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British filmmaker Christopher Nolan has the mien of a passionate literature professor (passionate, that is, in the British sense of the term) and, in December, he spoke about young actor Heath Ledger as if he were the most fascinating manuscript to cross his desk in years. “The bold decisions that Heath has made with this performance are fascinating to watch," said Nolan, who had one hand perched on his hip and the other holding a curled finger to his chin. “I think he's done something quite exceptional."
Nolan was in Los Angeles to screen some early completed footage from The Dark Knight, the second film in his reboot of the Batman mythos, which has Ledger in the role of the Joker. In super-hero cinema, the difference between a good film and a great film is the villain, not the hero, and it's telling that the six-minute sequence that Nolan brought with him did not include a single frame of the franchise's caped crusader, who is again played by Christian Bale.
Bruising shock
The industry types and journalists in the screening audience were agog over Ledger's wicked and scabby character and, in the cocktail lounge after, Nolan was all smiles. “I really cannot wait," the filmmaker said, “for everyone to see the finished product."
The world will see that product next week, when The Dark Knight opens, but Ledger, of course, will not be around to enjoy it. The 28-year-old Aussie and his promising career will be remembered as an unfinished novel. Seven weeks to the day after that screening in Los Angeles, Ledger was found dead in his second-floor loft in New York. Half a dozen different prescription drugs were found in his system, and an accidental overdose was the determined cause of death.
For Nolan and the cast of The Dark Knight, the death was a bruising shock and, in the months that followed, an awkward professional challenge. A summer movie with a budget of $180 million (Dh660 million) demands relentless pre-release promotion, but, especially with Nolan at the fore, no one in this production wanted to make a crass or maudlin misstep. Nolan stepped forward to write an appreciation of Ledger for Newsweek, and not only was it thoughtful (Nolan on Ledger's short films: “Their exuberance made me feel jaded and leaden. I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents."), the essay never mentioned the film's release date.
The cast picked up on the message.
“To have this film be successful and to have people see Heath's great work in it — to appropriately honour that performance by bringing the film to the audience — that became the goal for Chris and everyone involved," said Aaron Eckhart, who portrays Harvey “Two-Face" Dent, another grotesque madman who fights Batman for the soul of Gotham City. “Chris gave us a set where the actors felt very secure, they felt they could take risks. And Chris has continued to protect Heath and his performance."
Getting there
In mid-May, at the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, Nolan was in the late stages of post-production on The Dark Knight and the marathon hours were taking their toll. “Come on in," he told his visitor, “but I must warn you it's quite loud inside. I mean, really loud." In the mixing suite, Nolan joined sound editors Lora Hirschberg and Gary Rizzo, who were labouring over a bank of control boards. Up on a screen in front of them was a frozen image of Ledger, a rocket-launcher in his hand and an expression of callous menace on his face.
Nolan ran through the scene a dozen times and pulled apart the barrage of sounds, homing in on what he disliked (“Why am I hearing an air brake there? The truck is speeding up, that's a disconnect.") and what he needed (“In the first film, the roar of the Batmobile that we hear when the headlights first go on; let's go back and get that and use it right here."). The director stretched his neck and exhaled. “OK, we're getting there."
Hollywood has been throwing larger-than-life heroes at the cineplex at a dizzying rate, with Iron Man, Indiana Jones, the Hulk, Hancock and Hellboy leading the florid parade. But there is within The Dark Knight a level of subversive menace and ambition that sets it apart from the popcorn slugfests, although it might be too unsettling to reach the box-office numbers of the comparatively sunny exploits of Iron Man. The Dark Knight is many things, but it is not the feel-good movie of the summer.
Mysterious menace
For the Joker, Nolan went back to the first appearance of the character in comics in 1940, when the leering clown showed up without any sort of back story and simply started killing people. That's how the Joker enters Nolan's Gotham, not unlike, Nolan pointed out, the toothy intruder of Jaws. “You don't care where the shark came from," Nolan said, “you don't care who the shark's parents were."
In one harrowing scene, Ledger does explain his cheek scars to a victim — and then, later in the film, he delivers a second creepy monologue with an entirely different explanation. The revelation: The Joker is a liar, even to the folks eating the popcorn. It's one of the compelling nuances of the movie. There are many others. Maybe that's why Nolan declined to talk about his own emotional journey with the movie and its lost star. “I think we've said as much as we can about Heath. We want to do right by him. I'm proud of his work in this film, and I'm excited to have it seen, but I think in respect to him and his family, perhaps it's best to just let the film have the final word."
The hidden faces of Harvey Dent
One of the secrets that director Christopher Nolan has guarded the longest with The Dark Knight is the visage of Aaron Eckhart's Harvey “Two-Face" Dent character after his violent disfigurement that leads him away from law and order and toward ferocious revenge. Nolan's film is PG-13 and is clearly not for young children (there is one sequence, in fact, in which a terrified youngster is directly threatened by one of the villains), but the director said he actually had pulled back on the horror of Two-Face's seared flesh.
“I didn't want people to actually look away so much they were missing the film," Nolan said with a chuckle.
Searching for the dark heart of society
Throughout The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger's the Joker probes the scars around his lipstick grin with his tongue, the way some toothless people incessantly chomp their gums. He also walks with shoulders bowed and his chin out and down, like a hyena. This Joker has green hair and a purple suit, but there's little else that evokes Jack Nicholson's flamboyant take in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman.
Actually, if anything, Ledger here is closer to Nicholson's eerie ferocity in The Shining.
When talking about the film, director Christopher Nolan talks about it in terms of a search for the dark heart of society and the blood-red line between justice and vengeance. It's still a super-hero gizmo movie, of course, but The Dark Knight delves further into Nolan's familiar themes of moral uncertainty, madness and the cost of vendettas, which gave shape to Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige and his first trip to Gotham, the 2005 Batman Begins.
That movie was hailed by critics as the necessary pendulum swing back from Joel Schumacher's campy Batman & Robin, forever remembered for putting future Oscar winner George Clooney in a nippled Batsuit. It's telling sign of the times that there is a building buzz that Ledger might receive a posthumous Oscar nomination for his work as the Joker.
‘Just like Dean'
Heath Ledger's final role before he died crowned a career marked by continuous growth
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.
Ledger's death struck fear and self-loathing into the hearts and minds of publicists for The Dark Knight. How could they publicise Ledger's vaunted acting feat in the new Batman film without looking like grave-robbers? Ledger in The Dark Knight plays Batman's arch-villain, the Joker, as a psychotic anarchist, getting off on destruction. Stories of the actor's demise theorised 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 on screen 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 cowboy romance, Brokeback Mountain.
If the picture clicked for millions of moviegoers, it was probably because Jake 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, with the success of Ten Things I Hate About You, Ledger 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.
Rapid growth
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 war against 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.
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 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.
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.
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