“Batman Returns” is the strangest thing Warner Bros. ever put its name on, and it is not close. Tim Burton came back to direct the sequel to his 1989 “Batman” only after the studio handed him more control, and he spent that control on a Christmas movie about a deformed man raised by penguins, a corrupt industrialist, and a secretary who survives a fall and comes back with a whip. Michael Keaton wears the cowl again. Danny DeVito is the Penguin. Michelle Pfeiffer is Catwoman. Christopher Walken is Max Shreck. It runs 126 minutes and it is an action and fantasy picture in name only.
Trailer, via DC.
A Malformed Son in the Sewers
The film opens with a birth. Two wealthy socialites, Tucker and Esther Cobblepot, look at their infant son, find him malformed and feral, and leave him in Gotham’s sewers. A colony of penguins takes him in. That is the first five minutes.
Thirty-three years later it is Christmas in Gotham City. Oswald Cobblepot, now the Penguin, runs the Red Triangle Gang — former circus performers tied to child disappearances across the country — out of the abandoned Arctic exhibit at Gotham Zoo. He has Max Shreck abducted and brought to him.
The Penguin has evidence of Shreck’s corruption and murders. He uses it. Shreck will help him re-enter Gotham society, or Shreck goes down.
Max Shreck Stages a Kidnapping
Shreck’s first move is a staged crime. He has the mayor’s infant child taken, which lets the Penguin “rescue” the baby and come out a public hero. The city buys it completely.
In return the Penguin asks for the city’s birth records. His stated reason is that he wants to find his true identity by working through Gotham’s first-born sons.
Shreck, meanwhile, has a private plan: a power plant that would secretly drain and store Gotham’s electricity. His secretary Selina Kyle finds out. He pushes her out a window.
Selina Kyle Survives the Fall
She survives the fall. She goes home, makes a costume, and becomes Catwoman. When she walks back into the office, Max does not know what to do with her. Neither does the audience, at first.
Pfeiffer plays the transformation as a full rewrite of a person. The timid assistant is gone. What replaces her is confident, assertive, and out for revenge, and Pfeiffer makes the switch feel like a decision rather than a spell.
Bruce Wayne, visiting the office as a billionaire, notices her immediately. He is also Batman, and Batman is investigating the Penguin’s ties to the Red Triangle Gang. The two of them keep meeting in both costumes.
The Penguin Runs for Mayor
Shreck wants the power plant built, so he wants the incumbent mayor gone. He talks the Penguin into running for office and then discredits the sitting mayor by turning the Red Triangle Gang loose on Gotham.
Batman tries to stop the violence. That puts him in Catwoman’s path, and the fights between them are the best thing in the movie, to this paper’s eye — two people in costume who are clearly enjoying themselves and clearly not on the same side.
In their civilian lives, Selina and Bruce start a romance. Neither of them knows what the other does at night. Catwoman then allies with the Penguin to smear Batman’s reputation.
The Cast Around the Leads
Michael Gough returns as Alfred. Pat Hingle is Commissioner Gordon. Michael Murphy is the Mayor. Cristi Conaway is the Ice Princess, Gotham’s beauty queen-elect. The bench is deep and strange.
- Paul Reubens and Diane Salinger as Tucker and Esther Cobblepot, Oswald’s parents
- Andrew Bryniarski as Charles “Chip” Schreck, Max’s son
- Vincent Schiavelli as the Organ Grinder, who carries a monkey
- Anna Katarina as the Poodle Lady
- Jan Hooks and Steve Witting as Jen and Josh, the Penguin’s mayoral image consultants
- Sean Whalen as a paperboy
Burton wanted Marlon Brando for the Penguin. Warner Bros. wanted Dustin Hoffman. Christopher Lloyd and Robert De Niro were considered. DeVito became the frontrunner after Daniel Waters rewrote the character as a deformed human-bird hybrid.
To explain what he wanted, Burton showed DeVito a painting he had made of a small character sitting on a red-and-white striped ball. The caption read: “My name is Jimmy, but my friends call me the hideous penguin boy.”
Sean Young in a Homemade Costume
Casting Catwoman was harder than casting the Penguin. Annette Bening was cast first and had to leave because of a pregnancy. The list of actresses considered runs long: Ellen Barkin, Cher, Bridget Fonda, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Madonna, Julie Newmar, Lena Olin, Susan Sarandon, Raquel Welch, Kim Basinger.
The most notable contender was Sean Young, who had been cast in “Batman” before an injury stopped her from performing. Young went to the Warner Bros. lot in a homemade Catwoman costume for an impromptu audition. Burton allegedly hid under his desk.
Keaton took $10 million to come back, double what he made on the first film. Filming ran from September 1991 to February 1992 on a budget of $50–80 million, mostly on sets and soundstages at Warner Bros. Studios and the Universal Studios Lot in California. The effects are practical, and they hold up better than most of what replaced them.
What the Christmas Setting Actually Does
The Christmas frame is not decoration. Gotham in December is a city of shoppers and lights and a beauty queen, and the Penguin’s whole political project is to sell himself as a holiday story. The film knows that a man in a sewer can be made into a hero if the staging is right, and it says so out loud through Jen and Josh, the image consultants.
Waters wrote a script that cared more about character than plot, and Wesley Strick came in for an uncredited rewrite that added, among other things, a master plan for the Penguin. You can feel the seam. The Penguin’s plot is thin and the Penguin himself is not — DeVito plays him as a man who has decided the world owes him something and intends to collect.
Where the film loses its footing is in the middle. The Penguin’s run for mayor, the smear campaign, the power plant, the birth records — these are four schemes where one would do, and the movie keeps cutting between them without ever making them add up. Shreck is the villain with the actual plan, and Walken is having a good time, but the film never decides whether he or the Penguin is the real threat.
Pfeiffer is the answer to that problem, and she is the reason to watch. Her Catwoman is the only character in the film whose motives stay clear from start to finish, and the only one whose story has an ending rather than a resolution. When she and Keaton share a scene out of costume, the movie briefly becomes something better than a superhero picture.
The fights between Batman and Catwoman are staged as flirtation and land as flirtation. The fights between Batman and the Penguin are staged as spectacle and land as noise. That imbalance is the whole film in miniature.
Burton’s first “Batman” had to introduce a character and prove a genre could work. “Batman Returns” has nothing to prove, so it indulges itself, and self-indulgence is not the same thing as vision. The sewer, the circus gang, the penguin army — these are images that stick. The plot around them does not.
It is also, plainly, a movie that would not get made now. A $50–80 million studio tentpole with this much deformity and this much death — that the film exists at all is worth something.
But worth something is not the same as good, and “Batman Returns” is at its best when it stops trying to be a blockbuster and lets Pfeiffer and DeVito be strange in the same frame. That happens less often than the reputation suggests.
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