B:TAS reviews: It's Never Too Late

(1/25/09)

I am reminded of what has been echoed by the best of film critics, that standards of realism are utterly worthless when critiquing a work of art. Batman: the Animated Series is praised far and wide for being 'realistic,' and yet as evidence by the fans' love of hollow manipulations like I Am the Knight, the television equivalent of Oscar-bait, they are easily deceived into buying into narrative contrivances while still maintaing that the specifics of physical action be based in an arbitrary reality. It's Never Too Late suffers some of these unfortunate shortcomings, putting on the charade of 'depth' by cramming its runtime with flashbacks and lofty themes like redemption and self-delusion. But in all its melodramatic hoopla, it succeeds in dramatizing a case unique for Batman's willingness to bring a criminal to an evaluation of conscience before bringing him to justice.

If the antagonist is a madman, it usually follows that his or her psychological complex might render him sympathetic. If he is a thug, even a recurring mastermind, he is a near-amoral caricature of 30s gangsters. Rupert Thorne may have more personality than your typical henchman, but he is no more humane than any of the ruthless musclemen scouring Gotham City. Arnold Stromwell is different, and though the symbolism that marks his guilt-ridden journey is banal--his brother is a priest, Batman the figurative angel, and the smoky train yard a hellish harbinger of the past--the effort in making him a less snarling and more introspective mob boss is noble, perhaps ultimately moral for a children's cartoon so often content with simplistic moral extremes.

Boyd Kirkland is the real hero of It's Never Too Late, and his spatial sensibilities, in which a city can appear interconnected by background details and multi-plane reveals, make Gotham City feel unique and idiosyncratic in its various environments, be they hazy train station, untouchable upper-crust suburbia, or tucked away diner. Critic Manny Farber discusses how the narratives of Howard Hawks films are often intentionally pulpy, leaving Hawks room for careful auteurist design work--In The Big Sleep, it is not the convoluted story but the particulars of the city's atmosphere that make it a masterwork of cinema. One could easily say the same about Kirkland's command of space, that it is the true aesthetic in an otherwise phony melodrama.

But unlike a Hawks film, It's Never Too Late is not aware of its own lackluster redemption story. It wastes time by repeating the same over-significant sepia flashback and ends with an easy symbolic association between the distant cathedral and Stromwell's police confession (which in turn mirrors a confession to a priest). That Stromwell is involved in drugs seems a risky move by the producers until the business is robbed of all pungency by a ham-fisted moralistic exchange between him and his wife. But conceptually it remains something to be commended, and I recall as a children being thoroughly immersed in what was then my greatest exposure to a morally and spiritually involved tale.