Once Upon A Time In The Vest | Heath Ledger perfects his glower as The Joker in The Dark Knight.
THE DARK KNIGHT
Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine. Now playing. (Duh.)
****
Michael Keaton tells a story about talking with Jack Nicholson between scenes during the filming of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of Batman. Supposedly, Keaton was fretting over how to play the scene, whereupon Nicholson smiled and told him, “Relax, kid. Let the suit do the acting.”
That may be the key difference between Nicholson’s performance as The Joker—a star turn that amounted to not much more than an outrageous wardrobe, a few hours in the makeup chair, and some well-worn trademark Nicholson tics—and Heath Ledger’s remarkable take on the character in The Dark Knight. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan has conceived of The Joker as a total enigma, with no backstory (every time The Joker explains how he acquired the grotesque facial scars that have left him with a permanent ear-to-ear grin, he tells a different story), and no apparent motive for his crimes against Gotham City other than wreaking the maximum amount of havoc.
But Ledger’s performance doesn’t seem chaotic: even though The Joker behaves differently from scene to scene, and even uses different speech rhythms, everything he does feels like it emanates from the same, specific, unclean place. It’s a big, flamboyant performance that somehow avoids Pacinoesque self-parody; it’s a funny performance that never crosses over into camp; it’s a highly rigourous performance that nevertheless constantly surprises you. Who knew the tight-lipped cowboy of Brokeback Mountain had this performance in him? Every time Ledger comes onscreen, you can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next, and of course the tragedy is that now we’ll never know what he might have had in store for us in future films.
Indeed, one of the disappointments in The Dark Knight is that once Ledger’s final scene is over, we still have to spend 20 minutes with a bunch of much less interesting characters, including crusading district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), now transformed into the hideously deformed vigilante Two-Face, and whose internal moral battle is too pat and overly diagrammed to be dramatically interesting.
Then again, all the thematic conflicts in Nolan’s script (which he co-wrote with his brother Jonathan) are set out a little too baldly. How do we know The Joker represents chaos and Batman represents order? Because Nolan keeps giving The Joker all sorts of monologues in which he says that he represents chaos while Batman represents order. On the other hand, on a plot level, that same script is wonderfully complicated, densely populated with gangsters, politicians, and cops, and full of cleverly conceived setpieces, from the nastily funny opening bank heist to a Joker-devised ethical conundrum that plays out on a pair of ferries. But on the third hand, it would have been nice if some of the action sequences had been more coherently directed—the finale, with Batman searching for The Joker in an abandoned skyscraper while his right-hand man Lucius (Morgan Freeman) monitors his progress on a giant wall of sonar display screens, is a visual botch, nearly impossible to make sense of.
While I’m playing contrarian, here are a few more quibbles I had with The Dark Knight. I think the rumbly voice Christian Bale uses when he’s in his Batman guise sounds silly. The whole subplot about Lucius using cellphones to spy on every single person in Gotham City feels half-baked. Harvey Dent’s conversion from good to evil feels rushed. And even though the broadcast ends prematurely it seems impossible that Batman’s true identity could still remain a secret when a weasely lawyer goes on live TV to reveal he’s actually Bruce Wayne.
I know, I know: I’m picking nits. But somebody has to: the last time I checked the IMDb, visitors to the site had rated The Dark Knight as the greatest movie ever made. Which is absurd, even though Nolan does many things phenomenally well. He paints his film on a big canvas—you really get the sense of how The Joker’s actions affect the psychology of an entire city, and his conception of Gotham City as a dark, unmanageable labyrinth of criminal impulses, both organized and inchoate, is wonderfully vivid.
I love that all the characters are adults grappling with adult questions and quandaries, as opposed to the arrested adolescents of Burton’s film. I love that the film feels incredibly dangerous and dark even though it contains no blood and no foul language. It’s a film of genuine scope and ambition... and if it’s a little emotionally remote, a superhero movie with too much on its mind is a welcome rarity. What can Nolan possibly do for an encore? Perhaps that’s a question only The Riddler can answer.
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