The American Spectator

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In Memoriam

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GIVE THE RECENTLY deceased his due: He was a good, versatile actor and he had a certain amount of guts too. It cannot be easy to play a part in a film like Brokeback Mountain, knowing you'll be on the receiving end of "steers and queers" jokes for years to come.

But his death, like most, is a tragedy for those who knew him intimately. For the rest of us he was a flickering image on a screen, soon to be replaced by another.

Whether or not he suffered for his art the awkward truth is that most of his films were pretty weak. He appeared in Mel Gibson's The Patriot, in which we learned that our nation was created not from a desire for independence but out of the uncontrollable urge to butcher those British bastards who killed Gibson's son, damn them.

His other films include the woefully misbegotten, PC-crippled remake of the classic British Empire story the Four Feathers, the hugely overrated downer Monster's Ball, and The Order, a film about a conspiracy in the Catholic Church so preposterous that it makes The Da Vinci Code seem plausible.

Brokeback Mountain was vastly overrated too. It contained about 45 minutes of genuine drama -- about enough for a "very special episode" of a weekly TV drama -- and then proceeded to stretch it over 2 and a half tedious hours of screen time. Give director Ang Lee credit, though; he knew how to make the audience feel the agony the characters in the film were feeling.

I doubt many of his films will linger on in collective memory after the shock of his dying so young passes. He was not the voice of his generation. There's no shame in that. Very few people are. Ledger was just an actor who didn't know his time was shorter than he thought.

As EW tells us, Ledger's death was "an unlikely end for a star deliberately removed from the Hollywood maelstrom that seemed to consume the likes of River Phoenix and, more recently, Brad Renfro."

To which one can only respond, "Brad who?"

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