B:TAS reviews: Joker's Favor

(6/12/09)

What do Paul Dini and Brian de Palma have in common? At least in Joker's Favor it is a penchant for emulating the style and conventions of acclaimed director Alfred Hitchcock. Of the few De Palma films I've seen, his borrowings degenerate into either camp or sterility but they almost always succeed as pastiche.

It all begins with Hitchcock. I don’t know if Dini was consciously borrowing from the master, but I cannot help but notice the familiar themes and set pieces from his classic films. This is the story of the ordinary man who, through no fault of his own, becomes involved in a complex scheme out of which he so desperately tries to escape, only for the web to grow more tangled and intricate. The opening of Joker’s Favor establishes Charlie Collins as the everyman, stuck in a middleclass rut, with a bad job and a wife who fixes the same thing for dinner every night. What is terrifying is that the moment he attempts to break out of his lull of submission to others is the moment that seals his fate for the next two years.

As Joker calls upon Charlie two years later I am reminded of the classic films Strangers on a Train and The Man Who Knew Too Much. It is not simply the theme of the innocent man being caught in a situation way over his head; it is what this does to him on a psychological level. You can just feel the pressure, the anxiety, the fear, all boiling up inside Mr. Collins’ head. How terrifying to feel secure, having moved away and changed his name, only to find out that the Joker has been following his every move. This is a classic combination of paranoia and suspense in the vein of Hitchcock's famous bomb anecdote, except that we don't know what exactly is hidden under the table.

The Joker meets and greets him and ostensibly makes him right at home, as if Charlie is one of his best friends in the whole world. Finally I can say with sincerity that the Joker has become a great character. He possesses a quality that simply is not on full display in his previous spotlight episodes. In Joker’s Favor, he treats Collins with a peculiar brand of kindness that wears its falseness on its sleeve. The knowledge that the Joker wears the same smile for both welcome parties and murder attempts generates a delicious unease, and this is the first time that characterization is revealed.

If founding this review on the master os suspense himself seems a bit farfetched so far, there is one scene that is pure Hitchcock. In fact, Charlie practically sums up one of the man’s signature ideas. As Charlie finds himself at the banquet for Commissioner Gordon, he says to himself how ironic it is that he is in a room full of cops, and yet can’t tell a single person about the trouble he’s in. How many times did Hitchcock place his heroes in formal social gatherings, where they conceal something dark and horrible and yet can’t tell a soul? Saboteur, Notorious, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and that’s only out of the slice of his films that I’ve seen. This awards ceremony also, unsurprisingly, is the most tightly packed bundle of tension in the episode.

Obviously, referencing a great filmmaker doesn’t instantaneously make the art in question great. And yet watching Joker’s Favor with this homage in mind, I immediately became more drawn into the work. I was able to focus on the irony a little bit more and notice some of the great strokes of direction I never noticed before (note the way the camera goes from being placed on Bruce and Gordon only to pan down past the legs of a passerby to see little Charlie Collins emerge from a door in the background).

And yet this delicious set up for a climax yields a pretty substandard one. Charlie signals Batman, who shows up and saves the day and apprehends the Joker and his goons. I could have done without the obligatory action scenes for once. But still, Charlie saves the episode in his unpredictable, misleading revenge, causing the Joker to cower in fear before him before the final in a long succession of surprises. And off Charlie goes down the alleyway, vanishing into silhouette to become just another nobody yet again.