Joker is part Batman prequel, part Taxi Driver remake, leavened with The King of Comedy and flame-broiled by an incendiary performance courtesy of Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix stars as Arthur Fleck, a sad clown-for-hire with a bevy of psychological problems and a handful of pills whose prescriptions are about to run out. He’s the caregiver for his addled mother (Frances Conroy); he’s carrying a torch for Sophie (Zazie Beetz) down the hall; and he never misses a late-night episode of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But Gotham City circa the 1980s is a pressure cooker of decadence and madness, and it’s about to boil over.
But is it? And is he? Or did he…? One of the central tenets of The Joker is that he’s an inscrutable cipher, a man without an identity or an origin. “If I’m going to have a past,” Joker says in Moore & Bolland’s Killing Joke, “I prefer it to be multiple choice!” (Bolland gets a “special thanks” credit, and if Moore didn’t hate movie adaptations he probably would have, too.) Without giving away too much of the game in Joker, director Todd Phillips is very careful to intimate (and at one point outright declare) that Arthur Fleck is an unreliable narrator. For any of my grievances about the film, I have to give Phillips a strong pat on the back for circumventing the certainty that would have run this film counter to The Joker’s innate unknowability; indeed, the one moment where Phillips baldly explains that a thing we saw happen did, in fact, not happen is one of the film’s major missteps, assuming the audience is not clever enough to understand that what Arthur sees isn’t always what’s real.
Joker has been surrounded and very nearly drowned in a morass of “hot takes” and cultural extrapolations that wonder if the film is “bad for society” or “dangerous.” And the truth of the matter is, Joker is nowhere near dynamic enough to merit such extensive commentary. It is, in a word, fine, elevated by Phoenix’s bravura performance as the man who would be clown prince. Phoenix is stratospheric as Arthur Fleck, manic depressive and skeletal with a painful persistent laugh that nags at him like a hiccup. Wholly void of mirth, Arthur’s laugh is, like its owner, a shell of humanity, an empty imitation of glee. He’s trying to fit in, trying to find joy, but the world beats him down again and again. It is in this sense that Joker is a kind of four-color Taxi Driver, and if you’ve seen the preceding film you’ve seen much of what makes this Joker tick. (Perhaps I would have loved Joker if I didn’t already love Scorsese.)
The comparison to Taxi Driver explains and simultaneously deflates the hogwash claim that the movie is sympathetic to the kind of lunacy the media has feared this film will inspire because – and this is key – presentation is not sanction. Or, as Mark Kermode so eloquently puts it, “He’s not sympathetic; he’s pitiful.” It would take a very special and deliberate misreading of the film to find unchallenged sympathy for The Joker in this film. Again, Phillips is quite deliberate about deflating Arthur’s own notions about himself, about unbalancing the audience just when it thinks it understands him. In that sense it’s a surprisingly smart and nuanced film, coming from the director of the hilarious but hardly erudite Hangover, whose sequels were the very definition of diminishing returns.
In another sense, though, the film is brutally one-note, single-minded in its relentless bleak worldview. Its gags (if one can call them that) are telegraphed loud and clear, with all the subtlety of an oncoming train. This brutal directness works to the film’s advantage in a climactic third-act sequence, which works like a perfectly tense setpiece, though the film doesn’t quite build to the scene in a unified manner. Throughout the film, everything is terrible, no one is trustworthy, and hope – so key to what I love about comics and the superhero genre – is nowhere to be found. Batman, too, is just out of reach, though the sidelong glances Phillips throws his way are among the more interesting pivots from conventional mythology, interesting precisely (though perhaps only) because they are pivots. In a genre that is constantly imperiled by sameness, persistently in danger of being “note-d” to death by bonebrained studio heads, I’ll always be a champion of the peculiar, of the different, of the unique, though I find I can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm for Joker in the same way that I did and continue to do for Batman v Superman. Where the latter is positively bursting with ideas, doomed like Icarus never to see its full potential met, Joker contains only about one or two – intriguing ideas, no doubt, but hardly enough to merit the vociferous condemnation of those who haven’t even seen the film.
Ultimately, I think Joker ends up as a cipher, a bit like its titular character. It means what you bring to it, and it doesn’t quite challenge any of those notions – except, I maintain, that we are meant to sympathize with Arthur Fleck. In true noir fashion, every scene is told from Arthur’s perspective, so even in those moments where you might feel sympathy, you must recognize that it’s because the story has been filtered through a teller who is (perhaps willfully) unstable. If you want to read this as an “eat the rich” Occupy fable or a prayer for mental health care or an argument on one or the other side of the gun debate, Joker gives you a coil of rope but doesn’t commit enough to hang you with it. Put another way, Joker is only ever really dedicated to showcasing Joaquin Phoenix’s idiosyncratic madman, and in that regard it’s the only place where the film unapologetically succeeds.
Anyone who has a passing familiarity with my review style and my tastes in pop culture should know that I would love nothing more than to love this movie. I should probably see it again to make sure I’m confident in my take on the movie, but I’m not in a particular rush to see it again. It was fine.
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