Does Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight merit an Oscar?

No

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by Henry Daniels

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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.

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