2. Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy
It's all pure camp. There's no denying that. But it's the good kind of camp. It's the What Ever Happened To Baby Jane/ Mommie Dearest kind of camp. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--RI7tlWuaM I think the difference between good camp and bad camp is whether or not the actor is able to pull off the performance. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze falls into the category of bad camp because he played the part so over the top that he lost his motivation and let the character get away from him. But Uma Thurman doesn't make the same mistake: not once in the film, whether she was slinking around in her sexy Poison Ivy cat suit or giving one of her sultry super villain monologues, did she ever lose grasp of the roots of who her character was. If an actor is able to do this then the audience wont be distracted by how far out into left field the actor takes the character but rather will go along for the ride. They will be shocked (or appalled) just by how twisted a human being the person has become but they will never lose their investment in the character (think of what Tim Curry in the Rocky Horror Picture Show). Poison Ivy has always been one of the more fanciful villains in Batman's Rogues Gallery. She is a woman with an affinity for plant life that goes far beyond that of the average tree hugger - we're talking about a psychosis that verges on full blown
Dendrophilia with homicidal tendencies. A woman driven to new heights of lunacy by her fanatical devotion to mother nature. Rendering such an obtuse character at least halfway believable (in the cinematic sense) would not be an easy task but Thurman pulled it off. How? By finding a base for her performance in a famous example of (overblown) cinematic femininity: Mae West http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVrfHXnUJFc Mae West was a woman who was a feminine force of sexual nature. Poison Ivy functions in the same way as Mae except that in Mae's world men = sex and in Ivy's world plants = sex. By using a familiar cultural touchstone as a basis for her acting, Uma maintained an element of believably in her performance because she was working in a vein of fictionalized woman hood that we as a culture had come to accept. As a result no matter how crazy her performance got, we bought it. I have a lot of fun with Uma Thurman's performance because I see how much gusto she puts into it. Yes, if I had my druthers I would have probably told Uma to dial it back a little bit; maybe tone down the sultry/seductive tendencies from 11 down to 10. But it is still a dynamite performance and I doubt, in the rare event Poison Ivy ever makes her way back to the big screen, that another actress will be able to do any better. Compare her performance to the Nolan villains, and she is head and shoulders above them, because of her conviction and the explicit homages in her performance. And Schumacher deserves the credit for the casting.