I have never written one of these columns about someone born after I; indeed, one of the requirements for Celebrating the Living is that you have to be older than I am. (A rule I’ll revisit in years to come, as I get older.) It isn’t just that Heath Ledger is never getting older than 28. For Attention Must Be Paid, that’s not a dealbreaker. I can see writing about any number of people who died young—while I’m not superstitious, others are, and the 27 Club is considered a thing. (Though it refers to musicians. Also, statistical analysis proves it’s not really a thing.) The difference, though, is that I was born in 1976 and he was born in 1979.
But Heath Ledger . . . well. For one, he’s been dead for ten years now. Died in 2008, making him Year of the Month territory. (And it was a sparse year for Disney, and I’ve already done Bolt.) Honestly, I can’t quite imagine discussing 2008 without discussing Heath Ledger. His death was astonishing at the time. It’s still a little stunning to me now. At the time, there was much discussion about how the Joker had killed him, a theory in its way believable but in another way as fanciful as the 27 Club.
He first came to my attention in 10 Things I Hate About You; funny to think that, had I not moved in with a boyfriend when I did, I could have seen him in person—you can see what had been my apartment building in the helicopter shot at the end of the movie, right next door to Stadium High School which was Padua High School in the movie. I thought it was good, but it’s not the world’s most challenging role, and the next thing I saw him in was A Knight’s Tale, a profoundly silly film. In my review of it for my college paper, back in 2001, I called him “Australian Eye Candy Heath Ledger.”
Frankly, his film career was erratic. I haven’t seen The Patriot and am not likely to, but Brokeback Mountain is amazing. I’m Not There is indisputably fascinating even if you don’t like it, and I couldn’t finish The Four Feathers. I like The Brothers Grimm, but it’s often considered to be the worst Gilliam. I can’t help thinking that, had he lived, he would have been considered not unlike Nicolas Cage, although less personally crazy—you never quite know whether you’re going to get a great performance in a great movie, a great performance in a lousy movie, or what. I’m not sure I ever saw him give a bad performance, though, which I can’t say of Nicolas Cage!
As it is, Ledger is the only person in history to win an Oscar for acting in a superhero movie, and I’m not sure how much that position stems from his death. Don’t get me wrong—it’s an incredible performance. It may even be the best I’ve seen in a superhero movie, though I’d have to really think about that for a while. I just don’t in general expect the Academy to care about such things. The movie’s only other win was for Sound Editing; Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button split the rest of the wins in its category. Ledger’s nomination was, let’s be real, the only one the film got in categories the average person cares about. The Academy may have felt its arm twisted; the only two superhero movies to win Oscars since have been Big Hero 6 and Suicide Squad.
This, then, his legacy—the Oscar and the death. Even his last film is weighted by the death; I have seen The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (another film in contention for Gilliam’s worst according to a lot of people), and you can’t avoid his death in it. The minute Tony steps into the Imaginarium and becomes Johnny Depp (though he does look in that movie more than I would have believed someone who doesn’t at all look like Heath Ledger could look like Heath Ledger), you’re forcibly reminded, if you know, that there’s a reason he’s Johnny Depp and not Heath Ledger. It isn’t just that three-pronged performance that’s been lost. It’s all the other lost performances as well. He may have been younger than I, but I couldn’t not talk about him.
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