As Welsh-born actor Christian Bale looks forward to reprising his role as Batman, he admits that he would rather forget some of his film projects. Ahmer Khokhar speaks to him about his colourful career

IT’S been a rather emotional time for Christian Bale. As he looks forward to reprising his biggest movie role as Batman in The Dark Knight this summer it will be a bittersweet experience for him. For the film will be released six months after the death of Heath Ledger, who plays the menacing joker.

The Australian actor died of an accidental overdose in an apartment in New York in January.

Like others who had worked closely with him, Bale was left shocked and saddened by the 28-year-old’s untimely death.

“Heath was an incredible actor and he brought a very, very scary Joker to life,” says Haverfordwest-born Bale, who also features alongside Ledger as one of six Bob Dylans in I’m Not There.

“It’s (his death) shocking. Heath shocked us as the Joker and his death shocked all of us.”

The Dark Knight is the latest in 34-year-old Bale’s long list of movie credits, which includes American Psycho, Batman Begins and 3:10 To Yuma.

One of his most recent roles was in Rescue Dawn. When I speak to him it’s prior to the film’s release in Australia and he’s reliving eating fried insects.

For the actor immersed himself in Thai jungle culture and developed a liking for grasshoppers and pig swill when shooting the Vietnam War film.

“They sell a lot of bugs you can eat, fried bugs and things, which I really took to and enjoyed eating in Thailand,” says Bale.

“Grasshoppers were my favourite. They really just taste like a very crispy french fry.

“I would head off to the market at night time and I wouldn’t know what I was eating half the time. I think they had malnourished maggots (during filming), so it was all wriggle and texture.

“I was enjoying more the look of repulsion on the faces of the other actors and the crew behind them.

“I was enjoying that too much to truly concentrate on what I was taking in my mouth, but they went down surprisingly easy.”

Bale does not fit the image of a pampered Hollywood actor living the life of luxury in five-star hotels.

The star was prepared to sleep in a tent or hammock with a mosquito net and walked around barefoot, without making the fuss that some of his Hollywood colleagues might have kicked up.

“Walking around barefoot all the time on the mud and the stones, getting these nice hard feet, getting accustomed to being in the jungle, having that become your home really helped,” he says.

“Everyone was in the same boat and I had one of the best times I have ever had on a movie.”

Rescue Dawn, directed by German Werner Herzog, tells the real-life story of American Navy pilot Lt Dieter Dengler, who was captured by Laotian soldiers during the Vietnam War. Eventually Dengler escaped from a Pathet Lao prison camp in Laos and was rescued after 23 days on the run in the jungle, after witnessing his close friend being decapitated. The movie was shot on location in remote parts of north and south Thailand and Bale had to rely on video footage to research the part of Dengler who died in 2001.

“We would be filming and have elephants walking through the middle of the set and then these spiders I was busy poking my finger at – I was told I would be paralysed within two minutes if I had been bitten,” Bale says.

But Bale says he loved working with Herzog.

“He doesn’t give a damn about what anybody else is doing, and I like it if a movie can be worth doing, regardless of whether I see it at the end.

“For me, seeing a film and liking it is gravy, but I want to get a kick out of actually making a film, because that’s the only thing I’ve got any control over.”

In the western 3:10 To Yuma, directed by James Mangold, Bale plays a horseman – but he now admits that riding horses makes his stomach turn after a life-threatening incident as a young boy.

“When I was about five, I was being an idiot. I ran up behind the horse and smacked it on the a***. It was up against the fence and had nowhere else to go and it ran over me, but I didn’t really get hurt because it was very muddy.”

Bale, who starred alongside Australian actor Russell Crowe in the movie, insists he has learned his lesson and was true to his word by arriving a week early for the filming to practice his horse-riding on the gentlest four-legged beast he could find.

“I did what I could, a couple of jumps,” he says. “There was one time when they were sure the stunt guy would break his ankle, so I said ‘OK, let him do it’. It was the last day (of filming), they would have let me do anything. But I know there’s a reason why we have stunt guys.”

Bale admits his diverse CV includes a couple of films which turned out to be box office flops. “I’ve made c*** movies and I’ve made good ones,” says the actor whose back catalogue also includes Reign of Fire, Shaft, Equilibrium and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

“Let’s be honest – but let’s not encourage people to go back and do the research. Let’s hope they look at the most recent stuff!

“I’ve got to say with Rescue Dawn, and 3:10 to Yuma, I was very comfortable watching them. They are definitely two films that I will be proud of for many years to come.

“But with Rescue Dawn, they would have had a really tough time selling me to the financiers if I hadn’t done Batman, because that was my story all the time before it.

“I’d always get directors calling me up, ‘Christian, I want you for the role!’

