That’s Right Folks: I’m the Latest Person to Write 700 Words About “Joker”
An origin story for America’s favorite villain developed by the master(?)mind behind the Hangover trilogy. Certainly no one asked for this, and yet director Todd Phillips gave it to us. Hey, he even got Joaquin Phoenix to join in for the fun.
Okay, I’m being flippant. A film which, on paper, I had no reason to take seriously has actually become very serious all of a sudden. Whether it’s the film’s massively unexpected triumph at the Venice Film Festival or the Old Testament-esque volume of thinkpieces already published about it, Joker is a movie that demanded to be taken seriously and is very much getting what it wants.
This is, I think, for good reason. Joker is certainly a movie worthy of serious engagement and high-level analysis — its stirring central performance and stunning visuals are themselves enough to warrant consideration. The trouble is that once you put Joker under the microscope it wants to be seen through, you see how flimsy some of its construction really is.
I’m sure most of this is common knowledge by now, but the film follows Arthur Fleck (played by Phoenix), a man failing in equal parts at being a clown and a stand-up comedian. He lives with his aging mother (a modest performance from Frances Conroy) and pines for the girl across the hall (a painfully under-and-mis-used Zazie Beetz). His troubled loner archetype, one with which we’re all painfully familiar, is complicated by his relationship with mental health: Arthur has a condition that causes uncontrollable laughter at random moments, though it has a convenient way of coming out at all the wrong times.
The movie’s fixation on mental health seems to be an attempt to make Arthur a more sympathetic character—he descends into violent cruelty fairly quickly, but he is subject to quite a bit of abuse (violent, emotional, and structural) before it happens. I personally think the movie does a solid job of inciting compassion for Arthur without forcing the audience to stay with him throughout the journey. This is due in large part, of course, to Phoenix’s barnstormer of a performance.
Joaquin Phoenix must be the greatest actor working today, and this performance is completely in step with that moniker. His Joker is at once entirely original and yet eerily familiar—his overlong glances and air of discomfort are something we’ve seen not in other screen characters but in actual human beings. He couples all of this with an obvious and gruesome internal pain—a pain that carries the weight of his character all the way through the final shot of the film.
It’s incredible Phoenix brings so much to this character given how confused the movie is about him. For a movie generating so much controversy around its messaging, it is awfully vague on what its messaging actually is. There are times when it seems Arthur’s transformation into Joker is due entirely to mental illness, others when it seems like it’s just because people are mean to him, and even times when it seems to be the result of some kind of over-arching class war. The movie might lightly glorify some of Arthur’s violence, but it’s often so unclear on what the source of that violence is that very little can really be made of this.
Some of this is easy to ignore, as the film packages its core in a solid-but-not-groundbreaking script, gorgeous cinematography, and production design to rival anything I’ve seen onscreen in a long time. So many of Joker’s individual components work so well that it’s really not until the film is done and gone that you realize you’ve just watched a film that hasn’t even made up its mind yet. I don’t know exactly what Joker was trying to say, but at least I enjoyed watching it try to say it—even if it burst into menacing fits of laughter along the way.
Joker
HIGHLIGHTS: Phoenix’s performance, the visuals, most of the supporting cast, everything involving the Wayne family (including a dickish Alfred), a pitch-perfect tone
LOWLIGHTS: Confused messaging, some terrible song choices (I actually can’t imagine a worse usage of “Rock and Roll Pt. 2”), a couple obvious plot twists, a handful of extremely tired midget jokes
VERDICT: B
