Ledger brilliant as ‘The Joker’

LOS ANGELES – The buzz over Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in ‘The Dark Knight’ for the last several months was justified.

With his final full film role, Ledger delivers what may be remembered as the finest performance of his career. A press screening of the ‘Batman Begins’ sequel on 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’.In an interview earlier this year, director Christopher Nolan, reuniting with ‘Batman Begins’ star Bale, told The Associated Press 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”.Nampa-APA press screening of the ‘Batman Begins’ sequel on 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’.In an interview earlier this year, director Christopher Nolan, reuniting with ‘Batman Begins’ star Bale, told The Associated Press 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”.Nampa-AP