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How far can you coast on charm? If you could ask Heath Ledger, he'd say you can coast pretty far.
We're not saying there's anything wrong with that. After all, he is an actor. It's not like he's coasting on charm while working as, say, a tax attorney or a vascular surgeon. Charm is -- or should be -- in the job description. Evincing charm, as an actor, is fine. But Heath Ledger's been doing more than evincing charm in the course of otherwise taxing or challenging film roles. Rather, he's been napping in the back seat of the charm car as it rolls down the hill toward Fametown. (You know. Coasting.)
If you've read a magazine or been to see a movie or watched TV or gone outside and looked up, you've recently seen Heath Ledger's sun-dappled, dirt-smudged face staring grimly at you from a print ad or trailer or commercial or billboard for A Knight's Tale. Sure, Ledger's the leading man, whatever -- it's an early-summer filler movie hoping to pick up the sloppy seconds of The Mummy Returns, so it's not like there's that much at stake; it's not a Pearl Harbor, for heaven's sake -- but someone on the marketing team has decided that his Ledger's face is not only cute enough to adorn scores of advertising materials, but also recognizable enough. Someone's gambling that there are enough of us who not only know who Ledger is but consider him enough of a draw that his mug + movie title = must-see! Ledger has, in short, coasted on his charm all the way past Fametown and straight to the town square of Bankable...um...ville.
How did that happen? When did Heath Ledger vault to that fame level and Q rating? Sure, he's pretty, and yeah, maybe he can act okay, but let's look at the facts. A Knight's Tale is probably only the third big movie on Heath Ledger's CV, and he wasn't exactly the leading man in the other two. We enjoyed his swagger and tight pants in 10 Things I Hate About You, the Taming of the Shrew's adaptation in the "Classic Work of Literature in a High School" genre that was briefly popular in the late '90s. Two years later, he played Mel Gibson's Mini-Me...er, "son," in The Patriot; while the subject matter was potentially more explosive and challenging, considering that the film was set during the Revolutionary War, it turned out just to be another very violent summer movie -- only with bayonets and wigs. (Even as we discredit Ledger for not taking artistic risks, we must confess that we haven't seen Two Hands, the movie Ledger made between Things and Patriot, but since we haven't even spotted it on a video-store, ever, we suspect that it didn't affect his fame level much in either direction.)
So now here's Heath Ledger -- a mere three years and one movie after we first became aware of him as the moderately cute and somewhat compelling high-school Petruchio -- he's getting the tight-close-up movie-poster treatment usually reserved for the likes of Tom Hanks (on the Cast Away poster) or Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich). Is Heath Ledger famous enough to draw a crowd to a summer movie -- even one angling only to be second place after The Mummy Returns? Are we, as a nation of moviegoers, compelled enough by Heath Ledger's particular talents and charms to overlook the obvious flaws in a neo-historical movie about jousting? Finally, is Heath Ledger -- even if only for marketing purposes -- on par with a Tom Hanks or a Julia Roberts?
Maybe. Probably not. No. We agree that Heath Ledger is cute, and we suspect he may even have as-yet-untapped reserves of Clooneyesque glamour and allure. We just suspect that, after two movies, Heath Ledger's headlining A Knight's Tale puts him out of his depth, and way out of his rightful fame caste.
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