Yeah, I never was a huge Heath Ledger fan, I mean, I thought he was good and all, but that’s it.
I saw him in A Knights Tale, and The Patriot, and of course in Brokeback Mountain – he was good. I could see that he had a brilliant career ahead of him, but it was a casual notice at best, because my mind was elsewhere and I had other things to do. It feels all callous and cold now, now that I think about it. And now, especially having just seen The Dark Knight. Oh LORD. LORD. LORD. LORD.
He was fantastic. That doesn’t even begin to describe it. He played the Joker like the character was newly sprung from the pit of chaos, you didn’t know where, you didn’t know when, you just KNEW. And his eyes, oh my god, his eyes. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t cover my eyes, couldn’t NOT watch. His eyes, his eyes, staring out from that mask pinning you to your seat, like black holes that were somehow alive, so alive, he threw SPARKS from them. He was INSIDE that character, so deep inside that his voice sounded like it smelled evil, if that makes any sense. I was amazed and blown away – the whole movie was good, I enjoyed it very well, but watching Heath do his thing was like watching something so horrible it was brilliant. He had it DOWN, and as I walked out of the theater, I said to my friend, (and me not being terribly religious or anything) “Angels are weeping because we’ll never see anything like that again. We’ll never see that man be brilliant again.”
I don’t know if there’s a point or a moral or anything here, whether there’s anything to learn or to say…just that he flickered so brightly there and I never noticed until it was too late.
