The Dark Knight is Heath Ledger
Did Heath Ledger win Best Supporting Actor? I don’t think I heard about that at all…
His performance is certainly the centerpiece of Dark Knight – the heart of, the brains of, the excitement of…I would say that he is The Dark Knight if Batman wasn’t already literally the Dark Knight. Ledger’s Joker is a menacing, horrifying, seething, mass-murdering demon. There is no reasoning with him and he is probably smarter than you are – he is scary. I mean, he still makes jokes but he’s the only one twisted enough to find them funny.
What’s cool is that Christopher Nolan actually lets the entire movie fall under the hypnotic influence of Ledger’s performance.
Nolan is a messy, messy director – he has a problem with trying to fit too much into his movies. In Batman Begins, every frame of footage was filled and filled and filled with CGI Gothic-ness. Memento’s flashbacks (the black and white flashbacks that moved forward, not the backward flashbacks that actually tell the story) were distracting and drab. Dark Knight has more plot than Tom Clancy, more speeches than Julius Caesar – which makes the editing choppy and blunt in order to jam it all in there.
But this time, Nolan has the Joker to set one commanding tone to hold it all together.
EVERYTHING revolves around the Joker in this movie. Every bit of story, every character, every note of music, every building in Gotham – everything is affected by him. He haunts. When he is not to be seen on screen (which is actually a fairly large portion of the first half of the movie), it still seems as though he is right there with you, lurking in every shadow, watching everything you are watching.
I remember the day Ledger died – I was at work; for about twenty minutes we were all trying to figure out if it was a joke. It’s strange when celebrities die (especially when they’re young, especially when it’s unexpected). Everybody kind of knows these people without really knowing them. There’s some sort of bizarre mass ownership, some weird mourning for the loss of…performances, movies, gossip or interviews that will never come to fruition. And all of that strangeness finds its way into this movie. It is a part of this movie and has been ever since the first electrifying but creeeeeeepy posters.
The Joker haunts this movie, Heath Ledger haunts this movie; they will, I imagine, haunt the next few Batman movies to come – and that is a good thing because they are both SO full of Life. I am still not convinced of Christopher Nolan’s own quality as a director or writer, but he certainly knows quality when he sees it – the great premise of Memento he doesn’t live up to, the great Swedish movie Insomnia he adapted for America with forgettable results…and Heath Ledger’s Joker. Nolan, at the least, knew to get rid of the CGI and just follow the lead of what is sure to become a legendary performance.
