Stars aren't born—they're made. But legends? They can only be born when they have the ability to be remade. Screen legends endure precisely because their images remain endlessly confounding, continually offering up unexpected aspects of their allure. When Heath Ledger passed away on January 22, 2008, he died a star and was reborn a legend. It wasn't just that he died in circumstances that quickly lent themselves to become tabloid fodder, nor that he was gone mere months before the world would see what is arguably one of the most iconic screen performances of the 21st century. It's that, despite being a household name, Ledger had left his persona an intentional cipher—all the better to allow posthumous reassessments to dominate what would become his personal and acting legacy.
In his short career as an actor, the Australian actor was a reluctant heartthrob in films like 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale, a serious-minded prestige actor taking roles in ambitious projects like The Patriot and Brokeback Mountain, a fearless performer willing to go out on a limb for Catherine Hardwicke or Terry Gilliam. But mostly, he was a charmingly inscrutable off-screen presence. He not only shied away from the press but often publicly clashed with the paparazzi in his native Australia. All fans had to go on were the performances he was leaving off-screen. Like that other talented young Hollywood actor who was taken too soon and who became an icon for a rebellious post-war youth, Ledger quickly became embalmed in a mythified image that undoubtedly had little to do with the talented actor.
His posthumous Oscar win for his searing performance as The Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight all but assured him a place in the history books. Here was an actor in his prime, about to have the biggest hit of his career robbed of the ability to see everything he'd been working towards come to fruition. Yet rumors that his unhinged take on Batman's infamous villain was what drove the insomniac actor to the edge and precipitated his accidental prescription drug overdose lent his life (and death) an all too tidy narrative arc. Before audiences could see what kind of career path the actor would continue creating for himself, obituaries and fan tributes alike began to fill in the gaps to create the image of Heath Ledger as the defining actor of his generation, one crippled, perhaps, by the pressure of his own unbounded talent.
The story fell into well-worn narratives about trailblazing icons gone too soon and tortured artists consumed by their own inner demons. It was, you could say, the stuff legends are made of. Besides, it was all there for anyone to see. His indelible performance in Nolan's film was so electric that it couldn't have been easy to shake it off. Moreover, given Ledger's guarded privacy, it was easy to project onto his star-making performances—as a laconic cowboy or as a deranged force of chaos—a clue to the inner life the actor often denied his fans.
Enter I Am Heath Ledger, which premieres tonight on Spike. As a revisionist take on Ledger's life and career, the Derik Murray and Adrian Buitenhuis-directed documentary is unsurprisingly persuasive.The film aims to humanise Ledger. His family beams with pride talking about his early artistic ambitions. Childhood friends share playful anecdotes of the adventurous young actor who moved to Hollywood on a whim. Fellow actors cannot help but gush about his generosity even as he became a bona fide leading man.
Yet, for all these personal remembrances (which, quite conspicuously, don't include that of his former partner, Michelle Williams), I Am Heath Ledger cannot help but add to the mystique surrounding the Australian actor. You can see it in the hyperbolic language used to describe him. He was, to borrow one of the many clichés bandied about by its many talking heads, a star that shone too bright, bigger than the world had room for. With seemingly unlimited access to the late actor's home movies and personal photography, the doc proposes that Ledger's thirst for life and passion for art of any kind were signs of an ever curious, hyperactive young man who was living on borrowed time—as if he knew, one of his friends unironically suggests, he wouldn't have enough time to accomplish all that he wanted.
This push and pull between Ledger the legend and Ledger the man is made even more complicated by the fact that much of the footage in the doc was shot by the actor himself. As part of his insatiable need to document his life (he was, apparently, a Millennial artist avant-la-lettre), Ledger always kept a camera by his side. He took polaroids of his friends. He recorded himself making faces to better understand what he could accomplish in front of the camera. Sometimes he improvised scenes by himself, turning a boring late-night hotel jaunt into a thriller-like scenario. And more often than not, he was just trying to turn his eye to what was around him.
The actor, who was often uncomfortable in press junkets and who was freaked out by the way movies like A Knight's Tale were marketed by selling, quite literally, his image—the poster featured only his face and the promise that he/his character "would rock you"—was, we learn in the film, an artist obsessed with mediated images. The sight of Ledger with a camera in hand, often capturing his own reflection in a mirror, becomes the signature pose of the late actor, one that complicates what we know about him and what we should make of a mediated memorial like I Am Heath Ledger.
Just as the recent Marlon Brando documentary Listen to Me Marlon did, Murray and Buitenhuis' film tries to wrestle Ledger's star image from critics and fans alike and return it to the actor himself. But this fabricated private peek at the Brokeback Mountain actor only serves to underline how futile such exercises can be. All it does is show how elusive the very idea of "Heath Ledger" has become. He's now a legend in his own right, an heir apparent to the Deans and the Monroes before him. His story will continue to be written on top and against these kind of authorized biographical projects. For the more I Am Heath Ledger tries to claim the authority its title presumes, the more it stokes the myth-making efforts it's so clearly trying to revise.
