Joker (Dir Todd Phillips, 2h2m)



Joker is, for all the incel-baiting headlines, all the off-the-cuff, and completely inaccurate comments from Todd Phillips about the death of comedy, and even for the appearance of Martin Scorsese in the press junket to promote a film that essentially apes his best output whilst daubing the competition as (rightly or wrongly) a theme-park-ization of cinema, a capturing of the zeitgeist, from a character that has always felt like a bellweather of culture. In its depiction of the origins of the Clown Prince of Crime as a down-on-his-luck comedian wracked with mental illness, downtrodden by the well off Gothamites, typified and crystallised in the Trumpian Wayne family, and eventually driven to vigilantism, and the unwitting creation of an entire violent uprising, so this is a Joker for a divided, polarised America.

But around a stellar performance by Joaquin Phoenix, coming tantalisingly close to the lofty peak of superhero cinema set by the late Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, albeit taking the character in a far darker, bleaker, and more introverted direction, Joker is a strange, disjointed beast, resting heavily, and incontrovertibly, the work of Martin Scorsese, in a strangely slavish combination of what, essentially, is a mix of the main plot of King of Comedy, the disjointed, disaffected figure of Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, harlequined and Jokerised, and the "one bad day" of works such as Moore's The Killing Joke given the slow-burn development of a psychological thriller.

Certainly, even compared to the works of the Nolan trilogy, there is a grounded, grungy, reality to the film, as though Phillips, in his desperate attempt to make a Serious Film for Serious Film Goers, rather than the colourful fairground fare of Marvel, has bled all but muted greys and brown from the film. This grounded reality carries through to the film's entire tone, in its portrayal of mental illness and violence. Beginning with a brutal, violent attack on the hapless clown, tying into that sense of Arthur, and those like him, being brutalised and victimised by society, so we are introduced to his meagre little life of a job where he is routinely beaten up, his home life, with his mother who is clearly ailing, and where they both watch his idol, variety show presenter Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro).

However, as Arthur's life, exacerbated by his mental illness, his poverty, and his deteriorating relationship with his mother, begins to unravel, capped by Franklin using footage of Arthur's dismal performance at a comedy club, so the film takes a darker, more violent tone, with the increasing tension in Arthur as a man echoed by the ever-more violent protests in the city, culminating with a truly shocking denouement where the madness of Joker and the madness of Gotham combine in an impressive finale. What this film captures, in a film that otherwise wears Scorsesian clothes, is the figure of the Joker. Or at least, a version of the Joker in this otherwise Serious Film for Serious People. Phoenix as Arthur, is a veritable coiled spring, his gaunt appearance, his hangdog look, Phoenix's incredible-and there is no other word for it-sense of a man battered and kicked by life, plagued with mental illness, including the manic laugh that he often finds himself trapped within, even as his face shows pain or sadness or fear.

 We cannot help but empathise with Arthur, and this is certainly Phillip and Phoenix's intent-I for one can certainly see where the film's detractors, those, who regard the film as a rallying call for disaffected white men, a call to arms for the alt-right who certainly co-opt the character in general as the mascot for the "involuntarily celibate" have found their reasoning for these conclusions. But this is, perhaps, missing the point, and certainly missing what Joker rails against. As Arthur's psychiatrist notes to him, in their final session, as budget cuts bring them to a close, "They don’t give a shit about people like you, Arthur...and they don’t give a shit about people like me either.”
Phoenix's Arthur, thus, is not a nihilist master of chaos, believing in nothing but the act of destruction and violence, nor a gangster riling against those who doublecrossed him, nor is he even a Hot Topicised gangbanger, all style and no substance. Arthur Fleck is a mentally ill man riling against austerity, against white men that bully and catcall a woman on a train, against the Wayne family that typify a white-castled elite divorced from what is going in in Gotham. Arthur is mad as hell, to borrow a line from Network, and he's not going to take it anymore.

However, much as Bickle, and Pupkin are men that, in essence, use their mentality as a crutch, an excuse for the violence they mete out, so too does Arthur. He, after all, stalks his neighbour, takes a gun to a children's hospital, and, as his very identity begins to unravel, confronts a young Bruce Wayne, in what is the film's only nod to the Batman mythos, and attacks Alfred Pennyworth. Even as Arthur begins to give way to his far more infamous alter-ego, so his violence increases, as, for lack of a better word, he gives himself to his violent impulses. His version of Joker, when he finally coalesces, is simply an extension of this-one could argue that there are elements of, certainly, Nicholson and Hamill's version of the character, as a well dressed, smart-mouthed, quick-witted figure, but Phoenix, and Arthur, are still there, albeit in a twisted, clownish figure who revels in upending the status quo with brutal actions.

