Heath Ledger Ruins Dark Knight
Heath Ledger’s indulgent, cartoonish performance ruins Dark Knight. In a movie filled with restrained performances, Ledger’s slow-chatter Joker comes off as not just deranged but deranging.
Like a malevolent poltergeist, Ledger moves the film’s furniture into nonsensical patterns. He unbalances the film. Although critics are lionizing his performance as darkly brilliant, the truth is that his Joker is all surface evil with no depth. It isn’t frightening, except in the way that a glass of spilled red-wine is frightening. It gets all over everything and the stain won’t come out.
As the Joker he seems to be channeling that stupid clown from Stephen King’s insipid It. This would be a career ending performance if it weren’t already too late for that.
People say Ledger’s death was untimely but it couldn’t have been better timed. He’s the only person involved with his movie who’s lucky enough not to have to see his performance in it. And death seems to have been a great career move. It’s hard not to suspect that the film’s editors were spooked out of cutting his performance down to size.
(WARNING SPOILERS: I haven’t actually seen the film, and so I formulated this opinion without any basis whatsoever. I just figured it was about time to start the backlash and no one else seemed willing to do it. Speaking ill of the dead is a nasty business but someone had to do it.)
