fancycwabs

There's a facebook group that a couple of my friends have joined calling for an Oscar nomination for Heath Ledger for his work in The Dark Knight--considering that the group was started weeks ago, before anyone in the group had actually seen the film, I was (and still am) skeptical of whether it came out of the marketing department at Warner Brothers or if it was the result of Heath Ledger's untimely demise and the resulting "martyrdom" (that's the wrong word. Is there a word for people whose talents and contributions are vastly exaggerated in the wake of their untimely deaths? There should be).

In any case, the hyperbole is justified. I caught a promotional screening last night and found Ledger's portrayal terrifying; if superheros are our modern-day Greek myths, with gods walking the earth and causing the Sun's motion across the sky, volcanoes, lightning, etc., Ledger's Joker is the closest thing I've seen to something approaching a force of nature in human form. That force of nature is entropy, and Ledger somehow captures that essence with every grin and reptilian flicker of his tongue. It is an amazing performance, and one that nothing in Ledger's previous work had hinted at being available to him.

That's not to say that everyone else in the film is sitting on their hands. While Christian Bale's Batman isn't given much of a character arc, he's still giving it everything. Aaron Eckhart does his finest work as well transforming from the boy scout DA Harvey Dent to Two-Face, who (in a movie without Ledger's performance) would have easily stolen the show. The gritty realism that marked Batman Begins is enhanced here; there's nothing that looks like the giant soundstages of the Burton-Shumaker era. The plotting is dense; there's a lot of story to tell here, but Nolan does it with aplomb--punctuated by a couple of really nice action set pieces.

All that said, I wouldn't recommend the film to anyone under 10 AT ALL, and I'd be hesitant about taking someone under 13. Bad stuff happens in this movie, and is likely to give the little ones nightmares about clowns and disfigurement (and other things--there's some Saw-level shit here, leaving one to wonder how it managed a PG-13 rating) for weeks. Besides, having to haul a child screaming in terror from the theater isn't fun for anybody.