|
|
HAND IT TO
HEATH: TWO HANDS REVIEW
by Shaun
de Waal
Mark my words - Heath Ledger will soon be as big as Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves. Bigger than Keanu, in fact, I predict, because he has more of a personality; he has an inner life that Reeves conspicuously lacks, or at least cannot transmit beyond the barrier of his handsome features. Ledger's name is odd (simultaneous images of moors and accounting books spring to mind), but he's got the look; certainly, he has the looks, a broad-faced beauty that is as undeniable as it is unusual, and he has the charm. Oh, and the body of a Greek god.
Ledger is Australian, though what we've seen him in thus far has been very American - 10 Things I Hate About You, the high-school reworking of The Taming of the Shrew, and the War of Independence flag- waver The Patriot. So it's good to see him in something from his native land.
Two Hands, made before 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot, is clearly not a big-budget picture. There are no whizz-bang effects or interesting camera movements; the film has that ungraded, slightly washed-out look that makes one imagine at times that it might have been shot on 16mm and blown up - and that it would probably look better on video. It has one of the ugliest credit-title sequences I've ever seen (like a particularly bad heavy-metal video), and contains some script-stumbles, but Two Hands has a warmth missing from many a movie with 10 times the budget.
Ledger plays Jimmy, an amateur boxer employed as a tout for a Sydney sex joint. He is offered a stab at social mobility by local hoodlum Pando (Bryan Brown), who asks him to run an errand for him. This is Jimmy's chance to go up a rung or two on the ladder of the criminal underworld. Except that, thanks in part to a coincidental demise (which is bleakly hilarious) and in part to Jimmy's own distractibility, he screws it up, and finds himself on the run from Pando and his heavies.
What follows is a humorous thriller of mishaps, in which poor Jimmy must try to put things right with Pando while staying out of his way, as well as pursue his interest in a girl from out of town (Rose Byrne). The story is partly narrated by Jimmy's dead brother, a device that could have been developed a bit further, but it serves.
The scenes with Ledger and Byrne, as they make tentative moves toward romance, are awkward. They are doubtless meant to be awkward and funny, but they are just awkward. Byrne is not much good, with a laugh almost as irritating as her sobs. Luckily there is not an awful lot of her, and the slack is taken up by the rest of the cast, with Brown, for instance, delivering a superbly underplayed performance as the Scrabble-playing, kortbroek-wearing crime lord.
But the movie is Ledger's. Seen in the same week as Gone in 60 Seconds, it supplies what that spectacular car chase lacks - a human centre. Gone in 60 Seconds, for all its thrills, or perhaps because of them, seems entirely devoid of real people; Nicolas Cage and his cohorts are ciphers, cardboard cut-outs flung about by the mayhem of the action. They are barely there at all.
Ledger is
very much there in Two Hands, and he manages it without the strenuous
concentration of his fellow-Australian Russell Crowe, who has made it so
big in The Insider and Gladiator. Ledger has a lightness,
a hint of irony, that Crowe, for all his prowess, cannot muster. In one
scene in Two Hands, Ledger telegraphs his confusion with a series
of facial movements (a scrunch of the brow, a purse of the lips) that are
both amusing and endearing. It's not a moment of genius, or even perhaps
of particular note, but it gives us something real and personal, and we
realise he has the rare quality of simple likeability. You'll see - he's
gonna be a big, big star.
-|-|-|-|-|-