First Look: The Dark Knight
LOS ANGELES (AP) - June 27, 2008 A press screening of the "Batman Begins" sequel Thursday night
had the audience cackling along with Ledger's Joker, a depraved
creature utterly without conscience whom the late actor played with
gleeful anarchy.
At times sounding like a cross between tough guy James Cagney in
a gangster flick and Philip Seymour Hoffman's fastidious Truman
Capote, Ledger elevates Batman's No. 1 nemesis to a place even Jack
Nicholson did not take him in 1989's "Batman."
Nicholson's Joker was campy and clever. Ledger's Joker is an
all-out terror, definitely funny but with a lunatic moral mission
to drag all of Gotham, the city Batman thanklessly protects, down
to his own dim assessment of humanity.
Spewing alternate personal histories for how he got the horrible
scars on his face, the Joker hides behind distorted clown makeup
that looks like a chalk drawing left out in the rain.
The Joker masterminds a series of escalating abductions,
assassination attempts, murders and bombings, all aimed at calling
out Batman (Christian Bale) and proving to the tormented vigilante
hero that they are two sides of the same coin.
"You complete me," the Joker tells Batman, dementedly
borrowing Tom Cruise's sappy romantic line from "Jerry Maguire."
Long before Ledger's death in January from an accidental
prescription drug overdose, his collaborators on "The Dark
Knight" had been describing his performance as a new high in the
art of villainy for a comic-book adaptation.
Director Christopher Nolan, reuniting with "Batman Begins"
star Bale, told The Associated Press earlier this year that Ledger
came through with precisely what he had envisioned for this take on
the Joker, "a young, anarchic presence, somebody who is genuinely
threatening to the establishment."
"It was though they'd taken the Joker and all the colors,
everything of it, and just kind of put him through a Turkish prison
for a decade or so," Bale told the AP. "It's like he's gone
through that personal hell to come out being this, if you can even
call him mad, at the end here."
A best-actor Academy Award nominee for "Brokeback Mountain,"
Ledger has earned fresh Oscar buzz for "The Dark Knight," which
could land him in the supporting-actor race.
Running just over two and a half hours, "The Dark Knight" is a
true crime epic. Throughout, the Joker's bag of tricks is
bottomless, twisted to the point of horror-flick sick.
"Some men aren't looking for anything logical," Michael
Caine's butler Alfred tells Bruce, who's trying to decipher the
Joker's motives. "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Come July 18, when "The Dark Knight" lands in theaters, the
world will be watching Ledger burn up the screen.