Yet, where he differs from his predecessors is in the way he seems, more than any Joker before, a product of the chaos and poverty he came from-it's long been a faux-pas to give Joker an origin story, and certainly it's why Ledger's rootless, multi-choice origin version is so effective, but here, to reluctantly use the phrase that sums up the last decade of the Joker as a character, he is a product of the broken, unequal society of Gotham, and his target is the men-and his targets are exclusively male-who have made it so. It's ironic that Phillips, and Joker himself describe themselves as apolitical, because the Joker has never been such a politically charged figure, a reflection of V For Vendetta's vigilante protagonist, his makeup becoming a mask worn by hundreds of protesters, who turn violent in the final act. Phoenix's Joker becomes a symbol, his actions an inspiration not for incel, but for popular-and arguably righteous, violence.

Sadly, where Joker is a translation of Scorsese's disaffected everymen perfected, a role that rightfully belongs among the best performances in comic-book adaptions, the rest of the film is derivative and piecemeal. It takes the language, the look, the feel, and the story-beats of another director, and rather than build something new and fresh for this century, the film practically steps back-with the possible, and thankful exception of its gender and race politics-wholesale to the late 1970s. It is gritty, grubby, and bleak. Sometimes, this is impressively effective-without it the effectiveness of the sympathy we feel for Arthur would fall short-but elsewhere it's more of what DC have been plagued with, a focus, an escalation of the grounded realism that made the Nolan films effective in a pre-Marvel world. Joker is certainly a well-shot, well made film, Phoenix's performance is elegiac and strange and stirring, but Joker never lets him enjoy it for much of its runtime.
And this is the problem of Joker. It is connected, slaved into the routemarch that is the plot of Scorsese's King Of Comedy, which the film less takes influence for, more remakes, so bent on being taken seriously as a Serious Film For Serious People that it practically never has fun with the Joker, a character whose anarchic, chaotic spirit feels like it should rile against the grim darkness that Arthur has spent his life in, revel in the chaos that he aims at the heart of Gotham's elites. Every other version, from Nicholson to Hamill to even Ledger, was allowed to dip into this sensibility, even in stories and scenes where the tone was serious, sometimes deadly so. We see this from Phoenix all too rarely, and by this point, the film is bogged deeply into a frankly miserable, and entirely misjudged sense that only by being such can it be Proper Cinema.

Moreover, and what is worse, is that this film tries to be Scorsese without truly understanding why Scorsese's style works, uses his iconography, and his very ethos of film making as set dressing-it wears the Emperor's robes over a hoodie and jeans. Nowhere is this seen better than in the much publicised, and critiqued staircase sequence, cut to Rock and Roll Part.2. Several times, to reach home, Arthur climbs a series of stairs to reach his dilapidated block of flats, and we see him dance a few times at home, either alone, or with his mother-it seems the only action where he feels happy, seems to be enjoying himself.
This time, Joker, and by this time, Arthur has fully given himself to the persona he names a few sequences later, dances down the stairs. It's his moment of triumph, fully made up, fully suited and booted, a moment so defining that it forms the basis of the by-now meme-remixed poster. The music, questionably sourced as it is, fits, the moment of transformation complete. It looks like Scorsese, it's certainly comparable to his work, the soundtrack may even, at a stretch, be something we could imagine him using.

And yet, it rings hollow. It feels, for lack of a better moment, like a moment intended for trailers and posters, rather than as a sequence in a cohesive piece of artistic cinema, a poster moment for people who have posters of films in their room, and understand films as such, an image devoid of meaning. This surface understanding of the film undermines it. This is a film that is beholden to a sense, a style, a slavish pastiche that it utterly misjudges and cannot do service; in a film that gives us a perfect summary of one of the greatest figures in comic books, Joker is hamstrung by its own self-importance.
What results is a film that, around Phoenix's sterling work as Arthur/Joker, a role that he, like Ledger before him, deserves an Oscar nomination for, is a hamfisted tonal mess, beholden to a directorial style it only occasionally captures, determined to be be taken seriously, rather than revelling in the chaos, the colour, the violence and exultant mayhem that has defined the Crown Prince of Comedy for nearly eight decades.

One is left with two thoughts. The first; that for all Phoenix's dramatic chops, he is somehow adrift in his own film, an unstoppable object in search of a immovable object that Phillips and co are too scared to give him for fear of stooping to the "low art" of a mere superhero movie. The second, comes courtesy of the two versions of the Joker that Phoenix's performance rests most heavily upon, and feels like less a question levelled at  the entire DC series than this standalone edition, feels like a grinning cackling reproach to a DC mired in a world of greys and browns, of gruff serious men doing gruff serious things, a challenge to DC's allergy to the very idea of these films being enjoyable and fun and comic.

...Why so serious?

Ah, what the heck, I'll laugh anyway!

Rating: Highly Recommended.

Comments

  1. I'm surprised you liked it. I didn't think it was anything special...

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