Murk in The Myth

By RICHARD CORLISS

The familiar blue sky behind the Warner Bros. shield grows dark. The clouds gain some menacing heft. A cumulus of urban steam shrouds the camera as it goes cruising for trouble in Gotham City. Nighttime is the right time for . . . Batman.

Not "Baat-maaaan!" Not the bleating trumpets and Pop art facetiousness of the '60s TV series, which turned Bob Kane's superhero into a camp crusader. Director Tim Burton's approach is dead serious. He renounces the bright palette, the easy thrills, to aim for a psychodrama with the force of myth. He creates a Gotham City that looms like a rube's nightmare of Manhattan. He strips the Bruce Wayne legend down to its chassis, dumping Robin and the goony rogues' gallery. This is a face-off between two men in weird masks: one in a leathery black item out of a dominatrix's pleasure chest, the other with a grin frozen into a rictus. One man obsessed with good, the other enthralled by evil: Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson).

Ambitious goals, most of which are not realized. The film stints on narrative surprise. It prowls -- slowly, so slowly -- in search of grandeur, but it often finds murk. It permits a few inside jokes (a cartoon of a bat in a suit, drawn by Kane), but mines its main humor from the Joker's ribald misanthropy ("This town needs an enema"). Batman's style is both daunting and lurching; it has trouble deciding which of its antagonists should set the tone. It can be as manic as the Joker, straining to hear the applause of outrage; it can be as implosive as Batman-Bruce, who seems crushed by the burden of his schizoid eminence. This tension nearly exhausts the viewer and the film.

Inconsistencies abound. The Joker falls into a vat of toxic slime that eats the skin off his body but doesn't damage his signature deck of cards; when he gaily vandalizes some classic paintings, the film spells the museum's name two different ways; and when he starts tossing $20 million in cash onto the street, the good people of Gotham don't go into a looting frenzy and attack his perch. More important, the picture's first hour poses one big question: How will ace photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) react when she learns that Bruce is Batman? We never find out; the revelation occurs offscreen.

Anyone can take pleasure in the matching of Keaton and Nicholson, their dueling eyebrows poised like crossed swords. And Keaton does locate the troubled human inside Batman's armature. He is amusingly awkward wrestling with the threat that Vicki's inquisitive love represents. He knows the world is not quite worth saving, and yet, "It's just something I have to do," he says, "because nobody else can." Same with Nicholson. Who else could play the Joker? He has a patent on satanic majesty. His performance is high, soaring, gamy. He is as good, and as evil, as the film allows him to be. Which, finally, is not enough.

Here's why. At the end, Batman and the Joker realize they must destroy each other because, in a way, they have created each other. It would be nice to say that the Joker is Batman's lost, twisted twin; then his clumsy antics could be seen as an expression of existential anguish. He could feel as much pain as he dishes out. He could be Hamlet dressed as a clown. But the Joker's malignancy is neither seductive nor poignant. His power never tempts Vicki or compromises Bruce. His soul must have been stripped away with his skin, and what's left is the spirit of anarchic violence, giggling at its own enormity.

What's left in Batman is the skeleton of a nifty film. Its heart got lost on Tim Burton's storyboard. R.C.