Joking Aside, It's a Tragedy

Just watching a couple of chameleons getting up to stuff on the telly. No, it's not one of the saucier bits of David Attenborough's latest wildlife documentary. It's The Dark Knight, the second instalment of the most recent Batman saga and personally, I'm a big fan of the latest incarnation of the Crimefighting Codpiece.

Just like the latest crack at James Bond, the revival of this film hero has been a massive success and driven not only by the mindless appeal of the franchise, but by an intelligent, exciting and affectionate new approach. Some critics weren't as pleased by The Dark Knight as they were by Batman Begins, but I feel that's rather a nit-picky attitude. Neither film is a timeless classic, but both are highly entertaining and worthy of praise for a number of reasons. But for two key things, I think The Dark Knight just edges it.

Those two things are Heath Ledger and Gary Oldman. Obviously, there has been an Oscar-winning hoohah about Ledger's performance as the thoroughly unhinged Joker and one couldn't help but speculate that his posthumous victory might have been at least partly secured by his untimely death just after the film's completion. But for an actor that had previously struck me as being rather vanilla in his prior career, Ledger absolutely explodes into a human catherine wheel in this film, giving a performance that both amuses, tantalises and bloody petrifies the viewer. This role gave him the chance to unleash his potential in a comparable but entirely opposite way to Brokeback Mountain - the story of country folk in love was an exercise in muted agony, while the Joker allowed his inner mentalist to spiral outward in ever increasing circles. His eye-popping performance as the hare-brained villain was truly extraordinary and an indicator of his true talent, which makes his early departure even more tragic.

Gary Oldman is a safe pair of hands in any role, but he is one of those actors who has a remarkable ability to morph into a physically different entity from one film to the next. His character does not make his debut in The Dark Knight, but he does get to spread his wings a little and show the vulnerable, hysterical side of his downtrodden cop (even if he is forced to deliver a particularly cringeworthy monologue at the end).

I recently saw a very young Oldman in Prick Up Your Ears, the true story of tragic playwrights Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, and realised how exciting it must have been to see this astonishing actor in one of his earliest roles. I had much the same thought when I saw Dog Day Afternoon, which provided an early stage for a baby-faced Al Pacino, and wished I had been in the cinema audience when this human firecracker first exploded onto the screen.

Hopefully, Oldman will continue to enrich our cultural lives for decades to come, though sadly Ledger will surprise us no more. But that is perhaps the greatest beauty of film. Nothing - whether a person, story or feeling - ever truly dies.