Joker: Folie à deux
Directed by Todd Phillips
Written by Scott Silver & Todd Phillips
Based on Characters by DC Comics
Produced by Todd Phillips, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Joseph Garner
Starring
Joaquin Phoenix
Lady Gaga
Brendan Gleeson
Catherine Keener
Zazie Beetz
Steve Coogan
Harry Lawtey
Leigh Gill
Cinematography Lawrence Sher
Edited by Jeff Groth
Music by Hildur Guðnadóttir
Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, Domain Entertainment, DC Entertainment, Joint Effort
Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures
Running time 138 minutes[1]
Country United States
In the wake of the sensational first Joker movie by Todd Philips I was really looking forward to the sequel. When I learned it was to be a musical, with Harley Quinn, I envisioned a whole slew of entertaining possibilities. Harley is cute, giggly, rapacious, amoral and thoroughly psychotic. She’s about the only fictional character who can keep up with America’s favorite bogeyman. (In an animated Batman feature a few years back, she rapes Robin, possibly his first sex partner not named Bruce.)
Like everyone, I was expecting the cheerfully over the top dark chaos that is the signature of those two characters.
The movie bombed, barely making back production costs and widely panned by critics. I think everyone (including myself) assumed that Joaquin Phoenix would take his nascent Joker to full bloody bloom, aided by America’s most sinister little sexpot, Harley Quinn. (The selection of Lady Gaga did give me pause; while indisputably talented, “sinister sexpot” didn’t seem like it would fit in her particular oeuvre.)
The movie has deep flaws, not the least of which is the utterly inert plot. Joker spends the first half of the movie as a sedate inmate at Arkham Asylum, the world’s most porous containment facility. Normally, in stories that begin in Gotham’s ineffectual asylum, the Joker makes his escape by the third panel, clearly disguised with white face, red mouth, green hair, and a Mario mustache, fooling the guards into thinking the Joker could never grow a lady-pleaser like that. Followed, of course, by a reign of murder and madness before Bats finally catches him.
But instead, we get about an hour of a very subdued Arthur Fleck strategising with his lawyer about claiming dissociative identity disorder, being abused by the guards (Brendan Gleeson is one of the few bright spots in this movie) and bullied by the other inmates. He meets Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), another inmate. Lee is manipulative, deceptive, possibly delusional, and lays claim to a streak of wildness that doesn’t seem in evidence. She falls for Joker, and helped by Arkham’s appalling lack of security, sets a piano on fire allowing them to make their escape.
Murder and mayhem, right? Well, no.
They are captured before they even leave the asylum grounds. Fleck takes the fall for the escape attempt to protect Lee, only to learn that she was a voluntary commit who checked out the following week. No, she didn’t murder her parents. She didn’t burn down her apartment building. She wasn’t even raised in Fleck’s neighborhood. She was very middle class, educated as a psychiatrist, and she just got bored and had herself put in Arkham as a voluntary commit. Fleck, once again, is betrayed.
Fleck gets thrashed by the guards, and, beaten and subdued, decides nobody is going to help him, and fires his lawyer, the only person who had any interest in helping him. This is followed by a trial that is highly implausible without swerving into over-the-top Joker madness, and indeed is increasingly dreary as Fleck’s efforts to resurrect his Joker persona fall flat. It’s obvious Fleck is doomed.
But then comes a ludicrous bomb-blast, apparently by Joker supporters, and he makes his escape.
[Glances at watch. Not much time for The Joker to show up, here.]
There’s a chase scene, and Fleck is rapidly captured. Sent back to Arkham, the Joker is extinguished.
The movie is an interesting failure.
I think I understand what Todd Phillips was trying to do. And in retrospect, he telegraphed it in the first movie, which unfortunately created a host of false expectations for the sequel.
He probably asked himself, “What if some poor schlub, badly repressed and beaten by a horrific system, developed delusions of grandeur and saw himself as a killer clown? What would really become of him?”
It’s a premise that, cut loose from the world of The Joker, could have resulted in a pair of dark, tragic movies that cast deep shadows on the role of an individual whose society has utterly failed him. Without the expectations of “a Joker story” it could have been a sad and earnest portrayal of a failed system and an individual who tried to imagine himself as being able to fight all that. It could have had the markings of a Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn novel, or even the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man.”
But it was a story entirely wrong to try to incorporate into the Joker legend.
And that’s the main reason it failed. It had other flaws, such as the glacial pacing and the utterly forgettable selection of songs, but mostly, it blind-sided a nation that had set expectations of the Joker and were unprepared for the grim and even mundane reality of a ground-down Arthur Fleck.
Like Shyamalan’s “Avatar: The Last Airbender” it failed, partly because it was dour and motionless, but also because it had absolutely no feel for the source material.
But at the same time, it was interesting, because it took us out of the comic-book fantasy world and made us look at something every bit as dark, and infinitely more human.