The best I read so far from Newspapers
this is from the
San Francisco Chroniclehttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/22/DDG6UJRN4.DTLMick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
(01-22) 15:26 PST -- On a seemingly routine Tuesday afternoon, word came that Heath Ledger was found dead. The 28-year-old actor best known for his Oscar-nominated role as a gay cowboy in "Brokeback Mountain" was found dead in a downtown New York apartment. Apparently, a masseuse showed up for an appointment, was led in by a housekeeper, and Ledger was found unconscious. The police found pills near his body.
In a little while, perhaps before you read this, the rest of the details will become known. Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Was there an unknown history of drug abuse? The answers to these questions will become part of the legend, and Heath Ledger will be enlisted into that ghoulish gallery of movie stars who, for one reason or another, died a good half-century ahead of schedule.
But before that happens - before the false hand-wringing begins on the nightly entertainment shows - before the interviews with ex-girlfriends reveal unknown truths that are probably false - and before the grave diggers show up with their microphones and cameras and their heads that can't furrow in fake grief because of all the botox injections - it might be worthwhile to take a moment to remember why exactly this particular 28-year-old rates an obituary in every major newspaper on the planet today.
Like few who ever lived, much less lived to be 28, Heath Ledger left behind moments and images that were guaranteed even Tuesday - even a week ago, when he was presumably healthy and had the world before him - to outlive his mortal life. When I got the news, I immediately flashed on one of them.
In "Brokeback Mountain," having said goodbye to Jake Gyllenhaal after their summer together - which is the only thing they'll ever have in their lives, and they seem to know it - he walks stoically away, then enters the frame as he passes an alley. In the background is the sky. Limitless. He stops, enters the alley and becomes a silhouette. He puts his head against the wall and sobs, struggling to hide his face with his hat. He curses. He punches the wall. He yells angrily at someone who passes by and stops to look. And two seconds later we see him in close-up, looking boyish and yet somehow like the world has just closed up, standing at the altar getting married.
"Brokeback Mountain" also was where he met actress Michelle Williams, with whom he had a daughter, Matilda, and lived with until the two split up last year.
This year, Ledger was seen in "I'm Not There," where he played one of the Bob Dylans and had just finished filming a sequel for "Batman Begins" in which he plays the Joker.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Ledger had an old-fashioned manliness - the kind that seems to have fled America and gone south in recent years, as far south as Australia. (He was born there, in Perth, in 1979.) But unlike most of the old-fashioned manly stars of America's macho period, Ledger was at his best playing men in turmoil, men in trouble, men suffering from deep wounds to the spirit. At 28, he had 25 prime casting years ahead of him. Just to be selfish for a minute, think of how that talent may have grown.
The Hollywood of today doesn't nurture acting talent. That is, it doesn't look for roles that explore the actors' soul. But even accepting that, just by chance and the law of averages, just with a little dumb luck, Ledger should have had two or three or five or six more films in his life that challenged him the way "Brokeback Mountain" challenged him. I think that would have been Ledger's career, from here on out: A combination of OK movies in which he played men who were as magnificent as he looked. And better movies, in which he played men whose imposing physical presence and locked-down stoicism were a façade for an emotional life of desperation and helplessness.
Instead of looking forward, we're forced to look back - to the fragile young man he played in "Monster's Ball," who shoots himself in a fit of anguish. Or to "Casanova" and those scenes when the great seducer discovers his capacity to love one woman. Or to movies like "Ned Kelly," those ones with nothing much to recommend them besides what I once called Ledger's "big-slab-of-a-guy magnetism."
There's no way to make sense of this. No way to end an appreciation like this on an uplift when the news is so sad. If there's something positive to be said, it's that the best work Ledger left behind will last forever, and the rest is already forgotten.
