Seed Newsvine"...I'm A Man Of My Word."
Daniel Day-Lewis dedicated his SAG Best Actor award this past Sunday to the late Heath Ledger (Oscar nominee for "Brokeback Mountain"), honoring Ledger's distinct body of work; he also cited the fascinating character Ledger portrayed in "Monster's Ball." As Day-Lewis spoke during the press conference about Ledger's death ultimately being "none of our business" I felt greatly appreciative towards the remark.
During the immediate days following Ledger's untimely death, a flood of media speculation circled around the notion of whether or not he committed suicide or if it was related to his split from Michelle Williams. And if you weren't watching TV, then the online fan community bombarded message boards with outcries on the fate of the upcoming Batman sequel, "The Dark Knight"--to which Ledger is playing The Joker.
Maybe I'm just weird, but the last thing on my mind was the fate of a comic book franchise, that will inevitably continue on. My initial reaction to the death was simple shock that then receded into sadness. I never held Ledger to a godly status, but I was convinced that he was in the beginning stages of setting himself into an elite class of thespians (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox for example) that worked outside the box of Hollywood formula; actors that stuck to their guns and achieved a more artful success. We shouldn't focus on his personal life--we have no say or position to do so. Instead, it would prove more useful to focus on the art and the craft of Ledger. I thought of Ledger's performance as one of the incarnations of Bob Dylan in the masterful "I'm Not There," and began to treasure his talent a bit more. There was something happening here.
Yet, it all ends there as well. Ledger's all-together eclectic chapters of work will find its epilogue this summer in Director Christopher Nolan's Batman film, and though no preliminary screenings have taken place, already there is an enormous sense of something special that was going on felt from just soundbites (from which this blog's title is taken) and early theatrical trailers of the film. How exciting, to have had one of the most promising of young actors to take a risk in embodying an immortalized comic book character, and going totally against norms and expectations (that's not lipstick across his cheeks...) in order to elevate material to art--which is what the artist's who will ultimately stand out aspire to do.
