Battier and Better

By RICHARD CORLISS

Scared, scarred Selina Kyle is trudging homeward after another wretched day as secretary to the mighty Power & Light lord Max Shreck when she bumps into a fellow in a black cape. "Wow! The Batman!" she apostrophizes. "Or is it just -- Batman?"

The 1989 movie Batman, director Tim Burton's first go at the Bob Kane comic- book character, earned well over $1 billion in its theatrical and video release and in a boffo merchandise blitz. Yet, however imposing its grosses, however many kids in developing countries wore T shirts with the logo that is supposed to look like a bat in a halo but inevitably suggests a gaping mouth with five rotten teeth, the film was wan, jangled, lost in meandering murk.

That one was "just -- Batman." Now Burton has made Batman Returns, opening Friday on more than 2,500 screens, and it looks as though Warner Bros., which produced the film, got its $55 million worth. It is a funny, gorgeous, midsummer night's Christmas story about. . . well, dating, actually. But hang on. This is the goods: "The Batman." Accept no prequels.

Like a superhero for cinema, Batman Returns arrives in the nick of time. Movies are in big trouble. The magic is gone; the danger is missing. Genres that vitalized the box office a decade ago -- the sci-fi epic, the horror movie, the adult comedy -- look sapped. Top directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese remake their own or other people's movies. So does everybody else. Lethal Weapon 3 and Patriot Games and Sister Act may bring millions into a cool theater on a hot evening, but are audiences getting the fresh kick that good films are supposed to deliver? Movies today are like the Bush Administration in its fourth year: aimless, exhausted, myopic. They lack the vision thing.

The first Batman seemed a symptom of that malaise. Batman Returns is an antidote. For a start, it's alive, not an effects showcase in a shroud. Daniel Waters' script delights in elaborate wordplay and complex characters. "The characters are all screwed up," Burton notes. "I find that much more interesting." Returns tops the first movie's shrill wrestling match between Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson) with a funnier, more lithe and daring villain: the Penguin (Danny De Vito). He is a vicious troll with a righteous grudge: his rich parents dumped him in the sewer when they saw he had flippers for hands. Now he wants to be loved and, even more, elected -- mayor of Gotham City. In DeVito's ripe performance, Penguin is a creature of Dickensian rhetoric, proportions and comic depth.

But this brisk, buoyant movie gets its emotional weight from an entirely other conflict: the tangle of opposites between -- and within -- two credible people. Wealthy orphan Bruce Wayne (Keaton again) -- the "trust-fund goody- goody," as Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) calls him -- is also Batman, a trussed-up do-gooder who cannot reveal his identity. Selina Kyle, the single woman with a lousy love life, is also the vengeful kitten with a whip: "I am - Catwoman! Hear me roar!" Bruce and Selina are drawn to each other's worldly wise grace and the hint of hidden wounds. They are attracted by the fear of what they might find. And when they don their business suits, as Bat and Cat, the animal comes out. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Hansel and Grendel. Fatal Attraction meets Beauty and the Beast.

"We're all animals in some way," Burton observes, and he doesn't mean it pejoratively. "One message of the film," says Waters, "is that the warped tensions underlying every personality should be embraced, not ignored." Unleash the beast. Otherwise you will be schizo, a stranger to others and to your other self.

So the passwords for Batman Returns are duality and isolation. "People-in- masks is pretty key," says DeVito of the movie's theme. These people are what they wear; Bruce's closet is filled with a dozen Batman costumes. All four main characters, Bruce and Selina, Penguin and Max, are isolated from themselves. They live in mansions, railroad flats, towers and sewer caves -- haunted houses, anyway, dwellings of the different. "You're a well- respected monster," Penguin says to Max. "And I am, to date, not." But all are at one time respected, at another time not, and always sacred monsters, removed from the city whose destiny they control. It's appropriate that the film is set at Christmas, the season of would-be togetherness and, for many, the time of deepest desperation.

That could have been the mood on the Batman Returns set. It was chilly enough: 38 degrees F for the 12-hr. working days. Annette Bening, set to star as Catwoman, ducked out when she got pregnant, and Burton scurried to hire Michelle Pfeiffer. Anton Furst, who designed Batman but was not working on the sequel, died jumping off a roof and plunged the crew into melancholy.

If Burton felt these burdens -- or the onus of topping himself after four films (Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands), all of them critical and popular hits -- he didn't show it. No screaming, no broken crockery. "He's the most un-Hollywood person I've ever met," says his co-producer, Denise Di Novi, who believes Burton's breakthrough came with Scissorhands, another Christmas phantasmagoria about lonely creatures making sad magic in the snow. "He connected with himself," she says, "and his art became much more intimate." Now, without Batman producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters hovering, Burton would make his own film. "You see glimmers of Tim in Batman," Di Novi says, "but this movie is all his."

