Heath Ledger's role as the Joker in "The Dark
Knight" is without a doubt his most significant performance of all, so
impressive that it's been generating a lot of Oscar buzz.
Heath Ledger's co-stars in The Dark Knight have already
expressed their opinion that the late actor win an Oscar for his portrayal of The Joker. Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays the role of Rachel Dawes, said
she would vote for Heath Ledger.
"In a way I feel funny thinking about the Oscars when
he isn't alive, but at the same time I'm a member of the Academy and I would
vote for him,” she said for People magazine.
Also Aaron Eckhart, who portrays Harvey Dent/Two Face said
that he can vote for Heath Ledger and Sir Michael Caine, who plays butler
Alfred Pennyworth, has the same opinion.
Heath Ledger would most likely become the second star to win
the golden statue from the grave, following the late Peter Finch for 1976’s
"Network."
When beloved Spencer Tracy passed away in 1967 after giving
a dynamic, heartfelt performance in best picture nominee "Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner," he was widely expected to win best actor, but lost to
Rod Steiger ("In the Heat of the Night"). But things were different
for Finch, who died from a heart attack just months before the Oscar cast
whereas Ledger will be dead for a year by the next awards ceremony.
In "The Dark Knight," Ledger delivered his last
complete film role before dying at the age of 28 from an accidental overdose of
prescription drugs on Jan. 22 in Manhattan.
His performance in the latest action-filled Batman flick has been shifted to
centre stage, inflated by all the marketing fury of a big summer blockbuster,
and even shaped into Heath's epitaph.
Drawing inspiration from sources as wide-ranging as Johnny
Rotten and ventriloquists, Ledger's Clown Prince of Crime is anything but
funny, instead, he's a sadistically gleeful force of nature who wants nothing
more than to watch the world tear itself to pieces.
From facial tics to bad jokes, his devotion to the role took
the Joker far from a garish comic book character to a nuanced madman that
somehow does what every good villain can - makes you like him.
Unlike any other evil character, the Joker has no motive for
his wrongdoing and in the same time, he is set to accomplish his ultimate goal:
chaos. His painted face – white complexion, dark eyes and blood-crimson mouth –
expresses nothing more than he is: ruthlessness.
The Joker is obviously not a premiere presence, the
character has been present in previous movies focused on the adventures of
Batman. But what Jack Nicholson or Cesar Romero realized is far from what
Ledger played. Their characters were clowns, mere pranksters in comparison with
the great cruelty of Ledger’s Joker.
Ledger, who never played a villain before, was cast by movie
director Christopher Nolan as the Joker "because he's fearless."
Nolan recently proclaimed that Ledger was the only person on his list of names
after seeing the actor’s performance as the gay cowboy in "Brokeback Mountain."
Richard Corliss from Time
has given a wonderful description of the part played by Heath Ledger.
“This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter
brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the
elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by
Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. He isn't a father figure or a macho
man. And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and
psychic) scars, he's not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This
Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie
history”, Curliss wrote.
Roger Ebert also greeted the remarkable performance of
Ledeger. “The key performance in the movie is by the late Heath Ledger, as the
Joker. Will he become the first posthumous Oscar winner since Peter Finch?”,
Ebert said in his review of “The Dark Knight”
