BATMAN: YEAR ONE (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though Frank Miller's BATMAN: YEAR ONE was published the year after his classic work THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, I've never thought that the second Bat-project held up as well. ONE dealt with Batman in his youngest crimefighting years, just as RETURNS dealt with him returning to the fray in his more advanced years. I respect ONE for accomplishing its fairly limited aims, but to this day I've not reviewed it, since I don't have much to say about it.

The DVD adaptation of ONE is arguably stronger than the DVD of RETURNS, given that the earlier graphic novel was packed with many convolutions and bits of business that the adapters felt constrained to omit. In contrast, the storyline of ONE was very straightforward and so required less tailoring.

Miller's careful parallelism between Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) and James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) is maintained from the start, in that both characters arrive in Gotham at the same time. For Wayne, his advent is a return to the painful site of his parents' murder after 12 years' absence, during which he has been training himself to become a scourge of the underworld. For Gordon, Gotham is a refuge after some unspecified departmental conflict at his previous position as a police lieutenant Somewhere Else. 

While Wayne's only contact in Gotham is his butler Alfred, who knows of and abets his master's plans, Gordon brings with him his pregnant wife Barbara. Gordon hopes to build a new life for his wife and future child, but he's almost immediately dismayed by the unremitting corruption of the Gotham police department. He encounters this corruption mostly in the form of the present commissioner Loeb and his flunky Arnold Flass, both of whom are deep-dyed villains from start to finish. Slowly, over the course of Year One, Gordon carves out his own niche in Gotham as a honest cop who gets some of the police force and the local newspapers on his side-- though this means, in part, beating the hell out of Flunky Flass.

By contrast, Wayne knows what he wants to do, but not how to do it. He's not yet had his "I shall become a bat" moment. This transpires only after he's made a disguised foray into Gotham's red-light district-- a foray which bombs spectacularly. But once he assumes the role of Batman, Wayne's ability to handle crises seems to expand exponentially. Inevitably, even honest cops regard this caped vigilante as a lawbreaker, so that Batman spends a lot of time dealing with cops of all types, particularly the corrupt ones who work hand in glove with organized crime. He uses a number of low-level uncanny gimmicks most of the time, but at one point activates a sonic beacon that calls dozens of bats to help the hero confound the police-- the only marvelous element in the narrative.

Gordon not only tries to bring down Batman in, he comes close to discovering the masked man's double identity. But Gordon also succumbs to temptation, cheating on his pregnant wife with an attractive policewoman. This plot-thread helps to humanize Gordon but doesn't add much to the overall story.

The least cohesive element in ONE is a subplot about Selina Kyle. The DVD plays down her status as a hooker, though she still "meets" Bruce Wayne when he's still in his pre-Batman phase-- a meeting in which the two of them exchange kung-fu blows in the street. The series didn't explain why a prostitute possessed superlative martial arts skills, and did even less to account for why, upon beholding the costumed vigilante, Kyle should suddenly decide to dress up in a cat-costume and commit cat-burglaries. This was the weakest part of the original comic, so it's also just as ill-conceived in the adaptation.

If the actual story is just adequate, the voice-work by Cranston, McKenzie and Eliza Dushku (as the future Catwoman) is extremely good. (Three years after this DVD, McKenzie would take on the role of a Young Jim Gordon for the 2014 teleseries GOTHAM.) The animators successfully duplicate the spare, clean artwork of the series-artist David Mazzucchelli. It's a good basic adaptation of a basic story with some narrative problems, and nothing more.