Mark my words – Heath Ledger will soon be as big
as Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves. Bigger than Keanu, in
fact, I predict, because he has more of a personality;
he has an inner life that Reeves conspicuously lacks,
or at least cannot transmit beyond the barrier of his
handsome features. Ledger’s name is odd
(simultaneous images of moors and accounting books
spring to mind), but he’s got the look; certainly, he
has the looks, a broad-faced beauty that is as
undeniable as it is unusual, and he has the charm. Oh,
and the body of a Greek god.
Ledger is Australian, though what we’ve seen him in
thus far has been very American – 10 Things I Hate
About You, the high-school reworking of The Taming
of the Shrew, and the War of Independence flag-
waver The Patriot. So it’s good to see him in
something from his native land.
Two Hands, made before 10 Things I Hate About You
and The Patriot, is clearly not a big-budget picture.
There are no whizz-bang effects or interesting camera
movements; the film has that ungraded, slightly
washed-out look that makes one imagine at times that
it might have been shot on 16mm and blown up –
and that it would probably look better on video. It has
one of the ugliest credit-title sequences I’ve ever seen
(like a particularly bad heavy-metal video), and
contains some script-stumbles, but Two Hands has a
warmth missing from many a movie with 10 times the
budget.
Ledger plays Jimmy, an amateur boxer employed as a
tout for a Sydney sex joint. He is offered a stab at
social mobility by local hoodlum Pando (Bryan
Brown), who asks him to run an errand for him. This
is Jimmy’s chance to go up a rung or two on the
ladder of the criminal underworld. Except that, thanks
in part to a coincidental demise (which is bleakly
hilarious) and in part to Jimmy’s own distractibility,
he screws it up, and finds himself on the run from
Pando and his heavies.
What follows is a humorous thriller of mishaps, in
which poor Jimmy must try to put things right with
Pando while staying out of his way, as well as pursue
his interest in a girl from out of town (Rose Byrne).
The story is partly narrated by Jimmy’s dead brother, a
device that could have been developed a bit further,
but it serves.
The scenes with Ledger and Byrne, as they make
tentative moves toward romance, are awkward. They
are doubtless meant to be awkward and funny, but
they are just awkward. Byrne is not much good, with a
laugh almost as irritating as her sobs. Luckily there is
not an awful lot of her, and the slack is taken up by
the rest of the cast, with Brown, for instance,
delivering a superbly underplayed performance as the
Scrabble-playing, kortbroek-wearing crime lord.
But the movie is Ledger’s. Seen in the same week as
Gone in 60 Seconds, it supplies what that spectacular
car chase lacks – a human centre. Gone in 60
Seconds, for all its thrills, or perhaps because of
them, seems entirely devoid of real people; Nicolas
Cage and his cohorts are ciphers, cardboard cut-outs
flung about by the mayhem of the action. They are
barely there at all.
Ledger is very much there in Two Hands, and he
manages it without the strenuous concentration of his
fellow-Australian Russell Crowe, who has made it so
big in The Insider and Gladiator. Ledger has a
lightness, a hint of irony, that Crowe, for all his
prowess, cannot muster. In one scene in Two Hands,
Ledger telegraphs his confusion with a series of facial
movements (a scrunch of the brow, a purse of the lips)
that are both amusing and endearing. It’s not a
moment of genius, or even perhaps of particular note,
but it gives us something real and personal, and we
realise he has the rare quality of simple likeability.
You’ll see – he’s gonna be a big, big star.