Todd Phillips is not an idiot, in spite of the fact that he made all the Hangover movies. And Joker: Folie a Deux is an expertly shot, written and constructed film. Nonetheless, almost no one should see J:FàD. It’s a film made out of spite for studios and audiences and love for old cinema and people whose lives aren’t worth filming. If you do enjoy watching everything comforting and good about movies getting systematically chucked out the window, though, this is one of the best movies of that genre, because, unlike, say, Funny Games, there’s no cheap manipulation of traumatic responses; rather, Folie a Deux expensively figures out exactly what commercial movies aren’t supposed to be and gives you that.
It has some gorgeously composed shots. There’s a scene of Joaquin Phoenix as poor Arthur Fleck, aka “Joker,” being walked from one gray section of a prison to another by corrections officers who are holding black umbrellas. But as the the shot cuts to an overhead, the umbrellas are now the blue, yellow, red and white of Joker’s makeup, forming a square of circles that slides down a colorless corridor of barbed wire in an image that would make The Red Balloon jealous.
This is in the early part of the film, where Joker is drugged into non-personhood by psychiatric medicine as he’s awaiting trial in an institution for the criminally insane. It’s drably boring in just the way being imprisoned by anesthesia is. Then, as though it were 1954 and our TV sets suddenly went from black and white to color, Fleck sees a spark of life in the eyes of Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), who’s singing in the asylum’s music room, a space reserved for people who don’t shoot talk show hosts. Brendan Gleeson, as prison guard Jackie Sullivan, decides it would be fun to get Fleck into that room so that Todd Phillips can start irritating comic book fans by having his main characters sing.
Soon, Phoenix and Lady Gaga are on stage in Bob Mackie outfits doing a Sonny and Cher impression with just a little more bloodshed. Or on a rooftop in something out of West Side Story. Or in some other real or imaginary place that’s clearly a reference to something else. Phillips did his homework here staging loving, slightly twisted, but sometimes just faithful recreations of classic Hollywood musical sequences. Plus, both Gaga and Phoenix can actually sing.
In fact Lady Gaga is shockingly good in this. If there were an Academy Award for Great Performance In A Musical That No One Asked For she would definitely get it. When not in dream sequences, she sings with the voice of someone who wants to, but can’t quite, carry a tune. And I’ve never really seen a singer pull this off in a film before. Instead, they all do these weird fake-bad singing voices that prove they can hit any note they want, but instead have chosen to hit, not a screeching note that’s 1/8th of a tone out of scale, but a series of perfectly executed wrong notes. But Gaga sings in a breathy voice that only cracks when she goes beyond of a normal person’s range. She sounds exactly like someone who was actually trying to sing well, but can’t quite.
As with the musical sequences, much of the main narrative is homage and reference to other, more enjoyable films. Phillips even drops in a nod to the notorious Roger Corman “badfilm,” Bucket of Blood, as if to say: yeah, I know what you want.
But he’s not giving it to you! There are no buckets, and not nearly enough blood to satisfy the savage audiences of 21st-century cinema. That scene you’ve been waiting to see? He didn’t even bother filming it. The violence is extremely limited, story-specific, and never aimed at the right targets. And even though the film made it obvious that the ending was going to be disappointing, I was still let down by it, which I loved. I was like, “that’s it? Holy shit! How dare he!” But I was smiling while I was like that, because: how dare he?
At one point Phillips even has Joker and Lee stop in in the middle of their Sonny and Cher routine and say “We’re not giving the people what they really want!” No, they aren’t. Nobody goes to see a movie about a Batman villain singing What the World Needs Now or I’ve Got The World on a String or really any song by Burt Bacharach, Harold Arlen, Cy Coleman, or even Barry Gibb. If there’s a song, it needs to be a screeching techno-hyper-pop tune created by robotic Swedish producers who get paid in cocaine and young pop stars.
Nor is the comic book crowd looking for a sweeping indictment of the depersonalizing effects of the stigma of mental illness, and certainly not for a depressing film about depression and the chronic unhappiness of victims of child abuse. I mean, not unless there are a lot of gadget fights and punching and catch phrases and something concrete to root for and against. Because who doesn’t want to see evil get kicked in the head? But in J:FàD, evil isn’t a supervillain or a corrupt governor or even a corrupt government. It’s a foundational element of legal, psychiatric and social institutions. You couldn’t swing in and kick it in the head even if you had boots the size of the U.S. budget deficit.
The closest Phillips comes to offering any of this excitement is a single car-bomb explosion. It’s a nice explosion, and the audience has clearly been waiting for it, but Phillips defuses its force by leading into a devastating scene. That scene shows that loving people for who we want them to be involves projecting our dream-image on someone who, like all people, isn’t composed of flashy song-and-dance numbers, but of the banal and unexciting stuff that movies and teenagers and pop songs have never been able to care about.
Meanwhile, Phillips is force-feeding us a touching portrait of a psychopathic murderer, and then has the gall to neither reward nor punish the viewers for rooting for a monster. Instead, he takes away the monster and leaves Arthur Fleck on the screen sunk in his own impotence, which maybe is punishment, but it’s punishment meant to say something like, “sorry I can’t give you the thrills you wanted. They don’t really exist. Everything is shit. Even this movie.”
So should you see this? There are bad films that are fun to watch because they’re so bad. This isn’t that: it’s made with skill, so there’s no flubbed lines, ragged pans or ridiculous dialogue. There are good films that are designed to be carefully depressing so the audience leaves with a kind of sadness that occurs against the background of the richness of life, making death and loss tragic because they represent an interruption of beauty and hope. This ain’t that either. The background world that Joker inhabits has happiness only in moments of misunderstanding, and laughter only in a neurologically disordered man’s diseased response to stress and pain.
I dunno, I loved Joker: Folie à Deux for the skill and thought that went into subverting expectations and constructing unsatisfying but expertly crafted scenes. My guess is that most people will, as intended, hate it.
