Favorite moments of cinema: Heath Ledger · 3:31pm Jan 22nd, 2018
A hallmark of his generation, from his first stage you could notice that the Australian was not a conventional teenager come to Hollywood. Between his skill as a chess player, his dancer skills and his great admiration for Gene Kelly; the peculiar blond would make his way through romantic comedy, the western and the drama always excelling despite sometimes supporting inadequate scripts. By the beginning of the new millennium, both the critics and the press called him "the great star of tomorrow", but unfortunately this prophecy would never be consummated. So, in his 10th mournful anniversary, it's time to inspect an actor whose career might be mediocre in general (no joking, check the numbers of his movies in IMDB and his overall score is 7), but he left enough testimony to become a star...
Few performances interpenetrate intimately with their characters, however within these there’s a much smaller segment that does so by becoming the same character, feeling, expressing and learning from them. Cases like those of Robert DeNiro in his early stages (he lived in the streets before filming Taxi Driver) and the most current and famous ones of Cate Blanchett (she lived as Bob Dylan for I’m Not There) and Daniel Day Lewis (that’s why he has declared acting with so little), are just some examples of that acting method called "Stanislavski", the technique in which the actor not only intimate, but undergoes a complete metamorphosis leaving aside his personality and character to adopt temporarily the other. Certainly dangerous, it takes a psychological preparation and a maturation according to the acceptance of losing oneself in another mind, in other emotions, in other reasons, even in another body.
One of the most notorious cases was also the Australian Heath Ledger, which for his multi-award-winning role of The Joker decided to literally sink into "chaos", writing anarchist diaries, retiring in a dark room to laugh, walk and transform into the iconic Batman villain. Ledger would win the Oscar under horrifying circumstances: his problem of insomnia, depression, fatigue, lack of concentration and maturation would lead him to never get rid of the character to die of an overdose of pills after the filming finished.
A misfortune, the loss of a great and young talent would procreate one of those memorable performances for history, of such magnitude, that thanks to him we can speak of perhaps the best or at least one of the five best superhero films, going beyond, revolutionizing its structure and becoming also thanks to a lucid Nolan, in a dark and complex thriller.
The summit of this performance is one of my favorite moments, an interrogation between the bat and his nemesis where the latter takes control of the situation, where Ledger under a gloomy and precise dialogue and physical performance becomes a gloomy and calculating villain that gives off a terrifying intelligence to tighten not only the story, but also the spectator, who witnesses the crack of the hero in a twist that is extolled thanks to its almost theatrical simplicity, its acting chemistry (provided mainly by Ledger), a stabbing script and an edition, specialty of the house, that make of this sequence one of the best and most formidable moments of the DC universe and of superheroes in the cinema.