“Two weeks later: ‘Christian, they tell me they won’t make the movie if I cast you in the role. Sorry. Can’t do it’.

“That changed after Batman.”

Ever since Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992, every new western has been heralded as an attempt to revive the genre. Dances With Wolves, The Missing, Wyatt Earp, Open Range, The Quick and the Dead, The Assassination of Jesse James all preceded 3:10 to Yuma, but Bale rejects the notion that he accepted his role with the intention of “reviving the western”.

“I actually do like westerns, but I didn’t make this movie because it’s a western,” he says.

“I’ve got no interest in reviving the western, which a lot of people have stated. We thought 3:10 to Yuma was a bloody good story that happened to be a western.

“Did I enjoy not talking much, riding horses and shooting guns? Very much.

“But it was the story that came first. I found it fascinating the way the story didn’t give you something bloody obvious.

“The guns and horses came second.”

Bale has come a long way since his acting debut as an eight-year-old boy in a Pac-man cereal commercial before going on to London’s West End. He first came to prominence at 13 as the star of Steve Spielberg’s Second World War epic drama Empire of the Sun in 1987. Since then he’s worked with some of the world’s most exceptional talents, including Ledger.

“Everybody knows how to act from life,” Bale says.

“You’re aware of the effect you have on people, and that if you alter yourself a little bit you have a different effect.

“The last thing you need to do to be a good actor is study acting, or sit and watch movies all your life.”

Bale also believes there is an advantage for actors such as himself who are not immersed in film culture.

“A lot of people are nuts over it and it does them wonders. For me, I’m not, because all I would do is start thinking too much about comparing myself to other people and I know that no good would ever come from that.

“I’d be way too self-aware of what I was doing.

“I like keeping my head in the sand a little bit.”

James Mangold’s “3:10 to Yuma” restores the wounded heart of the Western and rescues it from the morass of pointless violence. The Western in its glory days was often a morality play, a story about humanist values penetrating the lawless anarchy of the frontier. It still follows that tradition in films like Eastwood’s “The Unforgiven,” but the audience’s appetite for morality plays and Westerns seems to be fading. Here the quality of the acting, and the thought behind the film, make it seem like a vanguard of something new, even though it’s a remake of a good movie 50 years old.

The plot is so easily told that Elmore Leonard originally wrote it as a short story. A man named Dan Evans (Christian Bale), who lost a leg in the Civil War, has come to the Arizona territory to try his luck at ranching. It’s going badly, made worse by a neighboring bully who wants to force him off his land. The territory still fears Indian raids, and just as much the lawless gang led by Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), which sticks up stagecoaches, robs banks, casually murders people and outguns any opposition. Through a series of developments that seem almost dictated by fate, Dan Evans finds himself as part of a posse sworn in to escort Wade, captured and handcuffed, to the nearby town of Contention, where the 3:10 p.m. train has a cell in its mail car that will transport Wade to the prison in Yuma and a certain death sentence.

Both Dan and Ben have elements in their characters that come under test in this adventure. Dan fears he has lost the confidence of wife Alice (Gretchen Mol) and teenage son Will (Logan Lerman), who doubt he can make the ranch work. Still less does Alice see why her transplanted Eastern husband should risk his life as a volunteer. The son Will, who has practically memorized dime novels about Ben Wade, idealizes he outlaw, and when Dan realizes the boy has followed the posse, he is not pleased. Wade intuits, however, that the boy is following him, and not his father.

That’s an insight into Wade. He plays his persona like a performance. He draws, reads, philosophizes, is incomparably smarter than the scum in his gang. Having spent untold time living on the run with them, he may actually find it refreshing to spend time with Dan, even as his captive. Eventually the two men end up in a room in the Contention hotel, overlooking the street, in earshot of the train whistle, surrounded outside by armed men who want to rescue Ben or kill him.

These general outlines also describe the 1957 version of “3:10 to Yuma,” directed by Delmer Daves, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin in the roles of the rancher and the outlaw. The movie, with its railroad timetable, followed the slowly advancing clock in “High Noon” (1952) and was compared to it; when I saw it in 35mm at Telluride in the 1980s, I thought it was better than “High Noon,” not least because of the personality shifts it involves.

Mangold’s version is better still than the 1957 original, because it has better actors with more thought behind their dialogue. Christian Bale plays not simply a noble hero, but a man who has avoided such risks as he now takes and is almost at a loss to explain why he is bringing a killer to justice, except that having been mistreated and feeling unable to provide for his family, he is fed up and here he takes his stand. Crowe, however, plays not merely a merciless killer, although he is that, too, but a man also capable of surprising himself. He is too intelligent to have only one standard behavior which must fit all situations, and is perhaps bored of having that expected of him.

