Batman Is Not the Star of Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’
When you watch a movie called Batman, you’d expect the Caped Crusader to take center stage. Tim Burton’s Batman took things in a different direction. It might not have been the best idea, but it was certainly an entertaining idea.
Why Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ is swallowed whole by the Joker
If Burton loves one thing, it’s monsters. Sometimes, his main characters are monsters (Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas), sometimes, monsters take a side role (Alice in Wonderland, Corpse Bride), and sometimes, he takes the conventional route and has his monsters be villains (Mars Attacks!, Sleepy Hollow). Regardless, Burton’s monsters steal the show.
The monster in Burton’s Batman is, of course, Jack Nicholson’s Joker. The movie alludes to The Phantom of the Opera multiple times as if to say that the Joker is a Universal Studios creature for the 1980s. Nicholson steals the show — perhaps a little too much.
Nicholson gets almost all of the film’s oneliners, Prince songs, and Burtonesque grotesqueries. Batman, a true eccentric if there ever was one, seems a little pale in comparison. You walk away from the movie thinking that the Joker would be a lot more fun at parties than Bruce Wayne — if only you could get the Clown Prince of Crime to contain himself for an evening.
Why an underwhelming hero works alright in ‘Batman’
Is this a bad thing? Well, one could argue that Batman’s dullness in his first blockbuster screen outing prevents the film from truly soaring.
However, this choice also allows us to get as much of Nicholson’s Joker as you could get in a two-hour movie. So many movies, from Disney cartoons to horror flicks, have villains who are more fascinating than their heroes. Why not just give the audience its villain fix?
Eventually, Hollywood would realize that fans would like a movie that was just about the Joker. That was a little much for 1989. For the time, Burton’s treatment of the Joker was bold.
What Tim Burton felt about working with Jack Nicholson
In 2023, Slash Film reported Burton told Empire that he had some difficulty communicating with Nicholson while making Batman. “Jack has a very abstract way of speaking,” the Ed Wood director said. “So he would say things to me and I’d go, ‘Yeah, I get it,’ and then I’d go to someone, ‘What the f*** was he just talking about?’ So, there was this weird communication: non-linear, non-connective. But, it was very clear to me. I felt like we had a good sort of caveman-style communication.”
Despite this, Burton said that he had a great working relationship with Nicholson. “[Nicholson] protected me and nurtured me, kept me going, by just not getting too overwhelmed with the whole thing,” he said. “I felt really supported by him in a very deep way. I was young and dealing with a big studio, and he just quietly gave me the confidence to do what I needed to do. And him being a voice of support had a lot of resonance with the studio. It got me through the whole thing. It gave me strength.”
It seems that Nicholson held the film together in more ways than one.
