The flat provocations of “Joker: Folie à Deux”

At least the first “Joker” movie, Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story of Gotham’s villain as antihero, had the bravado to push its protagonist’s revolt to noxious extremes. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), abused, neglected and damaged, cursed as a son, lover and actor, takes a violent revenge that quickly earns him fans and followers. The film’s spirit of anti-plutocratic revolt is inspired by the injustice of right-wing vigilantes; it is a fascistic fantasy dressed up in egalitarian justice. In Phillips’ new sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” he returns to the fast-paced ideology that gave that previous film its energy, dubious as it was; the sequel is merely innocuous, grandiose in its scale of production but minor in its dramatic substance.

“Folie à Deux” finds Arthur locked up in Arkham Asylum for the murders he committed in the previous film (three attackers in the subway, a former colleague and a television host whom he kills live at the ‘antenna) and awaiting trial. capital charges. (He is responsible for a sixth murder, that of his mother, to which he freely admits but for which he has not been charged.) Arthur is the celebrity of the place and he has the help of a competent lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), who has a plan to spare him the death penalty. She intends to present him as not responsible for his actions, on the grounds that he has a split personality resulting from the abuse he suffered in his childhood: Arthur is the mild-mannered actor, Joker the rabid killer who takes over in time of crisis. . But before the case reaches court, Arthur’s personal life is turned upside down: during a music therapy group session, he meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a patient who is an expressive and enthusiastic singer and who is also a fan of him. Arthur and Lee quickly fall in love and, aided by sympathetic guards, forge a relationship that she ingeniously manages to deepen during her trial, even as the presentation of Arthur as mentally ill, according to Maryanne’s strategy, puts testing the couple’s bond. (Along the way, Lee transforms into the Harley Quinn character.)

The driving force behind “Folie à Deux” is music. In “Joker”, it was established that Arthur watched classic Hollywood musicals on television with his mother. “Folie à Deux” shows the imagination formed by this experience: Arthur’s inner life is expressed in terms of song and dance, in sequences that range from intimate duets with Lee to powerful production numbers on sets grandiose with great actors and flamboyant action. Where “Joker” draws heavily on Martin Scorsese’s “King of Comedy,” the models for “Folie à Deux” are James Thurber’s story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (published in The New Yorker in 1939), in which the mundane daily life of a suburban businessman inspires wild fantasies in which he is the hero, and “Pennies from Heaven,” Dennis Potter’s 1978 television series starring Bob Hoskins, in which the protagonist, a sheet music salesman, expresses his fantasies by lip-syncing to classical-era pop records in staged musical productions. In Phillips’ film, there is no lip syncing; Instead, Phoenix (who is not a skilled singer) and Gaga (who is among the most distinctive pop singers) actually sing.

This singing is one of the most publicized aspects of the film’s production: Gaga and Phoenix perform live, on set, while the cameras roll. (They don’t lip sync their own pre-recordings, as is often the case in musicals.) Some of the singing is on an intimate scale, in tight spaces and close-ups, and Gaga does more than reducing his voice – she deglamorizes him, and does so throughout, removing much of the luster and splendor of the voice in favor of a less professional finish. Strangely, the results translate into an affectation of staging, a voluntary restriction of his style. Moreover, the other essential aspects of these musical scenes, from their orchestral or big band accompaniment to the brilliant pomp of their filming, counteract the spontaneity, intimacy, subjectivity, and immediacy that vocal performances are intended to convey. Whether the musical numbers feign realism (as when Arthur imagines himself strutting in the asylum common room) or veer profoundly from fantasy (as in a simulated marriage with a concert at a jazz club attached ), Phillips stays on the surface and lends them little physicality, little flair to match the songs.

Filming the music and dance is perhaps even closer to the graphic abstractions and crazy impossibilities of comic book art than is filming the action, no matter how vigorous or violent, but the images musical aspects of “Folie à Deux” are far from a global vision. visual design; they are largely mundane visual recordings that, despite elaborate settings, offer little sense of style. (The booming instrumental accompaniments, submerging the singers’ voices in their enveloping textures, don’t help either.) It’s as if Phillips is content to conjure up the idea of ​​fantastical musical scenes and provide them with little identity of their own . His previous films are not imbued with cinematic lyricism either, but the close attachment of the fantasies of “Folie à Deux” to the plot, their primary role in representing the states of mind of the protagonist, makes these sequences all the more prosaic.

The inability of “Folie à Deux” to get more than just iconic displays of emotion from its two great leads says as much about comic book-based films and genre films as such as it does about Phillips’ choice of direction. With their simplistic plotting, stripped-down psychology, and decidedly plot-driven dialogue, comic book adaptations are made for the B-movie or television productions they received decades ago—yet few directors other than Orson Welles could do it. evoke on a low budget the extravagant world of visual arts that makes comic books so appealing. The elaborate and likely expensive execution of the films, however, tends to determine the results: because the films are expensive to make and because they must primarily appeal to fans of the source material, the most important artistic decision-making is moved, towards commercial objectives. reasons, from the set to the meeting room. The anticipation of fans analyzing details in a Talmudic manner over the course of several films in a series results in an overly emphatic literal meaning. When a guard shaves Arthur to prepare him for a meeting with Maryanne (since an inmate can’t be trusted with a razor), he nicks the corner of Arthur’s mouth, and the small trickle of blood could all might as well have an operatic air of its kind. clean, as it is blatantly emphasized. Fear the worst: I won’t spoil it, but when this thread reappears, it is in a scene of a great dramatic moment that the underlined detail devalues ​​and grossly vulgarizes.

“Folie à Deux” is also a brutal story, mixing gratuitous violence and cruel suffering. The film’s only true horror scene involves sexual abuse, a sequence horrifying to behold in its allusive generalities and to imagine in its undepicted details. This scene stands out for the angst that Phillips puts into it, and it also stands out in another respect: his apparent detachment from the action that precedes and follows it. Even this remarkable, emotionally charged scene can’t help but seem exempt from a cinematic machine designed not to convey an experience beyond reason but to produce a commodity called darkness.

The film doesn’t let its events unfold organically; he sticks them on the screen with demonstrative evidence. There is a moment that sticks in our minds as a true touch of life: when Lee, a minimum security patient, meets Arthur, whose maximum security protocol requires him to have his hands handcuffed behind his back, even in the music group – and, from his handcuffs, he extends a single finger to shake her hand. In contrast, scenes of intensely expressed emotion (such as when Arthur, alone in the asylum courtyard, lashes out with loud, anguished sounds that could be laughter or crying) seem calculated, particularly for the demonstration of acting effort. Phillips has his actors for effect, but neither the script nor the filming live up to their efforts. In a major courtroom scene, Arthur speaks with a strange set of highly theatrical accents that are as accomplished in their eccentricity as they are detached not only from the film as a whole and the specifics of the scene, but also of Phoenix himself, who seems almost disembodied, filmed with a superficial inattention to physical presence. The film seems not just planned but decided, and what happens while the camera is rolling comes after the fact.