Joker: Folie à Deux, film review (2024)

When I saw “Joker” at the Venice Film Festival five years ago, I became extremely resentful and indignant about it, and I expressed that outrage – some readers thought inappropriately – in a review written in a hurry. (I was later informed that I could have taken some time to calm down: an embargo on reviews of the film remained in effect for another five hours after I filed my notice.) Because I didn’t want to reveal spoilers about the plot, I didn’t do it. reveal the main source of my indignation.

What triggered me was the film’s climax, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, now almost a Joker, appears on a late-night talk show hosted by glib showman Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro ). Franklin’s object is a mockery of the man in clown makeup. But Arthur has the last laugh: he pulls out a gun and blows Franklin’s brains out on live television.

This shook me in a very unpleasant way. Partly because I was pretty convinced that this story point was inspired by the 1987 on-air suicide of Pennsylvania political figure R. Budd Dwyer. The footage of him committing suicide was of course edited for news coverage, but I was close enough to the media at the time to be able to watch the unexpurgated footage of the suicide. And to this day, I wish I hadn’t. The similarities between the real event and what director Todd Philips staged struck me as too specific to be a coincidence. I considered what Phillips and Phoenix (and, yes, De Niro) did to be unforgivable opportunistic nihilism.

So there you have it, in case you were wondering. In my review, I wrote: “In today’s mainstream films, ‘dark’ is just another flavor. Like “edgy,” it’s an option you use depending on the market you want to reach. And it’s especially useful when injected into the comic book genre.

And now I’m back on the Joker beat for the sequel, “Joker: Folie a Deux,” which, as you may have heard, is a musical, written and directed, as the first one was film, by Todd Phillips. Fortunately, Phillips didn’t write the songs. It’s largely a jukebox musical, with selections from The Great American Songbook (“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”) and ’60s international pop (“To Love Somebody,” created by the Bee Gees and popularized by Janis Joplin) and more. . And the best thing I can say about it is that it clearly doesn’t take into account marketing, as we conventionally understand it.

Before we assess the ultimate merit of making the second “Joker” film into a musical, we must acknowledge that its rationale is arguably strong. In other words, Arthur Fleck, who here makes a stark distinction between himself as a civilian and himself as “Joker”, is a deeply disturbed individual whose distorted imagination might well imagine his existence as being at inside a kind of spectacle. We can therefore admit that the filmmakers are acting in good faith by presenting this as a musical. It also allows them to get out of certain desperate situations. The film is narratively, psychologically and aesthetically incoherent. Still, it can fall into the first two categories because musicals get away with narrative and psychological incoherence simply by the nature of their being, you know, musicals.

As this keeps reminding you, the story takes place almost immediately after the repulsive murder that ended “Joker.” Arthur/Joker is in captivity in one of Arkham’s dark and satanic mental institutions, and during one of his walks to see a visitor, he practically gets a wink from a young woman singing in a room open. It’s Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel (DC mavens may be miffed that they’ll never get into Harley Quinn here), and the two soon conspire to see each other as much as captivity allows before Arthur’s trial, to which Lee is quite mysteriously granted suddenly citizen status. attend as a spectator. (This is sufficiently explained, if not entirely believable.) Arthur is smiling and surly when he’s not in Joker makeup, but rest assured, he can put a lot of it into it, whether in the song’s fantasies or in the reality of the trial. And then he says, well, “Joker.”

Trial and romance are the mainstays of this seemingly endless film. There are passages – like Joker’s impersonation of a Southern lawyer drawl – that might have been entertaining if they hadn’t been placed in what appears to be the eighth or ninth hour of the film. Ultimately, the paper-thin story amounts to the same nihilistic silliness that Phillips served up in the first “Joker,” albeit remixed, genre-wise.

Some early reviews complained that the film didn’t offer much in the way of “Joker Fan Service.” This makes me laugh a little; I understand that the character is indeed a pop culture phenomenon and indeed fictional, but when you consider what he represents, what exactly would “Joker Fan Service” entail? We might as well talk about “Charles Manson Fan Service”. It sure is a sick and twisted world we live in.

The only other aspect of the film I can be positive about, aside from its indifference to the audience it might attract, is that of the performance. Lady Gaga and Phoenix clearly put a lot of work into their characterizations and interactions. The different modes of interpretation they use to sing, for example, discreet and fallible in their own “real lives”, translate fully and professionally into their shared dreams. While Gaga holds her own for the duration of the picture, Phoenix’s virtuosity eventually fades into narcissistic exhibitionism (his ostensible Joker “dance” really looks like he’s doing stretches before yoga). But it’s still virtuosity, whatever it’s worth.