Westerns used to be the showcases of great character actors, of whom I was lucky enough to meet Dub Taylor, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Ben Johnson and, when she wasn’t doing a million other things, Shelley Winters. “3:10 to Yuma” has two roles that need a special character flavor and fills them perfectly. Peter Fonda plays McElroy, a professional bounty hunter who would rather claim the price on Ben Wade’s head than let the government execute him for free. And Ben Foster plays Charlie Prince, the second-in-command of Wade’s gang, who seems half in love with Wade, or maybe Charlie’s half-aware that’s he’s all in love. Wade would know which, and wouldn’t care, except as material for his study of human nature.

Locked in the hotel room, surrounded by death for one or the other, the two men begin to talk. Without revealing anything of the plot, let me speculate that each senses he has found the first man he has met in years who is his equal in conversation. Crowe and Bale play this dialogue so precisely that it never reveals itself for what it really is, a testing of mutual insight. One trial of a great actor is the ability to let dialogue do its work invisibly, something you can also see in next week’s “In the Valley of Elah” with Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron. Too many actors are like the guy who laughs at his own joke and then tells it to you again.

James Mangold first came into view with an extraordinary movie named “Heavy” (1995). His “Walk the Line” (2005) won an Oscar for Reese Witherspoon. To remake “3:10 to Yuma” seems an odd choice after such other modern films as “Girl, Interrupted,” but the movie itself proves he had a good reason for choosing it. In hard times, Americans have often turned to the Western to reset their compasses. In very hard times, it takes a very good Western. Attend well to Ben Wade’s last words in this movie, and who he says them to, and why.

Almost the first sight we see in “Howl’s Moving Castle” is the castle itself, which looks as if it were hammered together in shop class by wizards inspired by the lumbering, elephantine war machines in “The Empire Strikes Back.” The castle is an amazing visual invention, a vast collection of turrets and annexes, protuberances and afterthoughts, which makes its way across the landscape like a turtle in search of a rumble. I settled back in my seat, confident that Japan’s Hayao Miyazaki had once again created his particular kind of animated magic, and that the movie would deserve comparison with “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and the other treasures of the most creative animator in the history of the art form.

But it was not to be. While the movie contains delights and inventions without pause and has undeniable charm, while it is always wonderful to watch, while it has the Miyazaki visual wonderment, it’s a disappointment, compared to his recent work. Adapted from a British novel by Diana Wynne Jones, it resides halfway between the Brothers Grimm and “The Wizard of Oz,” with shape-shifting that includes not merely beings but also objects and places.

Chief among the shape-shifters is the castle itself, which can swell with power and then shrivel in defeat. Inside the castle are spaces that can change on a whim, and a room with a door that opens to — well, wherever it needs to open. The Castle roams the Waste Lands outside two warring kingdoms, which seem vaguely 19th-century European; it is controlled by Howl himself, a young wizard much in demand but bedeviled with personal issues.

The story opens with Sophie (voice by Emily Mortimer), a hatmaker who sits patiently at her workbench while smoke-belching trains roar past her window. When she ventures out, she’s attacked by obnoxious soldiers but saved by Howl (voice by Christian Bale), who is himself being chased by inky globs of shapeless hostility. This event calls Sophie’s existence to the attention of Howl’s enemy, the Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall), who fancies Howl for herself, and in a fit of jealousy, turns Sophie into a wrinkled old woman, bent double, and voiced now by Jean Simmons. For most of the rest of the movie, the heroine will be this ancient crone; we can remind ourselves that young Sophie is trapped inside, but the shape-switch slows things down, as if Grandmother were creeping through the woods to Red Riding Hood’s house.

Leaving town in shame and confusion, Sophie meets a scarecrow (Crispin Freeman) who bounces around on his single wooden leg and leads her to Howl’s castle. Sophie names the scarecrow Turniphead, and we think perhaps a lion and a tin man will be turning up before long, but no. Nor is the castle run by a fraudulent wizard behind a curtain. Howl is the real thing, a shape-shifter who sometimes becomes a winged bird of prey. So is his key assistant Calcifer (Billy Crystal), a fiery being who job is to supply the castle’s energy. Sophie also meets Markl (Josh Hutcherson), Howl’s aide-de-camp, and sets about appointing herself the castle’s housekeeper and maid of all work.

