Friday, January 06, 2006
SHAWN LEVY

Just like athletes, actors have streaks during which they elevate their games, hit their peaks and burst through to new levels of achievement. Heath Ledger is having one right before our eyes.

Six years ago the Australian hunk made a promising American debut in "10 Things I Hate About You," after which he was, in the way of the biz, bandied about as the Next Hot Thing. But Ledger made little positive impression in "Four Feathers," "The Patriot" or "The Order".

Last summer, though, he gave an excitingly intuitive turn as a dissolute surf shop owner in "Lords of Dogtown." He followed it with a simply remarkable performance as the tight-lipped, emotionally constricted Ennis Del Mar in "Brokeback Mountain." In that film, he's built of equal parts Gary Cooper and Montgomery Clift, stoic and taciturn and dreamy and sensitive all at once. It takes your breath away.

In his latest effort, the farce "Casanova," Ledger reveals yet another aspect of his increasingly persuasive talent -- a touch of Errol Flynn. Playing with a jaunty fecklessness the famed Venetian libertine Giacomo Casanova, Ledger is jaunty, charming and filled with self-deprecating wit. His work here [edit] reaffirms Ledger's standing as the most interesting twentysomething actor of the moment.

The film, written by committee, is a pastiche of Casanova's life and times more unreliable than the real fellow's notoriously self-serving memoirs. After a needless prologue establishes a young Giacomo as an orphan with a mother fixation, we join the great lover in the midst of his notorious 18th-century career, seducing great men's wives and randomly encountered lasses and half the novices of a Venetian convent.

All of this carrying-on is frowned upon by the church and Casanova is half-heartedly persecuted by an ineffective local inquisitor who knows that the rascal enjoys the favor of the city's leader. But when the bold playboy goes one step too far in his randy antics, his patron insists that he marry or go to prison.

No sooner has Casanova set his sights on a chaste lass with a surprisingly frank lust (Natalie Dormer) than he encounters a worthier object for his attentions: Francesca (Sienna Miller), the free-thinking daughter of a widow (Lena Olin) who wants to make her own life comfortable by marrying the girl off to a rich, bloated Genovese merchant (Oliver Platt).

Casanova courts Francesca without telling her who he is, uncovers her secret career as a philosopher of women's rights, poses as the Genovese merchant, nimbly evades a more strident inquisitor sent by Rome (Jeremy Irons) and generally cavorts and gambols in a way that's far more headache-inducing than endearing. By the time the series of mistaken identities, underhanded ruses and ineptly staged near-escapes reaches its overblown crescendo, the film has taken on elephantine ungainliness and drained itself utterly of comic juices.

Ledger plays this silly story with a plumy British accent and a contagious sense of fun. There are engaging supporting turns by Platt as an obese dupe and Omid Djalili as Casanova's crafty manservant.

[Article edited by HH Admin.]