Heath, I swear...

I was in a cold-medicine fog all yesterday afternoon, so it wasn't until about 8:30 or so went I went to check my e-mail and saw that Heath Ledger had died.

It still doesn't totally feel real to me, any more than hearing about the death of anyone so young would. Does anyone else feel like a little bit of an asshole mourning someone you've never met, when a) people die tragically every day and I don't even read about them in the police briefs, and b) Ledger has actual loved ones who'll greive for him a million times more than I will?

So yeah, maybe I'm being stupid when I feel sad about this, but it sucks. It sucks, it sucks, it sucks. It sucks for the people who knew him.And yes, it really does suck, too, for those of us who merely loved watching him work. Call me silly all you want, but there it is.

The first thing I saw him in, like most Americans my age, was "10 Things I Hate About You," which is still one of my favorite movies. Do you remember this, Lauren? We came out of the theatre buzzing about a better-than-expected teen flick, and in particular about the male lead, who neither of us had seen or heard of before. (Considering what big movie junkies we were and still are, this was pretty unusual). We memorized his name, debated whether he was really from Australia and agreed that we'd seen somebody special.

I saw a few of his movies here and there after that. If you'd asked me to name my favorite actors, he probably wouldn't have been at the top of the list - but I always enjoyed his work. Then came "Brokeback Mountain."

Can I just tell you how much I wanted to not like "Brokeback Mountain"? It was slow, with no plot development that I could discern, and I'm still pissed that they gave that screenplay an Oscar (because it still feels like a book to me). But even when I criticized the film, it always came with the disclaimer that I thought the acting was off-the-charts. That means everybody, but mainly Heath Ledger. The film just doesn't work if he doesn't pull it off. It's astonishing to watch him. You hardly even see him acting. I completely believed him for every second he was on camera.

A few months ago, I caught "Brokeback" on cable, and I told myself I'd just watch it up until my favorite scene (where Jack and Ennis meet up again for the first time and end up just falling into each other - once again, completely believed it). It was the damndest thing - I ended up the entire movie all over again. And 99.9% of what kept me in front of the TV was Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar.

The film's last sequence, when Ennis goes to Jack's boyhood home and finds...well, I won't spoil it for you if you haven't seen it. But between that scene and the last, when Ennis's final line ( "Jack, I swear") tells us everything we need to know about Ennis struggle to love himself and others - somewhere in that sequence it clicks for Ennis. And the beauty of it is, Ledger never lets us see exactly where.

It reminded me of when I read "The Age of Innocence" and completely hated the cop-out ending, and then I saw the film version, and it made perfect sense. Daniel Day-Lewis made Newland's actions in that last scene logical, human, in a way the book version didn't. It took a living, breathing, thinking actor to make me understand.

And that's how I feel about that last scene in "Brokeback." Nothing earthshattering happens, there are no histrionics, only that one line - "Jack, I swear" - but yet we know that this man is never going to be the same.

I'm profoundly grateful for that one film moment, and I'll remember it as long as I live. I'm
grateful for the time we had with Heath Ledger, and I'll miss him terribly.