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- The Observer, Sunday 20 July 2008
Over the past few years, the best way to an Oscar nomination has been to play a recently deceased star. It worked for Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line and even for Eddie Murphy as a James Brown-style figure in Dreamgirls. With the current hype around Heath Ledger, it looks as if things have gone one step further.
- The Dark Knight
- Release: 2008
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 152 mins
- Directors: Christopher Nolan
- Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Anthony Michael Hall, Christian Bale, Cillian Murphy, Eric Roberts, Gary Oldman, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman
Ledger is next year's first hot favourite Oscar nominee, despite featuring in this year's obituary section of the ceremony. His performance as the Joker in the latest Batman film has been shifted to centre stage, inflated by all the marketing fury of a big summer blockbuster. With the black carpet rolled out at The Dark Knight's New York premiere last week, the film itself has now become Heath's epitaph.
Rather than keep a dignified silence in the face of questioning, his fellow cast members have trumpeted out glowing praise for his performance. Gary Oldman and Michael Caine in particular have practically challenged the Academy to give him the posthumous Oscar.
One can't help feeling uneasy about all this. Ledger stalks the film like a ghost, partly because he is one now in real life, and partly because up on the screen he's playing a spectral sort of human being, an unknowable, unfathomable violent entity, like a poltergeist. He's good, certainly, in a what is a very good part, written by the film's director, Christopher Nolan, and his brother Jonathan. Ledger's main achievement is to tone down the Joker's traditional sprite-ish campness, as previously embodied by Jack Nicholson. Here, the Joker is more a masked anarchist.
We see him in disguise as a nurse; shooting excitedly at a police van with a bazooka; joyriding in a police car with his face and hair flying out of the window like a mad dog; gleefully setting off ingenious bombs; giggling as he takes ferocious beatings.
All the marketing has left us with a difficult task in judging this part. No one wants to speak or write ill of the dead - nor would anyone, it seems, want to beat them in an Oscar race, so I already pity the actors who might find themselves nominated in his category. (Will this be a supporting or a leading role? The film's latest posters certainly thrust Ledger to the fore.)
Yet Ledger, for my liking, doesn't quite have the ticcy, nervy danger on screen that would have made his Joker an outstanding piece of cinematic devilment. He didn't scare me each time he arrived, the way one of his current co-stars, Gary Oldman, still does. Even when, as here, Oldman's playing a good guy like Commissioner Gordon, there's an edge of madness lurking. Marlon Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now or Brian Cox's Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter spring to mind as less showy, yet more chilling performances.
The Dark Knight is an oppressive, dense and violent blockbuster, an almost Manichaean vision of a world where good and evil are joined in battle. Heath Ledger is at the black heart of this, which makes you feel a bit sorry for Christian Bale. But then the devil always gets the best lines.
· The Dark Knight is released on Friday
