What’s Aged the Best?
Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker
In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:30:17Read transcript
- Nominees: Ledger's performance, the action sequences, the Breaking Bad fall and turn of Harvey Dent, unusual in a superhero movie, and the death of Rachel Dawes, whose he-went-to-the-wrong-building reveal is emotionally affecting and is placed second.
- Rachel Dawes was Katie Holmes's part in the first film; the story is that she was busy making a Queen Latifah movie, which is read as a publicist's version of being replaced; Maggie Gyllenhaal reportedly did not understand Batman and just wanted to work with Nolan, and though she is a little divisive she gives the movie a gravitas it would not otherwise have.
- Gyllenhaal seems like a real person in a movie without many, and credibly reads as someone who has known Bruce for a very long time, which he needs since nobody else in his life says 'my friend Bruce'; the love triangle is an underrated nuance, with both men making major life decisions on whether she will be with them.
- On the rescue: the Joker lies about the locations, so Batman heads for Rachel, in part because he wants to keep being the Batman rather than hand over to the golden boy, and ends up with Dent; just before, she had answered his if-I-stop-being-Batman question, then chose Harvey.
- Asked directly, the answer is Ledger: a YouTube mashup of his scenes is the most interesting stuff; where Sean Penn in Mystic River went from wow to the 'is that my daughter in there' meme, Ledger in clown makeup doing mannered work does not age a day, helped by how controlled his Brokeback Mountain performance had been, everything twenty miles beneath the surface.
- Because he arrived already trusted as a great actor, the over-the-top choices are accepted, the tonguing of his scars, the crooked, bent-over posture, the head turned left, as an interpretation differentiated from the comics, the cartoons and Jack Nicholson, a Joker very on the ground and messed up.
- Ledger died in January 2008 and the film came out that July, so first viewings carried the knowledge that this was the last time the character would be seen; rewatching ten years later you are simply in the moment with him, and he is the reason to rewatch; compared with the Joker of Suicide Squad, Ledger's has a complete lack of vanity that is crucial.
- The interrogation room is the first time he is seen in bright light: makeup cracking away from his eyes, slouched on the floor, poking at the cop, Gordon and Batman, looking weak and deranged, genuinely frightening where Nicholson in Tim Burton's movie, also liked, is cartoonish.