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Heath
Ledger died at an age when many gifted actors first
reach lift-off. At 28, he had achieved acclaim,
popularity and riches. But he was just beginning to
define himself as an actor and a star. In Todd Haines’s
I’m Not There, he played a tortured big-screen
idol, ill at ease with conventional accomplishment and
fame, in the manner of Bob Dylan—or James Dean. When
Ledger succumbed to an accidental overdose of
prescription drugs in January, Dean provided an
inevitable point of comparison. They both died young
(Dean was even younger, 24), and each had big movies in
the can—Dean, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant,
and Ledger, The Dark Knight, which opens Friday.
(It opened in Philippine theaters on Thursday, July
17—Ed.)
 Ledger’s
death struck fear and self-loathing into the hearts and
minds of publicists for The Dark Knight. How
could they publicize Ledger’s vaunted acting feat in the
new Batman film without looking like grave-robbers?
Although posthumous performances sometimes have helped
movies at the box office (Jean Harlow’s biggest hit was
Saratoga), Ledger in The Dark Knight plays
Batman’s archvillain, the Joker, as a psychotic
anarchist, getting off on destruction. Stories of the
actor’s demise theorized that Ledger’s trip to the dark
side of the Joker put him over the edge.
But in
recent weeks, Warner Bros. has positioned Ledger for an
Academy Award nomination and erased any residue of
ghoulishness. That decision might be right, in more ways
than one. The evidence onscreen shows that as Ledger
fulfilled his promise, he might have developed as a
character-actor star, like Robert Duvall or Gene Hackman,
rather than a generation-defining personality, like
Dean.
Right
from the start of his career, Dean conjured an aura that
transcended acting. Ledger never developed that kind of
resonant big-star persona, not even in his one certified
Zeitgeist movie, the gay-cowboy romance Brokeback
Mountain. He was nominated for best actor, Jake
Gyllenhaal for best supporting actor. But it was
Gyllenhaal who carried the movie.
If the
picture clicked for millions of moviegoers, it was
probably because Gyllenhaal allowed them to see Ledger’s
stiff, emotionally strangled Ennis del Mar through the
eyes of the besotted Jack Twist. Whether you consider it
a camp classic or a wrenching cry from the heart,
Twist’s anguished “I wish I knew how to quit you” became
the film’s signature line.
Still,
Ledger was earnest, talented and game, committed to
acting for the long haul. With the success of Ten
Things I Hate About You, he could have pursued
celebrity as a heartthrob. Instead he opted for
difficult, diverse roles, including a jail guard who
refuses to become a third-generation racist in
Monster’s Ball. When he let you see him sweat in
that movie, he also showed you blood and tears. And his
tension as an actor sometimes blended, in a good way,
with his character’s.
His
splashy adventures were at least offbeat, such as the
arena-rock-flavored knight-in-shining-armor film
First Knight, and the remake of The Four Feathers,
a tale of courage and cowardice during the British
Army’s crusade against the Islamic fanatic known as the
Mahdi in the mid-1880s.
Directors liked Ledger and were loyal to him: He played
Jacob Grimm in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm
and was in the middle of another Gilliam picture, The
Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, when he died.
He
lacked the gravity and dash that could have anchored and
energized sprawling fantasies like First Knight.
He might have grown into those qualities. But I
generally preferred him in juicy supporting roles, such
as the mentor-entrepreneur in Lord of Dogtown,
who practices tough love on his skateboarding team yet
keeps faith with his own personal counterculture. Ledger
has more genuine pathos than any of the kids in this
movie; he plays an arrested adolescent with a grungy
dignity that underlies even his drunken bouts of
self-pity. He lets this character grow on you. And it’s
this sneak-attack quality that could have made Ledger a
director’s best friend for decades to come.
One
quality that Ledger and Dean did share is rapid growth.
Ledger gave his most entertaining and inventive star
performance as the free thinker and hedonist in the
period romp Casanova, which came out right after
Brokeback Mountain. For once, in a lead role, he
relaxed—and conquered. In Casanova, he’s sunny
when he’s hopping beds at night and comically quick and
alert when making the Venetian social scene during the
day.
At last
comfortable with his good looks and more confident than
ever about his intelligence, Ledger is superb when he
sprawls across a couch and rehearses how to ask a woman
what’s on her mind.
Dean’s
greatest performance was his last one, as Jett Rink, the
disreputable Texas ranch hand-turned-fabulous oil tycoon
in Giant. He creates a character as unsentimental
and emotional, as unique and influential, as any in
American movies. He speaks in a sometimes comic,
sometimes moving mumble, and when he stomps out the
outline of his small parcel of land in giant steps, he
makes you feel the birth of pride in ownership.
In just
three movies he made the transition from a specialist in
embattled juveniles to an actor who could evoke the
emotional scars of a grizzled, wasted old man. According
to the run of recent feature stories, Ledger enjoyed
nothing more than doing the character-actor’s vanishing
act and disappearing into a role.
“If I’m
going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple
choice!” says the Joker in the Batman graphic novel
The Killing Joke. That’s how the artistically
adventurous Ledger must have thought about the future.
Let’s hope Ledger’s Joker crowns his career the way
Dean’s Jett Rink did his. |
