The Dark Knight

[Chris Knipp]

We agree on Ledger but people do fall into the trip of reading dark things about him personally into the performance. I'll give you the end of David Edelstein's review of the movie, which I recommend even though this is a red herring. I don't agree with the idea that he's flailing around, but it's interesting anyway. Note the review has two pages.

How is Heath Ledger? My heart went out to him. He's working so very hard to fill the void, to be doing something every second. It's rave and rage and purge acting. This Joker is a straight-out psychopath--a Stephen King clown-demon with smudged greasepaint and yellow teeth and hair that appears to have never been washed. As written, the Joker is like a souped-up Andy Robinson in Dirty Harry (only this Harry won't blow him away with a .44 Magnum), and Ledger revs it higher and higher. He bugs his eyes and licks compulsively at the gashes that extend his mouth. He tries on different voices. First he sounds like Cagney in White Heat, then slides into a prissy singsong like Al Franken's Stuart Smalley, then throws in some fruity Brando flourishes and a dash of Hannibal Lecter. Heath's lethal--fast with sharp objects--but apart from a gruesome bit with a pencil not terribly prankish. I couldn't take my eyes off him, but in truth, I found the performance painful to watch. Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself--trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one.

Edelstein is smart. His Dubya comment and his comment on Gary Oldman are worthy of discussion. But after reading him for a while I take him with a big grain of salt. I do give him credit for getting me out to see Cloverfield--but most people thing that is crap, and they're partly right. And partly they're missing something amazing. That may be Edelstein's value--sometimes he's so wrong he's right. But not this time--tough I value that he wrote a farily negative review among all the raves. Armond White wrote an even more negative one. Another story.

Edelstein says as Dengy did (the two most prominent New York reviews that were negtive about the film) that Nolan can't handle action. That I can't see. At least the car stuff is very well done, and the sommersaulting truck got applause in the theater when I saw it.

I can see this is a movie that is great to discuss. And everybody is discussing it.