Why So Serious?

I'd written this post last August, just edited it...

I still remember the moment when I first read about Heath Ledger's death. 23rd January, 6.30 in the morning, I was at Mulund station, waiting for the train. Flipped the folded paper after reading the headline and there it was, the tiny headline which made me do a double take : 'Brokeback Mountain star dies at 28'
My jaw dropped and I had to read the article 3 times before the whole thing sunk in. Ledger had been found dead, lying next to his bed, by his maid. The cause was later determined to be an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

I have seen very few movies of his. So when The Dark Knight came out - the latest Batman film and the last movie Ledger completed, I looked around desperately for someone to go with to see the movie, which had garnered rave reviews. After delaying for weeks, I finally grabbed M, one of my best friends, on a very wet, cold afternoon and went to see the movie. And what I saw blew me away.

Christian Bale as Batman was good enough, but his face was concealed behind the Bat mask for about a third of the film, so I couldn't really appreciate his acting. But Ledger(playing Batman's arch nemesis-the Joker), who had burst upon the screen in the beginning of the movie itself, was a force to reckon with. His beautiful (OK, handsome) face hidden under ghostly white and red makeup, green tipped grimy blond hair, shabby purple suit, voice modulated to sound whiny & sinister, a lopsided walk and posture all culminate to bring on screen one of the most impressive performances seen in recent cinema (How many movies adapted from graphic novels can say that?)
He was quite creepy, with all the shuffling around, the nasal laugh and no apparent conscience. And of course, his "why so serious?" is definitely the line of the year.

On a high after the hugely successful Brokeback mountain which garnered him an Oscar nomination for best actor in a supporting role, Ledger had, with this role in Batman, completed dabbling in almost all genre of cinema - romance, drama, action, science fiction...One can one ponder where this actor would have been 5 years from now. He might go down in film history as one of those great, would have beens, a la James Dean and Leaf Phoenix

Heath Ledger has, quite literally, delivered the performance of a lifetime (reducing Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the same character in one of the earlier versions of the batman movies to a mere caricature). I smell an Oscar (Hey, he won it). What is the saddest part is that it will be his first and last.