January 24, 2008
Appreciation
An Actor Whose Work Will Outlast the Frenzy
By A. O. SCOTT
The defining performance of Heath Ledger’s 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 Proulx’s original short story and brought to heartbreaking life by the film’s 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. Ennis’s 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 Ennis’s 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 early failure to live up to his apparent movie-star potential. He was the most likable of the young things in the Shakespeare-derived teen 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 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 Knight’s Tale,” a misbegotten (but not entirely unenjoyable) entry in the evergreen, 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, it’s true — the anguished second-generation prison guard in “Monster’s Ball”; the heroin addict in “Candy”; the unhappy film star in “I’m Not There,” in addition to Ennis — but the temptation to blend their fates with Mr. Ledger’s 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 Hardwicke’s “Lords of Dogtown,” playing a shaggy old-timer on the Venice Beach surf- and skateboard scene, and affably mischievous in Terry Gilliam’s “Brothers Grimm,” alongside Matt Damon. Ennis Del Mar is complemented and complicated by Casanova, whom Mr. Ledger played in Lasse Hallstrom’s unfairly neglected biopic-as-sex-farce, which came and went too quickly in late 2005, during the ascendancy of “Brokeback Mountain.” It’s not just that the flamboyantly heterosexual Casanova is Ennis Del Mar’s 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. Ledger’s performance is frivolous. Rather, it required intelligence, restraint and a tricky lightness of touch. Mr. Ledger’s had an unusual ability to mix lightness and gravity, an emotional nimbleness he displayed most fully, perhaps, in Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There.” Of the six avatars of Bob Dylan in that film, his, an actor named Robbie Clark, is the most remote from Mr. Dylan’s various personae and closest to the prosaic world of love, fame and ambition. Bobby 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, it’s 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 Knight’s 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. Ledger’s death at the age of 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 Tuesday’s news unleashed the usual rituals of media cannibalism.
Mr. Ledger’s 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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