Director: Brian Helgeland
Cast: Heath Ledger, Mark Addy, Rufus Sewell, Paul Bettany
Have I Seen it Before: Never, which elicited a fair degree of shock from Lora… I have a vague recollection of it being the centerpiece of a girl’s night that my girlfriend at the time and her friends went to on opening weekend…
Christ, I’m already exhausted writing about this movie.
Did I Like It: The strengths of the movie are fairly easy to quantify. Health Ledger was both a discernible movie star, and a nimble actor in equal measure, and people were beginning to sense that even at the point this film was released. He was probably at the height of his popularity as a heartthrob here, and there are far dumber reasons to make a movie than it has attracted the interest of a handsome man with an Australian accent.
A modernly wry take on Chaucer certainly is something that would have attracted more than a little top-flight talent, which then fills out the cast with more than a few stellar supporting talents. It’s a fun idea for a movie, if nothing else.
But then there’s the actual movie itself. The soundtrack choices, too, are clearly supposed to be fun. But who are they actually for? I kind of like many of those songs, and I couldn’t help but find them distracting and betraying a deep self-consciousness on the part of the filmmakers. The teeny-boppers of the era would have found the then-classic rock passé (believe me, they certainly did when they were what was playing on my radio at the time), and anyone who might be in the demographic for the film now would find the whole exercise preposterous in the extreme.
Not everybody can be James Dean, ultimately. And even those that can approach the legend-cut-down-too-soon status can’t make a great film every time they step in front of a camera.