In June 1995 a pop confection hit thousands of movie screens. It seemed to embody what both boosters and critics have identified as that decade’s end-of-history nonchalance. It was, of all things, a Batman movie. And holding it together, the sturdy straight man surrounded by abject goofiness, was Val Kilmer, the actor who died at the age of 65 on Tuesday.
“Batman Forever” was the third movie in a franchise kicked off in 1989 by the director Tim Burton’s brooding “Batman.” Starring Michael Keaton in the title role and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, “Batman” was, by the standards of the time, dark for a comic-book flick.
Burton’s and Keaton’s follow-up, “Batman Returns” (1992), failed to repeat the original’s box-office success. So a new director, Joel Schumacher, was brought in expressly to make what one journalist termed a “Batman Lite.” Schumacher was a fan of Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 western “Tombstone” and tapped him as his leading man.
This was not Burton’s Batman. “There’s not much to contemplate here,” the critic Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, “beyond the spectacle of gimmicky props and the kitsch of good actors (all of whom have lately done better work elsewhere) dressed for a red-hot Halloween.”
Schumacher favored showy camera angles and a garish color scheme. The villains — Jim Carrey played the Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones was Two-Face — were freely permitted to chew the scenery. Batman’s suit had nipples. The movie was weird.
It was also a box-office smash. It broke an opening-weekend record and eventually brought in more than $336 million worldwide, besting its predecessor by tens of millions of dollars.
In his highest-profile role ever, Kilmer played Batman and Bruce Wayne as stolid. He romances Nicole Kidman’s psychologist with aw-shucks respectability (“Chicks love the car”). He combats his antagonists’ ridiculousness with a straight face. His Wayne is tortured and guilt-wracked, and also middle-aged. No longer just a son seeking vengeance, he becomes a father figure to an orphaned young man (who turns out to become Robin, played by Chris O’Donnell).
The outlandishness of “Batman Forever” was recognized almost immediately as emblematic of its era. The next year, the French director Olivier Assayas made “Irma Vep,” a satire of modern blockbuster moviemaking. While the sleek black suit that the star of the film-within-the-film must wear is most obviously a reference to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman of “Batman Returns,” the gaudy aesthetic is all “Batman Forever.”
There have since been efforts to reclaim Kilmer’s film as something of an unsung masterpiece. Vera Drew, the director of last year’s art house independent movie “The People’s Joker,” credited “Batman Forever” as its primary influence.
But Kilmer was one-and-done as the Caped Crusader. He did not return for Schumacher’s follow-up, “Batman & Robin” (1997), and decades later told The Times that the role felt like too much of a cipher. “It’s not about Batman,” he said. “There is no Batman.” He was replaced by George Clooney.
“Batman & Robin” was a relative flop best remembered today for the execrable puns uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze (“All right everyone — chill”). That iteration of the franchise ended there.
The kind of comic-book movie that “Batman Forever” typified faded away, to be replaced the following decade by the grittiness of Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy and the real-world irony of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not counting his brief appearance three years ago in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Kilmer was never again in so big a movie.
But “Batman Forever” is an immaculate artifact of its time, in much the same manner as “Top Gun” (1986), another of Kilmer’s most memorable films. It was not the best ’90s movie, but it may have been the most ’90s movie. When historians wish to learn what it was like to live in the United States during the height of its unipolar moment atop the world, they could do worse than to dust off Kilmer’s Batman suit, nipples and all.
