Heartbreak mountain
By Harry Eyres
Published: February 9 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 9 2008 02:00
Sometimes a premature passing hits you hard. So it was for me, and I guess many thousands of others, with the sudden death of the actor Heath Ledger at 28. I did not know Ledger and my acquaintance with his work was limited to a single screen performance but his portrayal of Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain was so moving, so astonishingly mature, that it seemed the start of one of the truly great movie acting careers.
This wasn't at all like watching James Dean, who never had a chance to grow up, in Rebel Without a Cause . This was marvelling at a 25-year-old charting the course of a many-chaptered life, from prudish inexperience through passion, marriage, fatherhood and a strange kind of accepting calm. I'm not sure there has ever been anything quite like it. The comparison that comes to my mind is not James Dean but Franz Schubert. Ang Lee himself, in a most affecting tribute, said that Ledger's Ennis was "not just remarkable but a kind of miracle". Working with Ledger had been one of the purest joys of his life - his death was "heartbreaking", said Lee.
The word was chosen with precision, not the usual looseness with which we speak of breaking hearts.
Heartbreaking was not just Ledger's death but the life and the work. The point of Ennis Del Mar is that he breaks hearts; not just the heart of Jack Twist (in any other film Jake Gyllenhaal's performance would have captured every honour) but that of his wife Alma (the superb Michelle Williams) and his girlfriend Cassie.
Cold, callous and cynical are adjectives often applied to those who break hearts; Shakespeare describes such chilly fish best, in sonnet 74: "They that have power to hurt and will do none/ That do not do the thing they most do show/ Who, moving others, are themselves as stone/ Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow." But Ennis Del Mar is not one of those cold heartbreakers. What makes him both irresistible and devastating is the depth of baffled tenderness in him; the love that he can only fitfully express in his relationship with Jack Twist but that shines through at the end of the film in his relationship with his daughter Alma Jr (yet another magnificent performance, in this film with no dud notes, from Kate Mara).
Ennis is one of those people who, for all sorts of reasons, are opaque to themselves. This is what Heath Ledger so marvellously conveys, in his slow-burning, laconic performance: a man struggling over the course of a whole life to come to terms, not so much with his sexuality (I do not see this only as a gay film but more universally as a film about blocked love) as with his tremendous need for love and, ultimately, with his ability to give love.
"He brought to the role of Ennis", said Ang Lee, "more than any of us could have imagined - a thirst for life, for love, and for truth, and a vulnerability that made everyone who knew him love him."
What is heartbreaking, then, about Ennis, is his ultimately futile resistance to all those things which Ledger knew and had to express beneath the surface of Ennis's taciturnity. Ennis, unlike Jack, is afraid of heartbreak. In this he resembles another Shakespeare character, opaque to himself ("he ever but slenderly knew himself") and fearful of emotional shattering ("this heart/ Shall break into a hundred thousands flaws/ Or ere I'll weep"). But for all his resistance and fear, Lear too must suffer heartbreak, and breakdown, before he reaches the heartbreaking acknowledgement of his love for Cordelia, and for his "poor Fool".
In tragedies such as King Lear , the acknowledgment of love comes too late. The full acknowledgement of the depth and power of Ennis's love for Jack comes too late for Jack. But it does come, in the scene near the end of the movie in which Ennis goes to visit Jack's parents to collect his ashes. It is a scene directed and acted with Ang Lee's trademark combination of decorous restraint and overwhelming emotional power.
All is conveyed through the subtlest of gestures and changes of expression: the hand on the shoulder and the smile of kindness and comprehension on the face of Roberta Maxwell's Mrs Twist; Ennis's expression when he sees Jack's blood-stained jacket.
Finally, you feel, Ennis's heart is well and truly broken. And the broken-hearted Ennis will no longer be violent and uncomprehending in the face of love.
The message of King Lear , and of Brokeback Mountain , is that we must all have our hearts broken. In some strange way, these profound works do not merely convey but also enact that message; they perform a homeopathic heartbreak that leaves us miraculously breathing, more deeply and richly than before.
If only Heath Ledger had not had to break our hearts again, in a room in Manhattan, not a film-set or a stage.
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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