The plot deepens. Howl is summoned to serve both of the warring kingdoms, which presents him with a problem, complicated by the intervention of Madame Suliman, a grotesque sorceress voiced by Blythe Danner, who reminds us of Yubaba, the sorceress who ran the floating bathhouse in “Spirited Away.” These bloated old madame types seem to exert a fascination for Miyazaki scarcely less powerful than his fondness for young heroines. Howl cravenly sends old Sophie to represent him before King Sariman, and on her way there, she gets into a race with the Witch of the Waste, who haunts the hinterlands where the Castle roams. Sophie is obviously trapped in a web of schemes that’s too old and too deep for her to penetrate, and there comes a moment when defeat seems certain and even Calcifer despairs.

All of this is presented, as only Miyazaki can, in animation of astonishing invention and detail. The Castle itself threatens to upstage everything else that happens in the movie, and notice the way its protuberances move in time with its lumbering progress, not neglecting the sphincteresque gun turret at the rear. Sophie, old or young, never quite seems to understand and inhabit this world; unlike Kiki of the delivery service or Chihiro, the heroine of “Spirited Away,” she seems more witness than heroine. A parade of weird characters comes onstage to do their turns, but the underlying plot grows murky and, amazingly for a Miyazaki film, we grow impatient at spectacle without meaning.

I can’t recommend the film, and yet I know if you admire Miyazaki as much I do you’ll want to see it, anyway. When his movies are working and on those rare occasions when they are not, Miyazaki nevertheless is a master who, frame by frame, creates animated compositions of wonderment. Pete Docter (writer of “Toy Story”) and John Lasseter (director of “Toy Story”), his great American supporters, have supervised the English dubbing; online anime sites say however the Japanese voices are more in character (we’ll be able to compare on the DVD).

In the meantime, the big screen is the only way to appreciate the remarkable detail of the Castle, which becomes one of the great unique places in the movies.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige” has just about everything I require in a movie about magicians, except … the Prestige. We are instructed at the outset, in a briefing by Michael Caine, that every magic trick consists of three acts: (1) the Pledge, in which a seemingly real situation is set up, (2) the Turn, in which the initial reality is challenged, and (3) the Prestige, where all is set right again. An example, one not used in the film, would be (1) a woman, and it’s always a woman, except with Penn and Teller, who is placed into a box; (2) the box is sawed in half, and the halves separated, and (3) magically, the “victim” is restored in one piece.

The pledge of Nolan’s “The Prestige” is that the film, having been metaphorically sawed in two, will be restored; it fails when it cheats, as, for example, if the whole woman produced on the stage were not the same one so unfortunately cut in two. Other than that fundamental flaw, which leads to some impenetrable revelations toward the end, it’s quite a movie — atmospheric, obsessive, almost satanic.

It takes place in Victorian London, at a time and place where seances and black magic were believed in by the credulous. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Magician captures that period perfectly in its fictional portrait of Aleister Crawley, “the most evil man in the world,” who created the illusion that he really was an occult practitioner of dark forces. He had a gift for persuading women to materialize in his bed. These days, when most of us are less superstitious, it is the technical craft of a David Copperfield that impresses us. We see the trick done, but do not for a moment believe it is happening.

Houdini, the great transitional figure between “magical” acts and ingenious tricks, was at pains to explain that everything he did was a trick; he offered rewards, never collected, for any “supernatural” act he could not explain. The Amazing Randi carries on in the same tradition, bending spoons as easily as Uri Geller. And yet in Houdini’s time, there were those who insisted he was doing real magic; how else could his effects be achieved?

Daniel Mark Epstein wrote about the Houdini believers in a 1986 issue of the New Criterion, which I read as I read everything I can get my hands on about Houdini. The thing was, Houdini really did free himself from those fetters and chains and sealed trunks dropped into the river, and survived the Chinese Water Torture (an effect used prominently in “The Prestige” night after night). But there were those who argued his tricks were physically impossible, and thus must be supernatural.

Houdini would have been active at the time of “The Prestige,” but his insights would have been fatal to the movie’s plot, which is the problem with the plot. We meet two apprentice magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), who work as fake “volunteers” from the audience for Milton the Magician (the invaluable Ricky Jay). They assist in tying up a helpless damsel, in reality, Robert’s wife, Julia (Piper Perabo), and lowering her into the Chinese Water Torture box. Concealed by curtains, she somehow escapes, as Houdini always did, but one night, Alfred ties her knots too tightly, she cannot escape, and by the time a manager (Michael Caine) rushes onstage with an ax, it is too late to save her from drowning.

This sets off a lifelong hatred between Robert and Alfred, during which the frigid and ominous Alfred rises to the top of the profession. The hapless Alfred (now in love with his new assistant Olivia, played by Scarlett Johansson) falls to the bottom, is reduced to performing in flea pits, and yet presents an illusion named the Transported Man in which he walks into a door on one side of the stage and instantly emerges from a door at the other. How is that physically possible? It’s the sort of thing that made his fans claim Houdini was supernormal. Robert becomes obsessed with finding the secret of the trick.

