Word: devito
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Burton, returning to direct the sequel, guaranteed his producers a profit by landing superstars Michelle Pfieffer and Danny DeVito to share the Billing with Keaton. But the screenplay fails to give adequate space to these three big talents...
There is simply not enough room in this film for Catwoman (Pfieffer) and Penguin (DeVito)--both of whom would have made great a foils for Batman could they have monopolized the "bad guy" role...
...passwords for Batman Returns are duality and isolation. "People-in- masks is pretty key," says DeVito of the movie's theme. These people are what they wear; Bruce's closet is filled with a dozen Batman costumes. All four main characters, Bruce and Selina, Penguin and Max, are isolated from themselves. They live in mansions, railroad flats, towers and sewer caves -- haunted houses, anyway, dwellings of the different. "You're a well- respected monster," Penguin says to Max. "And I am, to date, not." But all are at one time respected, at another time not, and always sacred monsters, removed...
...aplenty in Danny Elfman's discordantly lush score, with its sugarplum fairy exploding over meowing violins. And imposing performances from Walken, as a master builder who out-Trumps himself, and Keaton, sturdily imploding from Batman's unresolved, not quite explicable nobility. But the flashy turns are from DeVito and Pfeiffer...
...Batman TV series, Burgess Meredith played Penguin as a kind of deranged F.D.R. This was not for DeVito. "I didn't see myself playing a weird Nick Charles with a martini glass and a tuxedo," he says. "It just didn't tickle my fancy." Then Burton showed him a painting he had done of "a toddler with a big round head and big eyes and a protrusion in the nose and mouth and a bulbous body with little appendages. And there was a caption that said, 'My name is Jimmy, but they call me the hideous penguin...