Joke’s On Me
I’m not going to beat around the bush: I wasn’t a fan of 2019’s Joker and I think it is genuinely insane that Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor at the Oscars for it. Attempting to ground Joker by approaching him from the aspect of his mental health and childhood traumas undermines the menace, chaos, and mystery that his character his best known for.
Worse, it handles this delicate subject matter with a shocking lack of nuance or care. It’s an edgy teenager’s idea of a good Joker movie.
I understand the impulse to do a different take on the character, and I can’t deny that much of my dissatisfaction with the movie comes from my love for his character as he appears in the comics, but Joaquin Phoenix’s ‘Arthur Fleck’ didn’t feel like Joker. I did not know that guy.
That is until maybe—maybe—the last scene in the movie. Only then did it feel like Phoenix was embodying a solid take on the character (albeit one punctured by the rest of the movie straining to explain how he got to this point).
It was with that mild hope that I approached Joker: Folie a Deux. They got all of the boring, poorly conceived backstory out of the way, after all. Mopey, misunderstood Arthur Fleck was gone, and cruel, crazy Joker was here. Finally, Phoenix would be let loose, freed from the peculiar conscience that his character was burdened with in the first movie. Maybe this would be fun?
Comedy Has Been Cancelled
While awaiting trial in Arkham Asylum—Uh, I mean Arkham State Hospital—for the murders he committed that lead to the riots in Gotham, Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) meets Lee (Lady Gaga), a fellow inmate obsessed with his ‘Joker’ persona, who pulls him out of his stupor and gives him something to live for.
So, it turns out that Arthur Fleck actually hadn’t fully embraced becoming ‘Joker’ yet. I groaned aloud in the cinema when I realised this and settled in for what I was guessing would be an absolute slog. In an attempt to lessen his sentence, Arthur’s lawyer (Catherine Keener) is trying to get him to ‘admit’ that he has a split personality disorder—that 'Joker' committed those murders, not Arthur.
And instead of telling her to go to hell and rejecting any sort of psychiatric diagnosis, Arthur just kinda goes along with it. He’s an extremely passive, dull, and gullible character, three adjectives that are about as far away from any true description of Joker.
Joker Face
Arthur / ‘Joker’ being such an angsty, dweebish loser instead of being in any way faithful to the source material is my biggest problem with the movie, but it doesn’t end there. Joker: Folie à Deux is, of course, a musical… in a way; there’s no interesting choreography or dancing or magical realism, though.
The songs, for the most part, are also clearly telegraphed to be happening in Arthur’s head. After all, we can’t have the audience—or Joker—questioning the gritty reality of this story. The songs are boxed off in their own world where they can safely avoid having any impact on the story or the audience's perception of Joker's reality.
Lady Gaga sings sometimes and is fine. ‘Lee’ exists to pull Arthur to his ‘Joker’ side but is a character lacking in any kind of dimensionality and really makes me appreciate Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn. Both Lee and Arthur are just such lifeless, morose characters. Maybe if this weren’t ostensibly a Joker movie, I would be able to get on board with all of this, but I just can’t stop thinking about how disappointing it is that this is the Joker story we’ve been given.
Who Is This Clown?
Sorry, let me refocus on what we got instead of what could’ve been. Brendan Gleeson makes regular appearances as a prison guard who has an American accent for his first few minutes of screentime but drops it after that. He doesn’t take any meaningful actions in the story. Uh, Steve Coogan shows up? A young man with a mental disorder kinda follows Arthur around sometimes? Um… the little person from the first film shows up (played by Leigh Gill) at the courthouse, which makes Joker sad for a bit…
Look, there is no plot here, which would be fine if the character work was compensating. It’s not. The movie is just meaningless event after meaningless event as it struggles to synthesise Joker into a ‘real person’. Again and again it asks the audience to remember the events of the first film for very muddy attempts at recontextualising them, but the only real question it’s able to ask is ‘How crazy was Arthur, really though: normal crazy, or crazy crazy?’
There is nothing here. It feels like director Todd Philips fell for all the fuss that had been made around the first movie. It’s easy to see how. The public discourse and division around Joker could've fooled anybody into thinking that it had anything of substance to say. Now, with Folie à Deux, Philips attempts a deconstruction of the first movie, not realising that the structure he built was hollow.
There is, unfortunately, nothing entertaining in watching it collapse around him.
Thanks for reading my review. If you liked it, consider checking out my wishlist or buying me a cup of coffee at https://ko-fi.com/kieranobrien or below.
Comments