Burton's gift is to make movies about beguiling outsiders -- the dead couple reclaiming their home in Beetlejuice, the deformed snow sculptor Edward Scissorhands, even the childlike Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens plays the Penguin's father here). Burton inverts pictures and fictions, and makes it seem as if he has just turned them right side up. In Batman Returns, everything is familiarly topsy-turvy. Black is good -- Batman, of course -- and white or bright is bad. Max, the rapacious industrialist, has a Stokowskian white mane that helps Gothamites think of him as Santa Claus, though Selina derisively calls him "Anti Claus." The Penguin's sewer-level lair, Arctic World, is a garishly colorful place; it has ice-white walls, chartreuse toxic bile and a giant yellow ducky that serves as the Penguin's Stygian barge.

Burton knows that moviegoers, just like the Penguin, need their oversize playthings. So he and production designer Bo Welch provided toys for the kids. The new-model Batmobile can get ultraslim (fast!) and slip through the narrowest crevice. The Penguin's parasol becomes an Umbrella-Copter, spiriting him out of the trouble he loves to make. At the end he sends his commando squadron of penguins to destroy the city: tuxedoed birds wearing embossed shields, tiny helmets and missiles with candy-cane stripes ( it is Christmas) on their backs. Some of the penguins were real, some were robot puppets, some were little people in costume and others were computer generated.

There are lovely toys for adults too. From the 8-ft. logs and 6-ft. andirons in Bruce Wayne's fireplace to the neon lettering (HELLO THERE) on Selina's bedroom wall (which Catwoman alters to read HELL HERE), the picture gives you the chance to luxuriate in a cartoon world made flesh and concrete. Massive Deco-style buildings -- a Rockefeller Center gone bats -- stretch skyward to put heroes and villains in ironic perspective. "The movie is very vertical," says Welch, who also designed Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands. "It goes from the penguin in the sewers to a flying rodent. So these are aggressive sets, not passive backdrops incidental to the action." The visual contrasts -- big on little, bright on brooding, snow on soot -- give the film a distinct, witty style: Dark Lite.

There's wit aplenty in Danny Elfman's discordantly lush score, with its sugarplum fairy exploding over meowing violins. And imposing performances from Walken, as a master builder who out-Trumps himself, and Keaton, sturdily imploding from Batman's unresolved, not quite explicable nobility. But the flashy turns are from DeVito and Pfeiffer.

In the '60s Batman TV series, Burgess Meredith played Penguin as a kind of deranged F.D.R. This was not for DeVito. "I didn't see myself playing a weird Nick Charles with a martini glass and a tuxedo," he says. "It just didn't tickle my fancy." Then Burton showed him a painting he had done of "a toddler with a big round head and big eyes and a protrusion in the nose and mouth and a bulbous body with little appendages. And there was a caption that said, 'My name is Jimmy, but they call me the hideous penguin boy.' And I got this weird chill." As Penguin, DeVito gamely spewed black bile (food coloring and mouthwash) and ate raw fish (seasoned with lemon). DeVito, auteur of his own dark comedies Throw Momma from the Train and War of the Roses, is now directing Nicholson in Hoffa. He says the only thing he would have done differently if he had directed Batman Returns is "make love to the leading lady."

In the movie, Penguin and Catwoman make hilarious hate. Pfeiffer had cats crawling over her supine body and, in one scene, a live bird in her mouth. "Fortunately," she says, "I have a pretty big mouth." She also had a longtime crush on her character. "Catwoman was a childhood heroine of mine," she says. "She's good, bad, evil, dangerous, vulnerable and sexual. She is allowed to be all of those things, and we are still allowed to care about her."

In Batman Returns she is a lot more, thanks to Waters, who wrote Heathers, the brilliant 1989 tale of feminine competitiveness and desperation (and on Batman Returns got story help from Sam Hamm and dialogue "normalizing" from Wesley Strick). "We didn't want to make her a macho woman," he says, "or a sultry, coquettish uber-vixen curling on a penthouse couch. We wanted her tied deep into female psychology. Female rage is interesting: we made her a mythic woman you can sympathize with. Catwoman isn't a villain, and she isn't Wonder Woman fighting for the greater good of society. That has no meaning for a lonely, lowly, harassed secretary toiling away in the depths of Gotham City. But she does have her own agenda. She's nobody's toy. She's a wild card -- the movie's independent variable."

Waters sees the story of Bruce and Selina, Batman and Catwoman, as a parable of the strangers men and women are to each other. "In the daylight they have a sweet, tentative romance," he says, "but at night their ids are out, beating the heck out of each other. In costume the ids are active. No kissing there, only one good lick." It is the reverse of a fantasy like Pretty Woman. Pretty Woman goes into the store and shops; Catwoman goes in and whips off the heads of the mannequins. Julia Roberts tells Richard Gere she wants the fairy tale. Cat tells Bat, 'I would love to live with you forever in your castle, just like in a fairy tale. I just couldn't live with myself. So don't pretend this is a happy ending.' "

Batman Returns could mark a happy beginning for Hollywood -- not because it might make a mint but because it dispenses with realism and aspires to animation, to the freedom of idea and image found in the best feature-length cartoons. Most directors think pictures have to be anchored in the narrowest form of reality: the one that Hollywood has presented since the dawn of sound 65 years ago. Burton, once an animator at Disney, understands that to go deeper, you must fly higher, to liberation from plot into poetry. Here he's done it. This Batman soars.

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole and Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles and Georgia Harbison/New York