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Does Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight merit an Oscar?
Results so far:
| Yes | 76% | 403 votes | Total: 533 votes | |
| No | 24% | 130 votes |
Yes
by Bobby B. Paul
Created on: August 09, 2008
Without the fall release of the prestige films, it is all presumptuous to consider who will win what. Even so, it is difficult to imagine a performance so hauntingly compelling as Ledger's portrayal of The Joker. In fact it's hard to look at the whole film The Dark Knight as just an action film. The performances of Cane, Eckhart, Bale, Gyllenhal, Freeman, and Ledger have collectively transcended the all the special effects to create a film comparable to the best crime dramas. This film doesn't fit next to Spiderman or Ironman as much as it does to Silence of the Lambs or No Country for Old Men.
There is no action film or comic book film to which Ledgers performance can compare. Even mentioning his performance as better than Nicholson's is so embarrassingly obvious it smacks of hack writing. Notice how the other original actor isn't even mentioned by name. To do so would be worse than comparing Tolstoy to Rowling. Sure Tolstoy wins, but what idiot even put them in the same sentence - beside this author?
Silence and No Country draw the closest parallels and it is no coincidence that both films won Oscars for their villainous portrayals. If Bardem's performance as the nonsense assassin with his understated lines and his horrifying glare deserves the statue, Ledger's devotion to the true sociopath whose logic and reason are both scary and difficult to counter must be seriously considered.
However, Ledgers performance draws closest to Anthony Hopkins's as Hannibal Lector in Silence. In both Silence and Knight, the villain must reach into two arenas: that of the cold, reasoning, strategist and the aggressive and deadly killer who knows precisely when a little edge is going to set the person off. In both performances, the success comes from the ability to move from one to the behavior to the other in a perfectly natural way. This is character study and it takes work. But when done well, the result is horrifyingly disturbing. This is not the first comparison of Ledger's performance to Hopkins's nor is the first to find them equal. There may be those who can debate this, but the closeness of the debate proves it difficult to produce a leader.
Ledger's untimely death creates a mystique around the film that rumors and article have fueled by questioning whether Ledger's performance is in part the result of his death. Was he really taking the lethal concoction of pills in part because of the work he was doing? This question, or variations of it, led to the buzz and the record breaking weekend. However, the buzz of his performance stands on its own. This movie ended with the ability of the Joker to return. Who can imagine anybody else but Heath Ledger in this role? What actor would not shrink at having to follow this performance? Heath's success and his tragic passing leave the creators of this franchise both celebrating and worrying. They know sooner or later the Joker must return. How to pull that off without a performance suffering in comparison will be their biggest challenge.
There will be criticisms that if Ledger does win the Oscar it will more be in tribute to his passing. We could argue against this, but for now let's play this horse. The Academy has a long tradition of giving statues to people for reasons other than just the acting.
Halle Berry's win for Monster's Ball was as much an apology as anything. Berry's performance was excellent but for being the best that year, that could be argued. However, the inability of the previous Oscars to recognize actors and actresses of color in the past had become glaringly obvious and 2001 marked the first time a black woman won the Oscar. Berry's speech showed a clear understanding of what had happened. "This moment is so much bigger than I am" was the most memorable line of the ceremony as Berry acknowledged many deserving actresses that were denied.
John Wayne's performance in True Grit is hardly his best, but it took a long time for the snobbery of the Academy to realize that westerns and actors in westerns have a place of importance in American cinema. The result is his Oscar that should have been awarded for The Cowboys or The Quiet Man. Henry Fonda gave so many outstanding performances but it took his final film, On Golden Pond, to make the Academy realize they had yet to acknowledge one of films most important actors. The list of wins that are more than just the performance may number those that represent the performance itself.
Let's be honest. The likelihood that the academy will ever acknowledge performances of action films is so low that they may as easily dismiss Ledger's work for that reason alone. It's a sad reality that there is an elitism among the Academy that causes its members to ignore films solely on the basis of their genre. Often this is justified, but at times they miss it. Ghandi is a far more important subject than E.T., but it is not better made film.
The Ledger situation, sad and tragic as it is, may be the thing that causes a shift in the collective attitudes of the Academy. Maybe this is reason enough.
Learn more about this author, Bobby B. Paul.
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No
by Henry Daniels
Created on: July 18, 2009 Last Updated: August 24, 2009
Health Ledger's portrayal of "The Joker", while sometimes fascinating, contains serious flaws that did not merit the Academy Award nod that should have been given to either Philip Seymour Hoffman or Robert Downey Jr.