But magicians do not explain their illusions, not even to their peers, unless money changes hands (”The trick is told when the trick is sold”). The Transported Man begins, you will agree, with a terrific Pledge. Now how will Robert ever discover the secret of the Prestige? He treks into the snows of Colorado to visit the hidden laboratory of the (real-life) Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), who may have manufactured the trick for Alfred. Tesla, the discoverer/inventor of alternating current, was believed at the time to be capable of all manner of wonders with the genie of electricity, but how could AC, or even DC, explain the Transported Man?

You will not learn here. What you will learn in the movie is, I believe, a disappointment — nothing but a trick about a trick. With a sinking heart, I realized that “The Prestige” had jumped the rails, and that rules we thought were in place no longer applied.

I have been in love with magic all my life. I’m no good at it, even though I bored my friends for years with cheesy illusions, and even today can make a dime disappear from your forehead. These days I am most impressed with the skills required for close-up magic. Teddy Nava, the son of writer-directors Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, can make cards change while I am holding them in my hands. Now how does he do that? Not through divine intervention, I am fairly sure. But I was holding them! The trick is told when the trick is sold. Yes, but what if it takes months of practice after you’re told the trick? Nikola Tesla isn’t going to help me then, by running alternating current down Teddy’s arm and up mine.

“If you were any thinner,” Stevie tells him, “you wouldn’t exist.” Trevor Reznik weighs 121 pounds and you wince when you look at him. He is a lonely man, disliked at work, up all night, returning needfully to two women who are kind to him: Stevie, a hooker, and Marie, the waitress at the all-night diner out at the airport. “I haven’t slept in a year,” he tells Marie.

Christian Bale lost more than 60 pounds to play this role, a fact I share not because you need to know how much weight he lost, but because you need to know that it is indeed Christian Bale. He is so gaunt, his face so hollow, he looks nothing like the actor we’re familiar with. There are moments when his appearance even distracts from his performance, because we worry about him. Certainly we believe that the character, Trevor, is at the end of his rope, and I was reminded of Anthony Perkins’ work in Orson Welles’ “The Trial,” another film about a man who finds himself trapped in the vise of the world’s madness.

Trevor works as a machinist. There’s a guy like him in every union shop, a guy who knows all the rules and works according to them and is a pain in the ass about them. His co-workers think he is strange; maybe he frightens them a little. His boss asks for a urine sample. One day he gets distracted and as a result one of his co-workers loses a hand. The victim, Miller (Michael Ironside) almost seems less upset about the accident than Trevor is. But then Trevor has no reserve, no padding; his nerve endings seem exposed to pain and disappointment.

Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a consolation. They have sex, yes, but that’s the least of it. She sees his need. Trevor is reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and perhaps there is a parallel between Stevie and Nastassia, Dostoyevsky’s heroine, who is drawn to a self-destructive and dangerous man. Leigh has played a lot of prostitutes in her career, but each one is different because she defines them by how they are needed as well as by what they need.

Marie (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon) is the other side of the coin, a cheerful presence in the middle of the night. “You’re lonely,” she tells Trevor. “When you work graveyard shift as long as I have, you get to know the type.” She wonders why he comes all the way out to the airport just for a cup of coffee and a slice of pie. She wouldn’t mind dating him.

Then there is the matter of Ivan (John Sharian), the distracting and disturbing co-worker who perhaps contributed to the accident. He lost some fingers in a drill press once, and the docs replaced them with his toes. “I can’t shuffle cards like I used to,” he says. Nor, apparently, can he punch in on the time clock: The guys at the shop claim he doesn’t exist. Is Trevor imagining him? And what is the meaning of the Post-It notes that look like an incomplete version of a Hangman puzzle?

“The Machinist” has an ending that provides a satisfactory, or at least a believable, explanation for its mysteries and contradictions. But the movie is not about the plot, and while the conclusion explains Trevor’s anguish, it doesn’t account for it. The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness. The photography by Xavi Gimenez and Charlie Jiminez is cold slates, blues and grays, the palate of despair. We see Trevor’s world so clearly through his eyes that only gradually does it occur to us that every life is seen through a filter.

We get up in the morning in possession of certain assumptions through which all of our experiences must filter. We cannot be rid of those assumptions, although an evolved person can at least try to take them into account. Most people never question their assumptions, and so reality exists for them as they think it does, whether it does or not. Some assumptions are necessary to make life bearable, such as the assumption that we will not die in the next 10 minutes. Others may lead us, as they lead Trevor, into a bleak solitude. Near the end of the movie, we understand him when he simply says, “I just want to sleep.”

