Good Night, Heath

The best way to understand how people used to watch movies is to go to a film festival and spend ten or more hours every day for two or three weeks sitting in a movie theater, absorbed less by one individual film than by the entire strange and glorious better-than-real life behind the screen. Movies in theaters are so expensive now - $10 in the big city, maybe a couple dollars less for a matinee. When you pay that much - say nothing about popcorn and soda, and who wants to see a movie without popcorn - a movie has to really blow your mind to earn that money back. Not back in the old nickelodeon days, when you paid for a double bill or stayed all day in the same theater. People didn't used to see a movie; they went to the movies. It was a destination.

That's what the Berlin Film Festival was like, two years ago now, when I skipped two weeks of classes and watched some 35 films. There were foreign films with electronica-chic scores and handheld photography, there were big Hollywood productions; the bad films seemed interesting, the good films seemed extraordinary. I had the best movie day of my life when I saw "Elementarteilchen," a german movie from a Houllebecq novel about depraved hilarious sexuality, and "The New World," the most beautiful movie I have ever seen, and the one I will defend to my dying day against everyone who says it's pretentious and sappy and artsy (it's all those things, and yet extraordinary). When you watch so many movies so quickly, you don't care so much about the very bad movies, and a tiny little gem can stick fiendishly in some small part of your mind for years to come.

So it is with "Candy," a tiny little film from Australia about two young people in love with each other and with heroin. Even in 2006, it seemed strange that someone was making a movie about heroin - "Requiem for a Dream" closed the book on the subject, with its hypertense visual style, its you-are-there-injecting-this quick cuts, its beautiful ugliness. "Candy," by comparison, was slight. Heath Ledger played a loser who somehow got a beautiful blond played by Abbie Cornish to fall in love with him; Geoffrey Rush was your typical elder intellectual drug enabler. They start out happy and descend. Every drug movie ever.

Except it wasn't. "Candy" was different. You realize that in a sequence that comes right around the middle of the movie, when Heath and Abbie are out of money and need to score some smack quick before the shakes start up. Heath goes to a park and hangs out looking whorish. A man drives up. The rain is coming down. A price is agreed upon. This is right out of "Boogie Nights," out of "Requiem" - the horrific image of giving up your body, letting other people force you to do unspeakable things, for the glory of the drug.

But then something shifts. The trick goes to the bathroom - Heath notices he left his wallet, snags it, and races off to a bank. The turn is so quick, unexpected, and cathartic that people in the theater started laughing - not in the least because, in the span of just a few minutes, you see Heath's slacker-loser-addict go from an absolute low point to a thrilling high. But a problem - the bank won't let him take out any money without his security number. Solution - Heath calls the guy (I forget how he got his number), affects the voice of a dull functionary, and manages to coax the number out of the guy through casual, hilarious subterfuge. Then he's back to his gorgeous blonde addict girl, big old grin on his face - Baby, You Won't Believe What I Did Today.

I wish I could describe the scene better. It's been so long. "Candy" came and went from American theaters very quickly - it was the movie Heath Ledger acted in before he got the nomination for "Brokeback," and its slightness was therefore understandable. Here was a guy who had been slaving away in thankless tiny roles in indie films (the suicidal son in "Monster's Ball") and even more thankless roles in big-budget moves (the suicidally noble son in "The Patriot.") He had worked with Terry Gilliam on Gilliam's worst film before his next one. About the only really memorable roles Heath Ledger had had before "Brokeback" were "A Knight's Tale" and "Ten Things I Hate About You." "A Knight's Tale" is that rare film that you either love for its crappiness or hate for its mediocrity - even people who like it have to admit that it's central conceit (medieval jousting set to rock music) simply doesn't work as well as it should.

"Ten Things I Hate About You" was much better - about the only movie that still sticks out from the late-90s teen movie boom. You have to understand that Heath in "Ten Things" is just fucking cool. Not that fake constipated cool that bland lameasses like Freddie Prinze Jr. and Paul Walker radiated. Real, true cool. That film started the career of Julia Stiles and created the myth that Julia Stiles could actually act - it seems obvious now, almost a decade later, that half the energy in her performance in that movie comes from Heath, whose laconic advances break through her teflon coated frown, challenging her in a way that she's never been challenged by her onscreen men since (including, yes, Freddie Prinze Jr.) Or maybe that's unfair to Stiles - maybe it's just that there are so few actors today capable of generating real chemistry onscreen with intelligent actresses. (It would've been great to see what Heath could have done paired up with Katharine Heigl, who is always much smarter than her dialogue.)

After "Brokeback," Heath took some time off, to marry Michelle Williams, raise a child with Michelle Williams, and finally, divorce Michelle Williams. That next great role never came. He was good in "I'm Not There" as a famous actor beginning to suspect he's nowhere near as good as he thinks he is, who lost his marriage for his fame. He looks terrifying, and wonderful, in the previews for "The Dark Knight." But no matter how good he is - how strange to think that some small part of the man that died earlier today might still have been the Joker - there's no way it can compare to that last scene in "Brokeback." Even pretty people get the blues; even handsome cowboys can find themselves, at the end of their life, all alone in some messy little apartment, left to ponder lost loves and missed chances. Where did it all go wrong? A better question - Why does it always go wrong?

Good Night, Heath. You were good, and you would have been better. You deserved a more noble final performance than a grainy video on defamer. You deserved better, period. We all got it coming, kid.