The most annoying aspect of Ledger's performance is the Joker's incapability of feeling any pain. Not once, during all the punishment that the Joker takes in this movie at the hands of Batman and the Gotham police department, is he ever affected by anything that happens to him! Take, for example, the famous interrogation scene:
The Joker taunts Batman with the disappearance of Rachel. Batman then proceeds to take Ledger and smash him against the table. The Joker laughs ... hmm. Laughter? That's weird. Usually the reaction to something like that would be screaming in pain, but, uh ... OK, maybe it wasn't as hard a slam as the film let on. He then taunts Batman further. Enraged, Batman takes the Joker and slams him by the head into a two way mirror. Glass flies everywhere. The Joker continues to laugh, seemingly unaffected. He continues to taunt "you've got nothing to threaten me with". This happens again and again ... hold the phone. It is not possible at all, not in any conceivable way, for someone to take that punishment and still seem unfazed and unharmed. It's simply not possible, and yet none of this registers at all with Ledger. His Joker is painless. He does not need stitches, there's aren't any glass fragments in his head, he does not get hurt ... he kicks the crap, five minutes later, out of a police officer and then escapes the police station, ecstatically sticking his head out of a moving copcar window.
What baloney. What actor wouldn't have the sense to reflect his character's sense of physical hurt during this scene? Nothing is more present, during the acting process, than one's body. Actors are physical creatures. They use and interpret sense to maintain a grasp on everything that they think and feel. Here is a scene where, clearly, they supplanted a body double to take the fall and then cut back to Ledger who I guess was unaware that his character is getting the crap kicked out of him. These kind of villains are the most annoying. They are so smug that, apparently, they cannot be hurt.
Then of course there's the moment where the truck The Joker is driving is flipped over and, seconds later, he gets out and straightens himself out as though he hadn't been in a accident that would have paralyzed or killed pretty much anyone who was involved in it. Since when do people let action movies get away with such ridiculous scenes? (I thought the bus surviving the jump in "Speed" was a stretch. I had no idea what people would really let movies get away with ...)
Still, an actor deciding to deny his character the ability to experience pain can be overlooked if there are other deeper emotional details to recommend the performance. Sadly, the Joker has no emotion except for anger ... but anger at what, exactly? His past? Here is the first major movie performance with a character who has no definable history, whatsoever. It's almost as if the Joker were born yesterday, because he has no real name and the details he provides about his past are conflicting. Consider this:
The Joker gives two opposing stories about the acquisition of his scars. In one story, his father scars him after he attempts to rescue his mother from a hate-filled beating. In the other, he scars himself after trying to "cheer up" his wife. Obviously, both these stories could not have happened because their details conflict, and yet the Joker tells them with exactly the same energy and anger! There is no difference between how the two of them are presented. It's almost as though Ledger were convinced that both of them have occurred - but how could that be? It's either one or the other. It's an obvious paradox - the Joker has many stories to explain his scars and all of them accurate?
The Joker character is riddled with inconsistencies. At random, he adopts a Chicago accent to mock various other gangsters whom he taunts, but is he from Chicago? It's anybody's guess. Most of the time, he talks quite normally, and yet for various scenes he chooses to embellish certain words for no particular reason, whatsoever. "Goooood evening, ladies and gentleMEN," he says, in stead of simply, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen." In today's world, I guess people consider this ingenious acting, to emphasise different syllables for no reason ... who knew it was that easy! Perhaps I should have played the joker and gotten an Oscar with the equally effective, "Good EVEning, laDIES and gENtlemennn."
Another one of Joker's nonsensical greetings: "Hello, CoMMMissioner." His motives for placing all that emphasis on the mm's in 'commissioner' is very simple to explain: Heath Ledger, the actor, was trying to sound as cool as possible, so he chose to emphasize the word in that spot. That's all it was. Nothing character driven ... nothing character driven because there is no character to drive! Human beings just aren't that inexplicable. People have motivations behind every action they take, and reasons for most of their thoughts. The Joker claims, confidently, "I'm an agent of Chaos". Ledger seems to have fashioned his character around that statement, but an agent of chaos isn't a character - that's a job, or a hobby. A character has a history. A character has a past.
"The Dark Knight" prides itself on being a superhero movie with deep characters who are posed serious moral dilemmas, and yet the supposedly "real" Joker is not a person who could even theoretically exist in the real world. He is not really a character, but a lack of one. A shapeless shadow without any history, background, habits, identity, or even the ability to feel any sort of emotional or physical pain. He's a lifeless mess, somehow planted into the world of thinking, feeling people.
It really drives me up the wall to hear Ledger receive all the praise for "The Dark Knight" while the great actors Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman, so pitch-perfect in their roles, with such a keen understanding of character and depth, are sideswiped in the reviews.
Ledger got the Oscar while Robert Downey Jr.'s brave, hilarious performance in "Tropic Thunder" as an Australian actor playing a black soldier - a performance requiring the actor to touch upon so many levels it boggles the mind how seamlessly Downey pulled it off - was passed over. So was Philip Seymour Hoffman's sly performance in "Doubt" as Father Flynn, an accused preacher. Hoffman's turn is haunting. He is a mixture of fatherly kindness and sinful repression, and the fact that only Meryl Streep's 'Sister Beauvier' can tell the difference makes the film beautifully captivating.
Where those actors are captivating, Ledger is annoying. Had he lived, I wonder if he would have matured to the point where his acting talent matched his screen presence. I can't help but think that maybe, given time, he would have come to one day deserve the Oscar that he was given posthumously. Now we'll never know.
Learn more about this author, Henry Daniels.
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