It’s just as well a woman directed “American Psycho.” She’s transformed a novel about blood lust into a movie about men’s vanity. A male director might have thought Patrick Bateman, the hero of “American Psycho,” was a serial killer because of psychological twists, but Mary Harron sees him as a guy who’s prey to the usual male drives and compulsions. He just acts out a little more.

Most men are not chain-saw killers; they only act that way while doing business. Look at the traders clawing each other on the floor of the stock exchange. Listen to used-car dealers trying to dump excess stock on one another. Consider the joy with which one megacorp stock-raids another and dumps its leaders. Study such films as “In the Company of Men,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Boiler Room” and the new “The Big Kahuna.” It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and to survive you’d better be White Fang.

As a novel, Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 best seller was passed from one publisher to another like a hot potato. As a film project, it has gone through screenplays, directors and stars for years. It was snatched up for Oliver Stone, who planned to star Leonardo DiCaprio, before ending up back in Harron’s arms with Christian Bale in the lead. (To imagine this material in Stone’s hands, recall the scene in Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers” where Tchaikovsky’s head explodes during the “1812 Overture,” then spin it out to feature length.) Harron is less impressed by the vile Patrick Bateman than a man might have been, perhaps because as a woman who directs movies, she deals every day with guys who resemble Bateman in all but his body count. She senses the linkage between the time Bateman spends in the morning, lovingly applying male facial products, and the way he blasts away people who annoy him, anger him or simply have the misfortune to be within his field of view. He is a narcissist driven by ego and fueled by greed. Most of his victims are women, but in a pinch, a man will do.

The film regards the male executive lifestyle with the devotion of a fetishist. There is a scene where a group of businessmen compare their business cards, discussing the wording, paper thickness, finish, embossing, engraving and typefaces, and they might as well be discussing their phalli. Their sexual insecurity is manifested as card envy. They carry on grim rivalries expressed in clothes, offices, salaries and being able to get good tables in important restaurants. It is their uneasy secret that they make enough money to afford to look important, but are not very important. One of the film’s running jokes is that Bateman looks so much like one of his colleagues (Jared Leto) that they are mistaken for each other. (Their faces aren’t really identical, but they occupy empty space in much the same way.) The film and the book are notorious because Bateman murders a lot of people in nasty ways. I have overheard debates about whether some of the murders are fantasies (”can a man really aim a chain saw that well?”). All of the murders are equally real or unreal, and that isn’t the point: The function of the murders is to make visible the frenzy of the territorial male when his will is frustrated. The movie gives shape and form to road rage, golf course rage, family abuse and some of the scarier behavior patterns of sports fans.

You see why Harron has called the film “feminist.” So it is–and a libel against the many sane, calm and civilized men it does not describe. But it’s true to a type, all right. It sees Bateman in a clear, sharp, satiric light, and it despises him. Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability; there is no instinct for self-preservation here, and that is one mark of a good actor.

When Bateman kills, it is not with the zeal of a villain from a slasher movie. It is with the thoroughness of a hobbyist. Lives could have been saved if instead of living in a high-rise, Bateman had been supplied with a basement, a workbench and a lot of nails to pound.

“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That’s because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production. This film, and to a lesser degree “Iron Man,” redefine the possibilities of the “comic-book movie.”

“The Dark Knight” is not a simplistic tale of good and evil. Batman is good, yes, The Joker is evil, yes. But Batman poses a more complex puzzle than usual: The citizens of Gotham City are in an uproar, calling him a vigilante and blaming him for the deaths of policemen and others. And the Joker is more than a villain. He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies.

The key performance in the movie is by the late Heath Ledger, as the Joker. Will he become the first posthumous Oscar winner since Peter Finch? His Joker draws power from the actual inspiration of the character in the silent classic “The Man Who Laughs” (1928). His clown’s makeup more sloppy than before, his cackle betraying deep wounds, he seeks revenge, he claims, for the horrible punishment his father exacted on him when he was a child. In one diabolical scheme near the end of the film, he invites two ferry-loads of passengers to blow up the other before they are blown up themselves. Throughout the film, he devises ingenious situations that force Batman (Christian Bale), Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to make impossible ethical decisions. By the end, the whole moral foundation of the Batman legend is threatened.

Because these actors and others are so powerful, and because the movie does not allow its spectacular special effects to upstage the humans, we’re surprised how deeply the drama affects us. Eckhart does an especially good job as Harvey Dent, whose character is transformed by a horrible fate into a bitter monster. It is customary in a comic book movie to maintain a certain knowing distance from the action, to view everything through a sophisticated screen. “The Dark Knight” slips around those defenses and engages us.

