B:TAS reviews: Pretty Poison

(8/28/09)

Poison Ivy is introduced in a black-and-white flashback with a close-up on her hands doing garden work, viewed from her point of view. This close-up lingers a cluttered and intense space, a grim, isolated piano suffusing it with a deathly chill, before a transition via gradual pan up above the ground that views District Attorney Harvey Dent’s speech from a distance. This creates the impression of a figurative point-of-view shot that has subsisted from her intimate gardening to the view of Dent's speech, the distant long shot maintaining her calculating fixation. All these figurative elements melt into each other, creating from the start the image of a killer with a love of plant-life out for human blood.

The screenplay, the result of three collaborating screenwriters who usually wrote their own scripts, has quite a few preoccupations and takes its sweet time in addressing all of them. If the opening minute forecasts intense psycho-horror, then the following sequence, which begins with some unnecessary business juxtaposing Dent's descriptions of Bruce Wayne to his dinner guest with contradictory shots of Batman in action before easing into high melodrama, is something else entirely. A three-way conversation between Bruce, Harvey, and his fiance Pamela, whom we all know to be up to something, seems positively bent on starting up a cast of supporting characters for the series, reusing Harvey from On Leather Wings and continuing with bits involving Bullock and Montoya. The pan down from the moonlit skyline to the inconspicuous, ground-level Rose Cafe isn't simply an aestheticized contrast that greatly surpasses the earlier shot-reverse-shot method; it's also striking in its charting of some kind of established Gotham City geography.

The best things about Pretty Poison, then, are offered at the start. The carefully developed melodrama and film noir sharpness soon unravels, with Pamela Isely transforming from heartless femme fatale into a costumed maniac, accompanied by Diane Pershing’s unnecessarily shrill performance. Dialogue devolves into proselytizing and amateurish but earnest suspense into obligatory action. Ivy's link to feminism, implied by her suggestively shaped Venus Flytrap, is completely unexplored and yet endlessly more fascinating than her eco-terrorist craziness. Ultimately, this bold-colored showiness kills the drama dead in its tracks, and amusingly enough, her second spotlight episode, Eternal Youth, is soiled by the very same development.

A conflict of disparate auteurist ambition is only a partial explanation for the episode's failure to deliver the goods. Even the best scenes, save perhaps the opening flashback, have no sense of shape or purpose. The only salvageable qualities appear on the fringes, like the hallucinatory glow of the greenhouse blaze or the painterly decor of the Rose Cafe. By the time of Harvey's recovery, the allure of Pretty Poison has all but withered.