snow sculptor Edward Scissorhands, even the childlike
Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens plays the Penguin's father here).
Burton inverts pictures and fictions, and makes it seem as if
he has just turned them right side up. In Batman Returns,
everything is familiarly topsy-turvy. Black is good -- Batman,
of course -- and white or bright is bad. Max, the rapacious
industrialist, has a Stokowskian white mane that helps
Gothamites think of him as Santa Claus, though Selina derisively
calls him "Anti Claus." The Penguin's sewer-level lair, Arctic
World, is a garishly colorful place; it has ice-white walls,
chartreuse toxic bile and a giant yellow ducky that serves as
the Penguin's Stygian barge.

    Burton knows that moviegoers, just like the Penguin, need
their oversize playthings. So he and production designer Bo
Welch provided toys for the kids. The new-model Batmobile can
get ultraslim (fast!) and slip through the narrowest crevice.
The Penguin's parasol becomes an Umbrella-Copter, spiriting him
out of the trouble he loves to make. At the end he sends his
commando squadron of penguins to destroy the city: tuxedoed
birds wearing embossed shields, tiny helmets and missiles with
candy-cane stripes ( it is Christmas) on their backs. Some of
the penguins were real, some were robot puppets, some were
little people in costume and others were computer generated.

    There are lovely toys for adults too. From the 8-ft. logs
and 6-ft. andirons in Bruce Wayne's fireplace to the neon
lettering (HELLO THERE) on Selina's bedroom wall (which Catwoman
alters to read HELL HERE), the picture gives you the chance to
luxuriate in a cartoon world made flesh and concrete. Massive
Deco-style buildings -- a Rockefeller Center gone bats --
stretch skyward to put heroes and villains in ironic
perspective. "The movie is very vertical," says Welch, who also
designed Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. "It goes from the
penguin in the sewers to a flying rodent. So these are
aggressive sets, not passive backdrops incidental to the
action." The visual contrasts -- big on little, bright on
brooding, snow on soot -- give the film a distinct, witty style:
Dark Lite.

    There's wit aplenty in Danny Elfman's discordantly lush
score, with its sugarplum fairy exploding over meowing violins.
And imposing performances from Walken, as a master builder who
out-Trumps himself, and Keaton, sturdily imploding from Batman's
unresolved, not quite explicable nobility. But the flashy turns
are from DeVito and Pfeiffer.

    In the '60s Batman TV series, Burgess Meredith played
Penguin as a kind of deranged F.D.R. This was not for DeVito.
"I didn't see myself playing a weird Nick Charles with a martini
glass and a tuxedo," he says. "It just didn't tickle my fancy."
Then Burton showed him a painting he had done of "a toddler
with a big round head and big eyes and a protrusion in the nose
and mouth and a bulbous body with little appendages. And there
was a caption that said, `My name is Jimmy, but they call me
the hideous penguin boy.' And I got this weird chill." As
Penguin, DeVito gamely spewed black bile (food coloring and
mouthwash) and ate raw fish (seasoned with lemon). DeVito,
auteur of his own dark comedies Throw Momma from the Train and
War of the Roses, is now directing Nicholson in Hoffa. He says
the only thing he would have done differently if he had directed
Batman Returns is "make love to the leading lady."

    In the movie, Penguin and Catwoman make hilarious hate.
Pfeiffer had cats crawling over her supine body and, in one
scene, a live bird in her mouth. "Fortunately," she says, "I
have a pretty big mouth." She also had a longtime crush on her
character. "Catwoman was a childhood heroine of mine," she says.
"She's good, bad, evil, dangerous, vulnerable and sexual. She
is allowed to be all of those things, and we are still allowed
to care about her."

    In Batman Returns she is a lot more, thanks to Waters, who
wrote Heathers, the brilliant 1989 tale of feminine
competitiveness and desperation (and on Batman Returns got story
help from Sam Hamm and dialogue "normalizing" from Wesley
Strick). "We didn't want to make her a macho woman," he says,
"or a sultry, coquettish uber-vixen curling on a penthouse
couch. We wanted her tied deep into female psychology. Female
rage is interesting: we made her a mythic woman you can
sympathize with. Catwoman isn't a villain, and she isn't Wonder
Woman fighting for the greater good of society. That has no
meaning for a lonely, lowly, harassed secretary toiling away in
the depths of Gotham City. But she does have her own agenda.
She's nobody's toy. She's a wild card -- the movie's independent
variable."

    Waters sees the story of Bruce and Selina, Batman and
Catwoman, as a parable of the strangers men and women are to
each other. "In the daylight they have a sweet, tentative
romance," he says, "but at night their ids are out, beating the
heck out of each other. In costume the ids are active. No
kissing there, only one good lick." It is the reverse of a
fantasy like Pretty Woman. Pretty Woman goes into the store and
shops; Catwoman goes in and whips off the heads of the
mannequins. Julia Roberts tells Richard Gere she wants the fairy
tale. Cat tells Bat, `I would love to live with you forever in
your castle, just like in a fairy tale. I just couldn't live
with myself. So don't pretend this is a happy ending.' "

    Batman Returns could mark a happy beginning for Hollywood
-- not because it might make a mint but because it dispenses
with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea
and image found in the best feature-length cartoons. Most
directors think pictures have to be anchored in the narrowest
form of reality: the one that Hollywood has presented since the
dawn of sound 65 years ago. Burton, once an animator at Disney,
understands that to go deeper, you must fly higher, to
liberation from plot into poetry. Here he's done it. This Batman
soars.