Yes, the special effects are extraordinary. They focus on the expected explosions and catastrophes, and have some superb, elaborate chase scenes. The movie was shot on location in Chicago, but it avoids such familiar landmarks as Marina City, the Wrigley Building or the skyline. Chicagoans will recognize many places, notably La Salle Street and Lower Wacker Drive, but director Nolan is not making a travelogue. He presents the city as a wilderness of skyscrapers, and a key sequence is set in the still-uncompleted Trump Tower. Through these heights, the Batman moves at the end of strong wires, or sometimes actually flies, using his cape as a parasail.

The plot involves nothing more or less than the Joker’s attempts to humiliate the forces for good and expose Batman’ secret identity, showing him to be a poser and a fraud. He includes Gordon and Dent on his target list, and contrives cruel tricks to play with the fact that Bruce Wayne once loved, and Harvey Dent now loves, Assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The tricks are more cruel than he realizes, because the Joker doesn’t know Batman’s identity. Heath Ledger has a good deal of dialogue in the movie, and a lot of it isn’t the usual jabs and jests we’re familiar with: It’s psychologically more complex, outlining the dilemmas he has constructed, and explaining his reasons for them. The screenplay by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who first worked together on “Memento”) has more depth and poetry than we might have expected.

Two of the supporting characters are crucial to the action, and are played effortlessly by the great actors Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. Freeman, as the scientific genius Lucius Fox, is in charge of Bruce Wayne’s underground headquarters, and makes an ethical objection to a method of eavesdropping on all of the citizens of Gotham City. His stand has current political implictions. Caine is the faithful butler Alfred, who understands Wayne better than anybody, and makes a decision about a crucial letter.

Nolan also directed the previous, and excellent, “Batman Begins” (2005), which went into greater detail than ever before about Bruce Wayne’s origins and the reasons for his compulsions. Now it is the Joker’s turn, although his past is handled entirely with dialogue, not flashbacks. There are no references to Batman’s childhood, but we certainly remember it, and we realize that this conflict is between two adults who were twisted by childhood cruelty — one compensating by trying to do good, the other by trying to do evil. Perhaps they instinctively understand that themselves.

Something fundamental seems to be happening in the upper realms of the comic-book movie. “Spider-Man II” (2004) may have defined the high point of the traditional film based on comic-book heroes. A movie like the new “Hellboy II” allows its director free rein for his fantastical visions. But now “Iron Man” and even more so “The Dark Knight” move the genre into deeper waters. They realize, as some comic-book readers instinctively do, that these stories touch on deep fears, traumas, fantasies and hopes. And the Batman legend, with its origins in film noir, is the most fruitful one for exploration.

In his two Batman movies, Nolan has freed the character to be a canvas for a broader scope of human emotion. For Bruce Wayne is a deeply troubled man, let there be no doubt, and if ever in exile from his heroic role, it would not surprise me what he finds himself capable of doing.

‘Batman Begins” at last penetrates to the dark and troubled depths of the Batman legend, creating a superhero who, if not plausible, is at least persuasive as a man driven to dress like a bat and become a vigilante. The movie doesn’t simply supply Batman’s beginnings in the tradition of a comic book origin story, but explores the tortured path that led Bruce Wayne from a parentless childhood to a friendless adult existence. The movie is not realistic, because how could it be, but it acts as if it is.

Opening in a prison camp in an unnamed nation, “Batman Begins” shows Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) enduring brutal treatment as a prisoner, as part of his research into the nature of evil. He is rescued by the mysterious Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who appoints himself Wayne’s mentor, teaches him sword-fighting and mind control, and tries to enlist him in his amoral League of Shadows (”We burned London to the ground”).

When Wayne refuses to kill someone as a membership requirement, Ducard becomes his enemy; the reclusive millionaire returns to Gotham City determined to fight evil, without realizing quite how much trouble he is in.

The story of why he identifies with bats (childhood trauma) and hates evildoers (he saw his parents killed by a mugger) has been referred to many times in the various incarnations of the Batman legend, including four previous films. This time, it is given weight and depth. Wayne discovers in Gotham that the family Wayne Corp. is run by a venal corporate monster (Rutger Hauer), but that in its depths labors the almost forgotten scientific genius Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who understands Wayne wants to fight crime and offers him the weaponry.

Lucius happens to have on hand a prototype Batmobile, which unlike the streamlined models in the earlier movies, is a big, unlovely juggernaut that looks like a Humvee’s wet dream. He also devises a bat-cape with surprising properties.

These preparations, Gotham crime details and the counsel of the faithful servant Alfred (Michael Caine) delay the actual appearance of Batman until the second act of the movie. We don’t mind. Unlike the earlier films, which delighted in extravagant special-effects action, “Batman Begins” is shrouded in shadow; instead of high-detail, sharp-edged special effects, we get obscure developments in fog and smoke, reinforced by a superb sound-effects design. And Wayne himself is a slow learner, clumsy at times, taking foolish chances, inventing Batman as he goes along.

