THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 24, 2008
Appraisal
Prince of Intensity With a Lightness of Touch
By A. O. SCOTT
The defining performance of Heath Ledgers tragically foreshortened career
more or less equivalent to what Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause was for
James Dean will surely be the role of Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain.
A portrait of inarticulate love and thwarted desire, Ennis is a rich,
complicated character succinctly sketched in Annie Proulxs original short
story and brought to heartbreaking life by the films screenwriters, Diana
Ossana and Larry McMurtry; by its director, Ang Lee; and above all by Mr.
Ledger himself.
Outwardly, Ennis presents a familiar image of rough-hewn Western masculinity,
and the longing that surges under his taciturn demeanor does not so much
contradict this image as help to explain it. Enniss love for Jack Twist, whom
he meets tending sheep on a Wyoming mountaintop in the early 1960s, takes Ennis
by surprise and throws him permanently off balance. His lifelong silence, the
film suggests, is less a sign of strength than of cowardice, a crippling
inability to acknowledge or communicate the truth of his own feelings.
What made the performance so remarkable was that Mr. Ledger, without betraying
Enniss dignity or his reserve, was nonetheless able to convey that truth to
the audience. This kind of sensitivity the ability to signal an inner
emotional state without overtly showing it is what distinguishes great screen
acting from movie-star posing. And while Mr. Ledger was handsome enough, and
famous enough, to be called a movie star, he was serious enough, and smart
enough, to be suspicious of deploying his charisma too easily or cheaply.
In retrospect the best thing that happened to him the lucky break for his
admirers, at any rate may have been his disinclination to realize his apparent
movie-star potential. He was the most likable of the young things in the
Taming of the Shrew-derived teenage comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, with
his curly hair, high forehead and the permanent intimation of a smirk on his
thin-lipped, angled mouth. And as often happens with young actors in Hollywood,
his good looks and easy charm looked like a ticket to the commercial big time.
Dutifully, but also with sparks of playful, eager energy, he played period
golden boys in The Patriot and A Knights Tale, a misbegotten (but not
entirely unenjoyable) entry in the ever-silly costume-action genre.
It is hard to know exactly when Mr. Ledger discovered his range, and set
about trying to explore it, but it is clear that he covered a lot of ground in
a very short time. He had a taste for portraying troubled, brooding,
self-destructive young men, its true the anguished third-generation prison
guard in Monsters Ball, the heroin addict in Candy, the unhappy film star
in Im Not There, in addition to Ennis but the temptation to blend their
fates with Mr. Ledgers own should be resisted at all costs. Those roles should
be seen less as expressions of some imagined inner torment than as evidence of
resourcefulness, creative restlessness and wit.
Those same characteristics are abundantly evident in less well-known movies
that should not be overlooked. Mr. Ledger was hilarious and eccentric in
Catherine Hardwickes Lords of Dogtown, playing a shaggy old-timer on the
Venice Beach surf-and skateboard scene, and affably mischievous in Terry
Gilliams Brothers Grimm, alongside Matt Damon.
Ennis Del Mar is complemented and complicated by Casanova, whom Mr. Ledger
played in Lasse Hallstroms unfairly neglected biopic-as-sex-farce, which came
and went too quickly in late 2005, during the ascendancy of Brokeback
Mountain. Its not just that the flamboyantly heterosexual Casanova is Ennis
Del Mars opposite in obvious ways. He is also a creature of pure whimsy, a
lighter-than-air confection of licentiousness and gallantry.
Which is not to say that Mr. Ledgers performance is frivolous. Rather it
required intelligence, restraint and a tricky lightness of touch. Mr. Ledger
had an unusual ability to mix lightness and gravity, an emotional nimbleness he
displayed most fully in Todd Hayness Im Not There. Of the six avatars of
Bob Dylan in that film, his, an actor named Robbie Clark, is the most remote
from Mr. Dylans various personae and closest to the prosaic world of love,
fame and ambition. Robbie starts out full of youthful energy, heedless and in
love, and finds himself a decade later adrift and disappointed, robbed of the
happiness that early success had seemed to promise.
Again, its important to warn against looking in that film or any other for
clues or portents. It seems to me that Mr. Ledger, in his choice of roles, was
motivated above all by curiosity, and perhaps also by an impatience with the
predictability and caution that can settle around the shoulders of talented
young stars. In heroic roles like A Knights Tale or Ned Kelly he often
seems bored, which may be why he so eagerly seized the chance to play the
sociopathic Joker in The Dark Knight, the next installment in the Batman
franchise.
The dismaying sense of loss and waste at Mr. Ledgers death at 28 comes not
only because he was so young, but also because his talent was large and as yet
largely unmapped. It seems inevitable that he will now be inscribed in the cult
of the beautiful stars who died too young, alongside James Dean, Montgomery
Clift and Marilyn Monroe. Even before his death he had been ensnared in a
pathological gossip culture that chews up the private lives of celebrities, and
Tuesdays news unleashed the usual rituals of media cannibalism.
Mr. Ledgers work will outlast the frenzy. But there should have been more.
Instead of being preserved as a young star eclipsed in his prime, he should
have had time to outgrow his early promise and become the strange, surprising,
era-defining actor he always had the potential to be.
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