A late icon turns the camera on himself in 'I Am Heath Ledger'
Though he'd been kicking around for a few years already, most audiences first took notice of Heath Ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You. From then on, he was never out of the public eye for long – if he wasn't burning up the screen, he was covering the tabloids.
In the new documentary I Am Heath Ledger, though, we get to see the late actor as few of us have seen him before – through the lens of his own camera.
Directors Adrian Buitenhuis and Derik Murray cover all the usual bases, pulling together clips of Leger's performances and interviews with his colleagues and loved ones. But the film is never more interesting, or moire poignant, than when Ledger turns the camera on himself.
Ledger, it turns out, was constantly documenting his own existence. Some of the footage is totally mundane: Ledger jumping around in his living room, Ledger zooming in on his own feet. Some of it shows him experimenting, even if that just means fiddling with the camcorder's special effects en route to Burning Man.
In one of the most memorable sequences, Ledger points the camera at his own face as he wanders through a hallway, whispering improvised dialogue about a supervillain chasing after him. It's weird and charming, and feels disarmingly intimate thanks to the close-up angle and the lack of polish. It feels like a joke between friends, not a de facto short film by one of the most famous actors of his generation.
It's in moments like these that we most clearly see the "real" Heath Ledger that his friends and family describe in their talking head interviews: an insatiably curious artist who was "always creating" and "lived every moment to the fullest."
The descriptions themselves, though, have a distancing effect. I Am Heath Ledger is an almost relentlessly positive portrayal of the late actor, tending toward effusive but vague praise of Ledger as a person and Ledger as an artist. It feels like we're listening to a bunch of strangers talk about another stranger – which is exactly what we're doing, of course, but probably isn't the impression that the filmmakers were trying to make.
That said, it's tough to blame Ledger's loved ones for wanting to remember him at his best. Some of the most devastating moments in the documentary come when Ledger's family recalls his death. "The world did find out before we did," one of his sisters remembers sadly. Ledger's father, Kim, notes that while in some ways, they were like any other family who'd lost a child, "we had to live our feelings in the public eye." No wonder they aren't eager to open up any more than they have to.
But it means that there's a real limit to what I Am Heath Ledger can offer. Gossip hounds won't find much to feast on here; the film deals with Ledger's demons very gingerly when it deals with them at all. Indeed, everyone involved takes pains to contradict the popular rumors that The Dark Knight pushed Ledger to the edge.
"A lot of people would like to think it was a strenuous process for him," says one of the talking heads, before going on to stress that it was far from it. "He was in the best place of his life" when he died, insists another.
Meanwhile, those hoping for a more analytical look at Ledger's life and career will also come away disappointed. Colleagues show up to reminisce about how talented he was, but there's not much examination of his place in Hollywood history – his relationship with his peers, or the particular brand of 2000s-era masculinity that he reflected, or the way his onscreen persona evolved over time.
In fact, no one is likely to learn much new at all about Ledger here. While there are some choice anecdotes (fellow Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn delivers a particularly entertaining one about Ledger's "pre-Entourage entourage"), there are no big bombshells. The film assumes you're already familiar with the broad strokes of Ledger's biography. If you didn't already know that he had dated Naomi Watts, for example, you won't find out here, even as she shows up to praise his talent.
So who, then, is I Am Heath Ledger for? One of the very first faces we see in the film is that of musician Ben Harper, who's clearly still devastated by the loss of his friend. "I honestly think the universe is off its axis," he says, sounding anguished. "I'm not supposed to be talking with you."
I Am Heath Ledger is catharsis for those who feel the way that Harper does – those who still miss him dearly, those who just want to see him again, those who still can't quite believe he's gone. It's not a movie about his legacy. It's a movie about, as Harper puts it, how "some people are just bigger than the world has room for."
