'I Am Heath Ledger' Movie Review

The first thing you notice in I Am Heath Ledger is that he is filming. Not being filmed. Filming. The doc opens on this whirligig of home video where Heath is spinning a camera around his own face like a kid who just figured out how to make the toy work, and within about a minute you understand the central trick of the whole thing. He shot most of it himself, years before he had any reason to think anyone else would ever watch it.

That's the angle Adrian Buitenhuis and Derik Murray are working with here, and it's what makes this 2017 documentary worth your ninety minutes. Murray has been doing his "I Am" series for a while now. He has done Bruce Lee, Chris Farley, Evel Knievel, Steve McQueen. This one is the most personal of them because Heath did half the filming himself.

The film walks you from a scrappy Perth kid who left home as a teenager to the actor who turned down rom-coms after 10 Things I Hate About You and built a career role by role, Monster's Ball into Brokeback Mountain into The Dark Knight. But the spine of it is the people. Naomi Watts is the most useful talking head in the whole thing because she actually says something specific. She brings up "tall poppy syndrome" and how it followed Heath around as he started getting more famous than the friends he came up with. Ang Lee, who cast him in Brokeback Mountain after seeing what he did in Monster's Ball, talks about Ledger's voice and physicality with this quiet awe that never tips into hagiography. Ben Mendelsohn is great. Catherine Hardwicke is great. Djimon Hounsou, Emile Hirsch, cinematographer Ed Lachman all show up. Heath's dad Kim, his mum Sally Bell, his sisters Kate and Ashleigh, his lifelong best mate Trevor DiCarlo, his longtime agent Steve Alexander. An actual circle of people who knew him, not a press kit assembled by strangers.

Why is this in the film and not in the other ones? Apparently the Ledger family had spent nine years turning down documentary pitches before this team came around. They only said yes after his ex-partner Michelle Williams (who is not in the film, the only obvious absence) gave her blessing, and after Heath's longtime collaborator Matt Amato, his partner in their production company The Masses, signed on. Once Amato was in, the whole circle opened.

Here's the part that made the film land for me. Heath wasn't just an actor with a side hobby. He directed music videos. Real ones. He made the clip for Ben Harper's "Morning Yearning" in 2006, two for his friend N'fa Forster-Jones (the second, "Cause An Effect," he shot in his own garage with some umbrellas because he didn't want to bother with a real budget), and an animated video for Modest Mouse's "King Rat" that came out posthumously in 2009, about whales hunting humans on the open sea. He was learning to direct. He was meeting with Don't Look Now screenwriter Allan Scott to adapt a chess novel called The Queen's Gambit (yes, that one) which he wanted to direct and possibly star in. The film makes you sit with that for a second. He was twenty-eight.

Buitenhuis and Murray treat the directing stuff like it's the real headline, and they're right to. The "Cause An Effect" video alone, which Variety called utterly entrancing, is a small case for what we lost. There's also a clip he shot for Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog" that was apparently part of a larger Drake project he never got to finish.

The honest critique is the one almost every reviewer has landed on and it's true. The film does not engage with how he died. It alludes. It uses the word "demons" and then walks away from it. It tells you he barely slept and pushed his body too hard, and that's about the depth of the inquiry. If you want a documentary that grapples with the prescription drug context that killed him on January 22, 2008, this is not it. It's a tribute, not a reckoning. Variety called the film catchy and seductive and also said it leaves you wanting more, and both things are correct. Amy this is not.

But maybe that's fine. The film knows what it is. The people in it loved him, they got to make something for him, and the rest of us got to watch. The footage of Heath shooting hoops in his own living room, the painting on his bedroom walls, the camera spinning around his face in a sort of homemade Saturday Night Fever gag, is irreplaceable. Bon Iver's "Perth" plays over the closing credits and if you make it through dry-eyed you're stronger than me.

Things to look out for. There's a blink-and-you-miss-it Rose Byrne cameo in some of the early Australian home video, from when she and Heath were both kids starting out. Watch for how often Heath turns the camera around to film the people filming him. Watch his hands. He never stops moving them.

You should watch I Am Heath Ledger if you only knew him as the Joker. Or if you've ever been curious what an artist looks like when he doesn't care about the line between actor and filmmaker. Mostly, watch it if you've ever wondered what someone fully alive looks like on camera, before they had any idea anyone else was looking.