Post contains spoilers. Scroll on by if you’ve been hiding under a rock and don’t want to know anything.
The love for Heath Ledger in the new Batman movie doesn’t surprise me. That you can tell, just by looking at the line of criminals in the opening scenes, which one he is just from the way he carries himself, just from the set of his shoulders … it’s remarkable, he’s remarkable, you’ve all heard it.
It’s usually the tertiary characters who wind up making a show or a film or a book or a whatever for me, somebody whose story isn’t all the way there, somebody who I can see a way in with. With Batman Begins, it was Alfred, so quiet and devastated, and Gordon, who worked, head down, and was decent because decency was what he had decided to do. When it’s three weeks later and it only then occurs to me that it wasGary Freaking Oldman as Gordon, I mean like I sat up one night while Mr. A and I were watching TV and said, out of nowhere, “Dracula?” and it scared him a little, you know an actor’s done his job. I was, if at all possible, more excited about seeing Gordon become commissioner in this sequel than I was about seeing if Christian Bale would oblige us and take his shirt off and do push-ups some more.
So I’m pleased to see Gary Oldman getting some love in amongst all the OMG HEATH flying around the Internets:
This is not your father’s Gary Oldman, the actor who built his reputation on such characters as the prince of punk-rock anarchy, Sid Vicious, presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald or Dracula himself.
In fact, Oldman has kind of become your father – a pillar of paternalism, a symbol of saintliness. The man you want covering your back, rather than the one you would never turn your back on.
With his second turn as Batman ally Gordon in “The Dark Knight,” Oldman, 50, feels as though he has finally broken ranks with the bad boys and put to rest his typecasting as a go-to guy when filmmakers needed a villain.
“No, I don’t hear it anymore. I mean look, Rolling Stone said, ‘Oldman is so skilled he makes virtue look exciting,’ ” Oldman said in an interview with The Associated Press, quoting the magazine’s review of “The Dark Knight” from memory. “You know what? That’s the best review I’ve ever had. . . . I’ll put that on my tombstone. ‘Makes virtue look exciting.’ That’s pretty good.
“In the past, I’ve had my share of good reviews, but it’s always the crazy, scary, weirdo guy. I don’t even know how it happened. Look at me. I mean, when I’m naked, I look like a bald chicken. How did I get to be a scary bad guy?”
A.