In both stylized performance and instantly iconic skin-tight, patchwork attire, she could have strutted straight out of the panels of the source material.
Pfeiffer, meanwhile, who nabbed the role after Annette Bening got pregnant and vacated it, delivers one of the great movie star turns in all of comic-book cinema: a slinking embodiment of hell-hath-no-fury attitude, hissing venomous one-liners with aplomb and waging war on the powerful, sexist exploiters of Gotham.
Who is Cobblepot but Wayne without privilege, abandoned instead of orphaned? “You’re just jealous because I’m a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask,” he tells Batman. And he recognizes him as a kindred spirit to his archnemesis. DeVito, deliciously overacting under mounds and hours of daily prosthetic labor, makes the Penguin a sympathetic monster: horrifying in appearance, crass and corrupt in nature, but still a tragic figure. The director twists that classic Batman theme of the bad guys being warped reflections of the good guy to suit his own enduring love affair with misfits. No matter – for Burton, it’s just an excuse to collide these outsized cartoon personalities, to build a vaudeville stage for three tortured, animal-themed outlaws. Waters’ plot is lumpy, forcing an illogical allegiance between the villains. Imagine a politician dropping out of a race just because he got caught on tape disparaging his base. What seemed cynical in 1992 now looks rather touchingly naive. In the film’s funniest reveal, DeVito’s supervillain is interrupted mid-meal, chowing down messily on a raw fish, by the new staff of beaming operatives and volunteers applauding his candidacy. It’s an inspired gag, imagining that a creature as vulgar as the Penguin could steal the electorate’s heart. The absurdist political angle of the plot was his idea. The other thing that drew Burton back was the involvement of the Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters, who gave the material an arch, black-comic zinginess. The movie belongs more to Danny DeVito’s deformed, anguished Oswald Cobblepot, AKA the Penguin, and to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle, reborn into the vengeful, vamping Catwoman. The second surrenders the spotlight to the rogues’ gallery immediately, depriving Keaton of any dialogue for the opening half-hour. Just about everyone agrees that Jack Nicholson’s Joker stole the first Batman.
That includes billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton, slipping back into the cumbersome cape and cowl), ostensible hero of the movie, who at one point likens himself to Norman Bates or Ted Bundy, serial killers with split personalities or secret pastimes.īruce’s problems are doubled, his screen-time halved. With Batman Returns, Burton turned Gotham into the biggest of big tops, terrorized by a gang of criminal carnies and populated by freaks on both sides of the hero/villain divide. When the camera swoops like a creature of the night through the twisted architecture of the Gotham Zoo, it’s clear we’re fully in Burtonville, previous home to wisecracking prankster apparitions and lonely hairdressing androids.
In place of the original’s art deco noir aesthetic, Batman Returns goes full baroque fairytale.
The director exercised it from top to bottom. To lure Burton back to the world of the caped crusader, Warner Bros had to offer him greater creative control over the sequel. It’s certainly a more idiosyncratic movie than its predecessor, Tim Burton’s record-breaking popcorn sensation Batman, released to teeming, cheering crowds in the summer of 1989.