A budding career comes to an end
Heath Ledger had a great career ahead of him. Yes his portrayal of the Joker set the bar up a couple of notches. Which of course is a good thing. Jack Nicholson’s portrayal at the time did the same thing. We thought he had as he always seems to do, aced the role. His acting abilities have never been questioned. As Rick Flair, retired WWE Hall of Famer will tell you, ‘To be the Man, You have to Beat the Man!’. Well I think Heath Ledger ‘beat the man’. I think that Heath Ledger put on the Joker’s face in a whole new way. Torn down all our preconceptions of what the Joker ‘was’ and showed us something excitingly new and scary. He created the modern day Joker. Someone who didn’t care. Whose only driving force was to shake ‘everyone’ up. Show them that there was a new sheriff in town. And no matter who you were, gangster, politician, police officer, or John Q. Public, he was going to show you that nothing mattered. Nothing!
There was so much buzz about this movie and this actor months before it came out. Yes some of it was about how awesome the movie was! 150 minutes of stay in your seat rollercoaster action! No one went to the bathroom or got up to get popcorn during this movie! No one talked! No babies cried! NO ONE MOVED! You have heard of movies that were riviting?! Well this one strapped, tied, gagged, rivited, welded and put a spell over you from the very start to the ‘end’!
You can expect this movie to get nominated for a lot of awards. And whether Ledger gets the nod for ‘Best Actor’ or ‘Best Supporting Actor’, it doesn’t matter. Anyone seeing this film will say that the Joker changed them. The portrayal was so on the money ‘evil’ that they went home and needed another ‘fix’. They did Google searches on his name and found that he was in several great movies, but then said, ‘that was him?’ He played in ‘The Patriot’, ‘ Brokeback Mountain’, ‘The Brothers Grimm’, and ‘A Knight’s Tale’ to name but a few. They will download images of him as the Joker, put him up on their desktops, print them out and hang them in their rooms and private offices. They will pull out their makeup kits from Halloween and unskillfully try to recreate that vision that haunts them.
It makes us re-think what we had previously thought as the gold standard. And BRAVO for anyone who can do that!
It is a sad thing that this very creative young actor passed away. But he went out in style! We should all be so lucky to have leave behind a legacy such as his portrayal of the Joker.
I dare everyone to take a step back from their lives as they know it and instead of the ‘I don’t care’ message that everyone seems to send out these days, I dare them to move the bar up a few notches and make a statement that will leave all who see it say, ‘That is how to do it’. Although we cannot think of the Joker as a hero, we can think of Ledger’s performance as stellar and that is what we should strive for when doing anything in life!
