I guess we should talk about Joker: Folie à Deux, huh? I don’t know if this is a review more than just thoughts about this antagonistic film by Todd Phillips. The first film gained this weird amount of infamy around itself. This has caused friction around the greater pop culture landscape, from the diehard comic book fandom to the film community and the overall movie-watching populace. Back in 2019, Sherin* and I were on very different poles regarding the film. I’ve always been a bit more agnostic towards it and found it not as bad as some of the more questionable choices that had been made with the character in comics over the past eighty years. Phillips’ creation of Arthur Fleck, a downtrodden and invisible to society Clown who desperately wants to be seen, liked, and loved in a world that has shown him everything but got I feel too wrapped up in the “incel” dialogue at the time. Its use of pastiche from Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, along with taking influence from flashback sequences from Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, I thought it was a good film, not a great film, but good and something different than what Marvel Studios was putting out. It felt for me like some of the books DC would put out during the time when Marvel was going pretty h.a.m. with the big summer crossovers in their books in the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties.
It’s now been five years since that film came out; we’ve lived through a Global Pandemic, a Riot on the US Capitol, an ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and another historic Presidential Campaign featuring Donald Trump and Phillips is back again with a film I believe he made for people not to like at all. I have to say it’s been an interesting two weeks in the US film world as we have two big films that, I believe for many reasons, seek to challenge the tastes of filmgoers with Megalopolis and now this new Joker film. Phillips, with his screenwriting partner Scott Silver, seemed to take every conversation about Joker personally in a way that feels like, from Phillips’ perspective, the bulk of those didn’t get it. They didn’t understand it. He never meant to make Fleck a person to lionize or make the hero. Nor is this film something that’s supposed to fit perfectly as THE ORIGIN of the classic Batman foe that some people need even though the Joker doesn’t have an origin; that’s part of the point of the character. This new film, through the use of a court drama setup, takes time to essentially put the character, his actions, and culpability on trial in front of the audience in many ways the audience as well as with a very long and slow-moving film.
While amazingly filmed with the care and craft you expect from Phillips and his cinematographer Lawrence Sher. Wonderful use of color, great composition on the big screen, along with framing. This film will be great to watch with no sound as the acting from all the performers was great even if some were wasted a bit. Here is when I’ll get spoilery, but bear with me a bit. A lot of the witnesses in this film, I feel, were put in to say Fleck didn’t murder these people, just those we saw on screen. So no, Fleck didn’t kill the Black women characters, so they weren’t “props,” which is like ok bro you didn’t need to answer everything here but the testimony of Fleck cross-examining Leigh Gill‘s Gary, the fellow Clown who he killed the large Randall in front of. Here, you see this man, quietly mocked for his size in the courtroom by the onlookers, shaken and afraid to even be in the same room as Arthur Fleck. It’s an excellent scene as Joaquin Phoenix as Fleck flipping between his Joker performance and Fleck’s true meek nature have this back and forth as Gary is now this tortured person who can’t get past what he experienced. Fleck is now a monster to him, and what’s tragic is that Fleck was the only person who treated him as a person and with kindness. For Fleck, it’s like, I didn’t kill you, and you know Randall was a bully that deserved what happened. It’s one of the more human parts of them, and it’s not daydreaming, jail, or court repeating.
I think this is a very clear choice, and there are things in this film that, if not focused on reactions to the first film, could feed into a structure of an interesting look at Gotham and the recent past modern society through Fleck and his Joker persona. Everything with the Officers in Arkham State Hospital is shown in a very unflinching manner. Led by Brendan Gleeson as Jackie Sullivan, Fleck’s main guard, he’s a character who clearly enjoys his job of torturing the inmates. At the same time, Fleck gets to do more than other patients/inmates because they use this big bad “Joker” as a pet. If he tells a joke, he gets a cigarette. If he makes them laugh and listens, he gets to do things. He takes his medicine, and he gets to go to music therapy class. The guards make Fleck kiss another inmate, Ricky (Jacob Lofland), for entertainment. The first bit of kindness or any affection or love Ricky’s gotten makes him a follower of Fleck in the hospital; at a point in the film, the guards end up murdering him as he stood up for Arthur after the guards beat him for talking about the guards in court. This affects Arthur and has him finally decide about himself and being Joker. It ties nicely with everything with Gary but also gets lost with all the boring musical daydreams in Arthur’s head and super-extending Law & Order-like courtroom scenes.
Lady Gaga really doesn’t do much here, so seeing this might not make you that happy if you’re a big fan of her. The film does a different take on Harley Quinn that feels like it could lead to a version like the one we saw in Caped Crusader, but there’s not enough there to really chew on. Is a film about Fleck’s Joker taking over the Asylum putting a lens on how patients were treated in these institutions as well as Police Brutality there? How about one on how the media and its focus on controversial and infamous people connect to people through dehumanizing the perpetrator and their victims for entertainment and viewers? Hell just Joker and Harley falling love through a musical? We get a movie no one wanted on purpose. This film feels like something Phillips wished to close the door on, and Phoenix was down to do it, but in the end, it’s not something enjoyable to watch. I haven’t felt this much disdain from a filmmaker through his work since Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. While I found entertaining thoughts in this film, I don’t think it’s something most people should bother seeing. I guess that’s the joke.
Megalopolis is fire cinema, though.
* Back in 2019, Sherin and Julian joined Fantastic Forum to discuss Joker
