A moving portrait of an actor
Documentary explores Heath Ledger’s talented, driven and ultimately tragic life
Moving to a wider release after a première at the Tribeca film festival in New York, this rather standard-format documentary should really be called He Is Heath Ledger.
Co-directors Adrian Buitenhuis and Derik Murray interview an impressive cadre of Ledger’s family and friends — though not former partner Michelle Williams, mother to their 11-year-old daughter, Matilda.
But it remains a moving and informative picture of a man who was a chess champion, a budding director — he was planning to shoot an adaptation of Walter Tevis’s chess novel The Queen’s Gambit when he died — and a literal whirlwind: Many of his home movies show him spinning in circles, seemingly unable to stay still.
It also reminds us it’s been almost 10 years since the talented Aussie was found unconscious in his bed by his housekeeper on the afternoon of Jan. 22, 2008. He was pronounced dead 45 minutes later. He was not yet 30 and had recently completed a turn as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, a role that won him a posthumous Oscar.
The doc ignores Ledger’s early work in Australian TV — like many of his countrymen he appeared on Home and Away — and picks up with his role in 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), which brought him to Hollywood,
where his house became a hub for young actors, especially Australians.
(It’s suggested that Adrian Grenier did “research” there before starring in TV’s Entourage.)
What emerges is a portrait of a performer so driven that he would often literally collapse after filming.
Shooting Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, he joked that when it was done he would “drop to the ground dead, for a year.”
His statement was tragically prophetic.