Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is an enormous curiosity for several reasons. It is a 70-minute story with bloated ambition that boasts a foray into the origin of Batman, something unexplored in the animated series aside from the occasional allusion to the night of his parents’ deaths. Furthermore, it skirts the line between modest continuation of the series and bombastic big-screen production. It was not always intended for theatrical release, but its widescreen presentation, heavy symbolism, and melodramatic score all seem like steps forward in an attempt to be more cinematic than the twenty-two minute serials. The ideas that ground Phantasm are grandiose ones, and the film’s development of its central character and attempts at enriching the Batman mythos are its greatest attributes. It is the pandering to a wider audience through callow stylistics and soapy melodramatics that I find disappointing.
A long time ago, Bruce Wayne wasn’t an omniscient guardian of a dreary war zone of a city. His playboy image was still a façade, but he had no Batman into which to pour his ideal persona. In both present and flashback scenes, Bruce’s dilettante life-management is shown to be hopelessly shallow and wholly unconcerned. While usually we are led to believe that this is simply because Bruce Wayne is a constructed image and Batman is what deserves the man’s time, the opening scenes of Phantasm suggest a romantic tragedy that killed off a socially active Wayne forever and perhaps doomed him to a bitter crime fighting existence. We see via flashback that even though Bruce was on the path to dissociate himself from the world and take up the fight against crime, he was also rendered vulnerable by a woman who cared little for Bruce the playboy and had the humor and audacity to express her irreverence for his billionaire lifestyle.
The implication is that only a woman who could pierce through Bruce’s forced social role and detect something deeper is the only woman who might have ever won his heart. There then ensues a dilemma for Bruce, gradually unfolded over multiple flashbacks, over whether to be happy and seek a relationship or to bind himself to the dismal oath he swore upon his parents’ murder. Most Batman stories are tragic, and thusly Andrea left Bruce just as marriage became a possibility for them. The present-tense story events are allotted to a less complicated doppelganger plot. Upon confronting the imposter, Batman gets at the heart of what happened many years ago. We find that Andrea has taken on a morbid vengefulness, a vice ever ubiquitous in the Batman universe, and that the ever-elusive figure of the Joker ties everything together. The themes of futile oaths, dual identities, family tragedies, and isolation are interlocked and present in both Bruce and Andrea; this bleak reality of familial duty and psychological anguish prevents any chance of love.
But in every artistic endeavor unassociated with writing or immediate storyboarding, Phantasm demonstrates one of the key strengths of the twenty-two minute anthology: with less time to tell a story there is also less room to be showy. Phantasm’s first central flaw is structural, that of the misplaced expositional flashbacks. In many ways these glimpses of the past are the dramatic high points of the story, but there is no rhyme or reason to their placement or runtime; they are triggered by imposing icons or introspective close-ups, cued by a choral sound transition that seems straight out of an exotic Powell and Pressburger movie, and then they seem to meander along to arbitrary cutoff points.
One-note characterizations could have gotten by in the show, but in a feature-length movie they are almost inexcusable. The mob boss Valestra wears a black pinstripe suit, comes equipped with a pointed mustache and a thing for cigar smoke, and is voiced by Abe Vigoda, a typecast Italian mobster if there ever was one. Senator Arthur Reeves is unbearable in his pursed lipped urbanity, replete with arched eyebrows, slicked hair, an angled nose, and condescending posturing. While Vigoda’s gangster slides by with his minimal plot importance, Reeves is a cornerstone—he once worked for Andrea’s father, has mob connections, and influences police initiatives. He is an omnipresent roadblock that jars all of the scenes he factors into with his gaudy mannerisms.
The film having been a mass collaborative effort, there seems to have been no restrictions on the number of glossy flourishes to drape on a film already cluttered with narrative strands. Operatic syrup is smothered on in heavy doses. Soap opera dialogue, iconographic exploitation, and an obtrusive score become manipulative crutches. All evocations of Bruce’s parents must be blatant, either a low-angle centered shot of his parents’ tombstone or a composition that frames him as a small man in the shadow of their mounted portrait. Most of the big reminiscence scenes abuse the organ for its grave intonations. Aside from some of Andrea’s witty one-liners, her romantic dialogue with Bruce is run-of-the-mill, unnecessarily assisted by grating sentimental music. She also makes one too many statements about Batman’s parental vows, each intended as a dramatic, caustic reprimand.
I do have an affinity for the metaphorical presence of the retro World of the Future. It suggests that the gritty 1940s Gotham of present is a regression from a 1950s domestic optimism, its ruins standing for the decay of both the city itself and the protagonists’ relationship. Joker inhabits the House of Tomorrow with deliberate mockery, his marriage to the robotic housewife a mechanical perversion of the human love sought after unsuccessfully by Bruce and Andrea. The tattered Gotham fair is the third act battleground; on its hallowed ground, Andrea reveals herself to be Phantasm, Batman and his arch-nemesis fight as giants in a miniature city, and the Joker blows everything to smithereens, mirroring Andrea’s decision to take the final step into vengeful isolation.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm’s most important contribution to Batman: the Animated Series is its humanization of Bruce Wayne, achieved through expressive storyboarding and Conroy’s powerful vocal performance. The rest, for the most part, is all theatrics and melodrama. Watching it, I feel as if the creative staff is pleading on bended knee for an emotional reaction. There is an absence of narrative fluidity and emotional honesty that hinders it from the status of masterpiece, a title many fans are quick to assign it. But the commitment to a story defined more by characters than by physical action, however executed, as well as the construction of ambitious set pieces, demonstrates the boldness of Timm, Dini, Radomski and the rest of the creative higher-ups. This boundary pushing alone is on some level compensatory for the film’s overwrought storytelling, but as soon as the sappy love song starts over the end credits I realize that it’s far from enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment