Heath Ledger's perfect Hollywood swan song in 'The Dark Knight'
The new "Batman" movie opening Friday — "The Dark Knight" — is the most eagerly awaited since Tim Burton's original "Batman" in 1989.
That's because a perfect storm of fate, self-indulgence and a young talent at its zenith insured that one of its performances would be at the very top of this summer's movie agenda. And that performance, of course, is by the late Heath Ledger, who died in January of what might be pitilessly called Elvis Disease (i.e., prescription drugs taken in fatal excess). He plays a young Joker, Christian Bale plays the young Batman.
It is Ledger whose performance is one of the year's major movie events; it is Ledger whose promise as an actor will end after seeing onscreen the wonders of what he could do.
With Burton's original, after months of hype, there were so many of us at the invitation-only promotional screening in '89 that they had to show the film on two separate theater screens.
It was the surprise movie screening of that year. That's because it was a movie many of us approached with unalloyed dread. You'd have felt that way, too, if you'd seen the trailers for the film. There was simply no way to get a proper sense of the awe-inspiring audacity of Burton's "Batman" from its terrible movie house previews.
We all knew for years that Jack Nicholson was Hollywood's Merry Prankster-in-chief onscreen. We'd seen him be that, to considerable effect, as "Badass" Buddusky in "The Last Detail" and McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." What we didn't quite know before the preview was how immortally perfect was the casting of Nicholson as the Joker in Burton's "Batman." But we did see one of the great scenes in contemporary American movies as the Joker and his henchmen turn into freelance Dadaists and start daubing little defacing jokes on the masterpieces in Gotham's art museum. That, you'll recall, was the scene interrupted by Batman's arrival on a dangling rope, leading to the Joker's frustrated admiration: "Where does he get those WONDERFUL toys?"
Where indeed? It was a question children asked their parents all over America.
In the middle of Burton's energetically comic gloom, Jack Nicholson WAS the Joker.
For all time. (Or so we thought). What we knew was here, at last, was a Nicholson role everyone could love.
And what also blew everyone away besides Nicholson's lunatic deathless performance in Burton's "Batman" were those dark, menacing, immense sets by Anton Furst (whose gloom wasn't merely artistic; he killed himself two years after the movie's release) and that pop-Mahler music by Danny Elfman.
Making his mark
Playing Batman in one of Christopher Nolan's current movies about the Young Batman was no fearsome challenge for Christian Bale. He has only to be at least as memorable in the role as Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney. (Which wasn't much. In every case, after all, more than a little bit of pine in their line delivery was a role requirement.)
Playing the Joker, though, after Nicholson's all-time portrayal was another matter. And that's where Heath Ledger and a whole other set of moviehouse trailers comes in.
Ledger, to so many, seemed spectacular in what he was doing in the trailers for "The Dark Knight." Here was a whole other way of being a Joker — not just a terminally embittered Nicholson making civilization safe for weed and wanton philistinism, but a dangerous disfigured psychotic reveling in psychic derangement.
Just a taste of that — a soupcon from Nolan's busy kitchen — was enough to fire up passions with no further hype required.
And that was what was so dramatic about Ledger's death.
He was a brilliant talent of a decidedly unintellectual and intuitive sort sometimes found among actors (and, in truth, best appreciated by other actors, particularly those of entirely superior levels of articulation and intellectualism).
What Ledger had done in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" was shattering in every way — taboo-shattering (no other film had ever made male homosexuality that sympathetic to Middle America) and shattering in its fearless emotional nakedness. That he lacked the cold intelligence to gracefully represent his own performance out in the 21st century world of hype and movie jabber was a terrible misfortune but virtually irrelevant to his talent.
Ledger's legacy
That Ledger died so young under such chaotic and self-destructive circumstances led to all sorts of speculation.
Much reporting, then, was done from this source and that source claiming that the ardors of Ledger's role as the Joker in "The Dark Knight" led him to the unease and subsequent drug abuse that led to his death. That's why the cast of "The Dark Knight" — particular Aaron Eckhart — has gone out of its way in public statements to make crystal clear that Ledger's performance was just that, a performance.
Over and over, they have told anyone who'd listen that when he wasn't in front of the camera as the Joker, Ledger was a perfectly ordinary fellow on a movie set — better paid and more creative than most and appearing in quite a few more scenes but an actor decidedly uncrippled by expectation.
To be sure, too, it must be remembered that the movie Ledger was making when he died wasn't "The Dark Knight" (which had already wrapped) but Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," the newest exercise in creative risk and lunacy by the man whose richly self-destructive career includes such catastrophes as the recent "Tideland" and "The Brothers Grimm" and such triumphs as the extraordinary "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and "12 Monkeys."
Whatever the stresses of carving out a role for yourself on a path previously trodden for all time by Nicholson, they certainly weren't less than flying on a cinematic trapeze for Gilliam at the precise moment when just about everyone wants to know what you're going to do next.
When you look down and realize there's no net, who knows what an insecure and self-destructive actor might do at a moment of maximum life self-destruction?
Meanwhile, as James Dean, another fast-living young actor once did, he left us a couple films to see what a career he might have had.
It's the economy of scarcity: people are now inclined to cherish whatever Heath Ledger films we can get.
After Gilliam's, after all, there aren't going to be any more of them.
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