This is at last the Batman movie I’ve been waiting for. The character resonates more deeply with me than the other comic superheroes, perhaps because when I discovered him as a child, he seemed darker and more grown-up than the cheerful Superman. He has secrets. As Alfred muses: “Strange injuries and a nonexistent social life. These things beg the question, what does Bruce Wayne do with his time?”

What he does is create a high profile as a millionaire playboy who gets drunk and causes scenes. This disappoints Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), his friend since childhood, who is now an assistant D.A. She and Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman), apparently Gotham City’s only honest cop, are faced with a local crime syndicate led by Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). But Falcone’s gang is child’s play, compared to the deep scheme being hatched by the corrupt psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who, in the tradition of Victorian alienists, likes to declare his enemies insane and lock them up.

Crane’s secret identity as the Scarecrow fits into a scheme to lace the Gotham water supply with a psychedelic drug. Then a superweapon will be used to vaporize the water, citizens will inhale the drug, and it will drive them crazy, for reasons which the Scarecrow and his confederates explain with more detail than clarity. Meanwhile, flashbacks establish the character’s deepest traumas, including his special relationship with bats and his guilt because he thinks he is responsible for his parents’ mugging.

I admire, among other things, the way the movie doesn’t have the gloss of the earlier films. The Batman costume is an early design. The Bat Cave is an actual cave beneath Wayne Manor. The Batmobile enters and leaves it by leaping across a chasm and through a waterfall. The Bat Signal is crude and out of focus.

The movie was shot on location in Chicago, making good use of the murky depths of lower Wacker Drive and the Board of Trade building (now the Wayne Corp.). Special effects add a spectacular monorail down La Salle Street, which derails in the best scene along those lines since “The Fugitive.”

Bale is just right for this emerging version of Batman. It’s strange to see him muscular and toned, after his cadaverous appearance in “The Machinist,” but he suggests an inward quality that suits the character. Rachel is at first fooled by his facade of playboy irresponsibility, but Lt. Gordon figures out fairly quickly what Batman is doing, and why. Instead of one villain as the headliner, “Batman Begins” has a whole population, including Falcone, the Scarecrow, the Asian League of Shadows leader Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and a surprise bonus pick.

The movie has been directed by Christopher Nolan, still only 35, whose “Memento” (2000) took Sundance by storm and was followed by “Insomnia” (2002), a police procedural with Al Pacino. What Warner Bros. saw in those pictures that inspired them to think of Nolan is hard to say, but the studio guessed correctly, and after an eight-year hiatus, the Batman franchise has finally found its way.

I said this is the Batman movie I’ve been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for, because I didn’t realize that more emphasis on story and character and less emphasis on high-tech action was just what was needed. The movie works dramatically in addition to being an entertainment. There’s something to it.

Having revived Bruce Wayne/Batman on screen eight years after a series of disappointing Batman movies in the 1990s, director Christopher Nolan and actor Christian Bale brought a fresh breath of air to the Dark Knight with “Batman Begins” in 2005. The duo unites in this sequel, with the late Heath Ledger in the role nearly immortalized by Jack Nicholson in the past. Apparently, a love triangle between Batman, his friend Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) will bring the Batman territory into an even darker place than the previous one. Michael Caine reprises his role in the faithful butler Alfred. Why all the fuss?

It’s impossible not to anticipate the movie after the dark and mature tone of “Batman Begins.” But the real highlight of “The Dark Knight” will be the final role of Heath Ledger who died earlier this year. The trailers show that Ledger’s Joker will be creepy, watching him will be even creepier.

Christian Bale, the ‘Batman Begins’ star, has rubbished reports that the pressure of working in ‘The Dark Knight’ led to Australian actor Heath Ledger’s death.

Ledger played The Joker in the upcoming ‘Batman’ sequel and rumours surfaced after his death in January that he was too obsessed with the role and crew members advised him to seek counselling. Ledger died after he accidentally took a wrong dose of prescription drugs.
Anonymous sources claim that Ledger refused to talk to co-stars and the crew when not acting because he wanted to remain in the character, contactmusic.com reports.
Bale, however, vehemently denies it, saying:

It’s not for me to tell anybody or to pretend to have insights beyond what I absolutely know, but my instincts are that the idea Heath was disturbed by playing The Joker is ridiculous.

Heath was somebody who, like myself, acted for that immersion in a character. It’s not an unusual thing. And from working with him and knowing him, I don’t think that was unusual for him at all.