Why so stupid?

(I'm not even really gonna complain about Travers here, but whose face am I gonna do this with, David Edelstein's?)

David Denby in the New Yorker enthuses:

"...as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.

David Edelstein in NY Magazine cries:

"I found the performance painful to watch. Scarier than what the Joker does to anyone onscreen is what Ledger must have been doing to himself—trying to find the center of a character without a dream of one." -David Edelstein, New York Magazine

...and so on, and so forth, and oh my God, the poor kid sacrificed himself for the role, which I know because I am intimately familiar with the inner workings of his tragically deceased mind. I know it is impossible to view this movie out of the context of Ledger's death. But there are intelligent ways of writing about it in that context, and then there is making stupid and baseless cause and effect connections.

I honestly don't think my brain can stand going on to the other main trope that seems to pervade the Dark Knight reviews printed so far, which is something like "OMG! Comic book movie serious?! Whaaaaa?!" 2008 folks, good times.