It's all true.
The late Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in "The Dark Knight" is every bit as good as advertised, if not better.
It is a completely different role, of course, but Ledger gives himself as completely to the Joker as Daniel Day-Lewis did to a morally bankrupt oil man in his Oscar-winning turn in "There Will Be Blood." The immersion is complete and made all the more harrowing because the Joker is utterly corrupt in every way, including physically. His tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a viper's - only vipers don't lick their ruined faces while spitting out insane threats.
The Joker describes himself as "an agent of chaos"- fitting, because the film itself is chaotic. Bigger, louder and darker than "Batman Begins" (director Christopher Nolan's first take on the Caped Crusader), "The Dark Knight" groans under the weight of its hefty baggage of explosions, chases, explosions again. This is not to say that it isn't a good film - it is. It simply would have benefited from a little more order, more of a plan. Those are words that make the Joker cringe, but give audiences a stronger foothold than "The Dark Knight" offers.
Christian Bale is back as Bruce Wayne, whose alter ego, Batman, has spawned copycat vigilantes. But there's a new sheriff in town: district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who is so fearless in his fight against crime that Bruce daydreams about a time when the Batman might get out of the crime-fighting business and leave it to more legitimate practitioners. Of course, he's not perfect, at least in Bruce's eyes. Dent is now romancing Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in for Katie Holmes), the love of Bruce's life.
Still, grudgingly winning the trust of police Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Batman, Dent is more than willing to shake things up. It seems that things may be taking a turn for the better in Gotham.
Enter the Joker, slouching. There are bad guys aplenty in Gotham. The Joker is different. He doesn't care about money or power. He is, as he puts it, a dog chasing a car - he wouldn't know what to do with it if he caught it. There is no greater motive involved with him than invoking terror, for the sheer, insane delight he finds in it. As Alfred (Michael Caine), Bruce's loyal butler puts it, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
The Joker is unhinged, so much so that he recklessly steals money from the mob. Does he think he can just blithely get away with it, one mobster asks?
"Yeah," is his simple, shrugged reply. And he's right.
The Joker is a mystery. No one knows anything about him. He offers his own backstory to whomever he's menacing, but it's a different one every time. That's a wise choice - he exists almost as a force instead of a real person, a terrifying force, with nothing to lose. He's not afraid to die; in fact, he begs to. But, as he notes derisively, everyone has a line they won't cross, a rule they won't break.
Except him.
His corruption is contagious. It infects almost everyone he comes into contact with, because to catch a man who observes no rules, his pursuers must ignore them as well. The question is not whether those who are ostensibly good will do bad things to achieve their ends, but rather how far they will go - and whether they will be able to come back. Not all will.
Bale again captures the tortured duality of Bruce Wayne and Batman. What will the cost of stopping the Joker be, and is he willing to pay it? Dent's duality becomes even more pronounced than Batman's, of course, when he becomes Two-Face. Eckhart captures the tragedy behind the character, though that part of the story is rushed, shoehorned in with Batman and the Joker's inevitable final clash.
That's too bad, because corrupting Dent is the Joker's second-greatest triumph. Batman, naturally, would be the ultimate prize. Yet both men realize their lot in life - freaks. "You complete me," the Joker tells Batman, in a twisted variation of "Jerry Maguire."
Ledger is magnetic. No matter how much mayhem is going on around him, your eyes are drawn to him in every scene. His presence, or the Joker's, at least, hovers even when he's absent. It's a stunning performance, more explosive than any of the bombs or crashes his character unleashes on Gotham.
Whatever trepidation Ledger might have had about taking on such an iconic role, he blows right past it brilliantly, carrying "The Dark Knight" along with him. The irony of his loss is that in his biggest and best role, his character, while demented beyond repair, is so alive.
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and some menace.
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