Movie Review: Joker

Joker *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Todd Phillips.

Written by: Todd Phillips & Scott Silver.

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix (Arthur Fleck / Joker), Robert De Niro (Murray Franklin), Zazie Beetz (Sophie Dumond), Frances Conroy (Penny Fleck), Brett Cullen (Thomas Wayne), Shea Whigham (Detective Burke), Bill Camp (Detective Garrity), Glenn Fleshler (Randall), Leigh Gill (Gary), Josh Pais (Hoyt Vaughn), Rocco Luna (GiGi Dumond), Marc Maron (Gene Ufland), Sondra James (Dr. Sally), Murphy Guyer (Barry O’Donnell), Douglas Hodge (Alfred Pennyworth), Dante Pereira-Olson (Young Bruce Wayne), Sharon Washington (Social Worker), Hannah Gross (Young Penny), Frank Wood (Dr. Stoner), Brian Tyree Henry (Carl – Arkham Clerk).

 

I watched Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy again about a week before seeing Todd Philips’s Joker. On this latest rewatch of Scorsese’s film it struck me again that this is one of the most painful films ever made – a film that forces the audience to look at this pain, and doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away, and gives the audience no catharsis at the end of the film. It is similar to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver of course – but it’s basically an entire movie of that scene in Taxi Driver where Bickle is being rejected on the phone, and Scorsese’s camera pans away from him – the pain too much to bare – except this time, Scorsese doesn’t pan away for the entire runtime. It is a film about desperately lonely people – not just DeNiro’s Pupkin, but also Sandra Bernhard’s Masha, and this time more than ever, it struck me that Jerry Lewis’ Jerry Langford is a lonely character as well. Scorsese’s film is about our celebrity obsessed culture, made before we really realized how obsessed we were. At its core is a delusional man who is constantly being rejected, but never realizes he is being rejected at all. This makes it different from Taxi Driver, because Bickle in that film knows he is being rejected constantly – and it makes him seethe in anger, and then explode into violence. Key to both movies though is that while society pushes Bickle and Pupkin to their ultimate end game, Scorsese’s film never excuses their behavior. Both can stop at any time – and just don’t – they keep right on driving off the cliff.

 

I think this is a key reason why both of those films are masterpieces, and Philips’ Joker is ultimately a skillfully made and acted, but hollow clone of those films. I don’t ascribe to the theory that Joker is going to inspire others to commit mass murder – I don’t think movies do that – but I do think that the film is ultimately a fairly uncritical portrait of a man who does that sort of thing, that puts his whole worldview on display, without really examining it. In many ways, it seems like the film agree with the Joker’s worldview. That’s not dangerous – but it’s kind of silly.

 

This film pretty much flies in the fact of what we know about the Joker – Batman’s greatest nemesis, who has (almost always) had no backstory to speak of – something Heath Ledger’s Joker’s played with in The Dark Knight, by having many backstories. This Joker is named Arthur Fleck, and is played by in an intense performance by Joaquin Phoenix – probably the modern actor best suited to play those Robert DeNiro roles in earlier Scorsese films (hell, last year’s You Were Never Really Here was a modern take on Taxi Driver – that I wish a fraction of the people excited about Joker had bothered to see). He is a troubled (young? – it’s not clear how old he is supposed to be, but probably younger than Phoenix is in real life). He had been institutionalized, but is out now – still depressed, still taking a lot of medicine – but the only help he gets is one counselling session per week, and those are ending soon as well. He takes care of his aging mother (Frances Conroy) and makes a living as a clown – sometimes working at a children’s hospital, sometimes wielding signs on the streets of Gotham, directing people to Blow Out sales. He dreams of being a comedian – his idol is Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro, essentially stepping into the Jerry Lewis role from The King of Comedy). He gets a gun from a co-worker – which pretty much starts his epic slide into madness. While in clown makeup on the subway one day, he is attacked by a group of Wall Street bros (with an impressive memory for Sondheim lyrics) and kills them – sparking a debate in the city about the haves and have not – becoming a folk hero to some, and a villain to others – like one Thomas Wayne.

 

Watching the movie, you can pretty much go scene for scene and determine what ones were lifted from Taxi Driver (the first shooting on the subway is similar to the one in the store) or The King of Comedy (Fleck’s “relationship” with his neighbor – Zazie Beetz – is pretty much the same as Pupkin’s with Diahnne Abbott in that film). To be fair, it is an interesting idea to take those old Scorsese movies, and try to graft them onto the modern superhero obsessed movie culture. And Philips is a good director – and has surrounded himself with good people. The film looks great - a grimy, dirty Gotham that even kind of makes the streets that Bickle patrolled in his cab look clean by comparison. The costume design – by Mark Bridges is excellent. The score, by Hildur Guonadottir, is excellent as well. The film really does look and sound great throughout.

 

And Phoenix really is great here. It is an unhinged performance – the type that he has done before in films like The Master or the previously mentioned You Were Never Really Here – but this time taken up a notch or two above over-the-top (I say that in a good way). His laugh is creepy and disturbing. He constantly seems to be on the verge of tears, even as he tries to smile through it all. Phoenix does a great job navigating that line that many mass shooters seem to go through – that transition from depression to rage – from wanting to kill yourself, to wanting to kill everyone else. I’m not really sure that Philips knows what to do with that performance – previous directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Lynne Ramsay – were masterful at directing Phoenix’s brilliance into their larger films. Here, Phoenix pretty much overwhelms everything and everyone else in the movie – the lunatic has taken over the asylum for better and for worse.

 

In short, there is a lot to admire about Joker – I haven’t even mentioned that I do find the film entertaining – despite how self-serious and violent the whole thing is. I also have many questions about it as well. What is the film saying about mental illness – anything at all? What is it saying about race – this is an oddly white film, other than Beetz (who race is a non-factor in her character – hell I almost think Philips cast a black actress because Scorsese did in The King of Comedy – but the extremely talented Beetz deserves a better part than this), particularly for one that kind of deliberately trades on the types of imagery that bring to mind Los Angeles is the wake of the Rodney King verdict, or perhaps Black Lives Matter marches – without every directly, or even indirectly, addressing race (it brings to mind another Taxi Driver story – that originally, everyone Bickle kills at the end was supposed to be black – but they – rightly – concluded that was unnecessarily incendiary, for a film that hadn’t bother to bring up race as a subject before then). Hell, what is it saying about Joker himself? The film seems to go out of its way to justify what he does – one of the major changes it makes between itself and The King of Comedy is that Murray here really is someone who provoked Arthur deliberately and personally – for Jerry in the original, the only way he provokes Pupkin is by existing, and being famous. And I think that the fact that Philips so cavalierly mixes elements of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy shows little understanding of what made those two films so different. I think that in many ways, Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy showed where culture was headed – Taxi Driver is a film about Incels before that term was coined, but was critical of that type of person, and attitude, and violence. Joker revels in it.