Next up is a film my mum took me to see in the cinema when I was ten and clearly too young to have been allowed in. Visions of Danny DeVito biting the heads off raw fish and Michelle Pfeiffer in skintight leather continue to haunt my dreams to this day (for various reasons). Yes, it’s Tim Burton’s Batman Returns from 1992.
This one sees Batman (Michael Keaton) take on evil entrepreneur Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) who has teamed up with fiendish criminal The Penguin (DeVito) to cause chaos in Gotham City. Meanwhile, Schreck’s former secretary Selina Kyle (Pfeiffer) becomes the wicked Catwoman to seek revenge on, setting her on a collision course with the Dark Knight.
Despite being released in the Summer, this one regularly shows up on critics’ lists of ‘alternative’ Christmas films and it’s easy to forget just how Christmassy it really is. Everything goes down during the holiday season, with Gotham’s grand tree lighting ceremony and festive masquerade ball playing important parts in proceedings. A creepy, mega-atmospheric gothic prologue featuring Paul Reubens as Penguin’s dad showing the origins of the pointy-nosed hoodlum is also set during the festive season. As Penguin’s parents throw their monstrously deformed baby’s pram off a bridge, seeing him end up in the sewers, it’s a really bold, chilling way to start a superhero film, much less a Christmas one. I can’t decide if Burton loves Christmas or hates it, as he seems to delight in blowing it up and making it dark and twisted as all hell.
The director’s visuals are stunning, his Gotham presented as a spooky, snow-covered winter wonderland clearly sprung from the same mind that birthed The Nightmare Before Christmas. He pours on the festive imagery, with red and white candy stripes all over, but bathed in shadows. Penguin’s subterranean lair, populated by creepy circus performers, freaks and fairground rides is like a warped version of The Nutcracker…’s four realms.
Murderous Schreck tries to present himself as Gotham’s gift-giving Santa, but it’s all for show and in the middle of his big City Square speech, Penguin and his goons explode out of a gigantic Christmas present, a brilliant yuletide Trojan Horse.
Then there’s the running theme that “mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it…but a kiss can be even deadlier,” leading to some saucy moments between Batman and Catwoman. So yeah, this film is Christmassy as hell, even if it is seriously dark and twisted.
It always seemed funny to me that here, Batman seems to be sidelined in his own film, with Burton’s undisguised love of freaks meaning we spend a whole lot more time with the story’s colourful villains. Everyone involved give corking performances, particularly DeVito as the snarling, terrifying Penguin. Ignored and abandoned at Christmas, he’s unrepentantly taking his rage out on the world. His story can be read as a sort of satire of consumer culture, as he frames himself as some sort of messiah-like figure, running a promising campaign for mayor, but actually plots to steal all the city’s first-born children at Christmas, like the ultimate evil Grinch.
Pfeiffer’s Catwoman oozes powerful sexuality, lashing out at the chauvinistic world of men. She’s a fascinating sympathetic villain, a woman wronged who refuses to take it anymore. Her transformation scene - stalking through her apartment in a delirious trance, fashioning that costume - is eerily disturbing and hypnotic and, married with Danny Elfman’s towering score, is one of Burton’s most powerful and memorable moments.
This film makes no apologies for being completely fantastical, avoiding the gritty, serious quasi-realism of Chris Nolan’s later Dark Knight trilogy. This is very much another film about family, specifically those poor lonely souls who don’t have any and find weird and dangerous ways to deal with that. There’s really not another film like it – it’s fantastic. Thanks, mum.
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