Joker is a great-looking film with an astonishing turn by Joaquin Phoenix, but in the end I found it seriously lacking both as a character study and social commentary.
I’m about five years late in watching this movie, but at the time I did follow the initial controversy and the eventual critical and commercial mega-success of Todd Phillips’ origin story of Batman’s nemesis. By that point, I more or less checked out of the entire superhero genre, but the idea of a mature, gritty homage to movies like Taxi Driver did have me intrigued.
Two things impressed me right off the bat: delicious cinematography and Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill loner who you know will become the infamous killer clown. Though the film’s squalid, graffiti-covered, trash-filled New York City doesn’t look like anything else other than New York City no matter how many times it’s referred to as Gotham, I absolutely loved the moody atmospheric look and the fantastic production design. Every scene feels like it was carefully and thoughtfully planned and shot, and though the teal-and-orange colour grading can sometimes be overused onscreen, here it looks glorious.
Phoenix obviously lost weight for the role, so much that you can see his protruding ribs and shoulder blades, and his already bold and striking, slightly sinister features have been hollowed out to the same unnerving effect as Jake Gyllenhaal’s in Nightcrawler. He fully commits to the physicality and extreme, unhinged emotions, and though the movie itself lost me at times, Phoenix’s performance is utterly mesmerising throughout.
Arthur is a figure both sad and disturbing, an outsider whose painful, studied attempts at appearing normal are always doomed to fail. A former inpatient at a psychiatric facility, he now lives with his flaky mother Penny (Frances Conroy) in her shabby apartment, in a derelict block that feels like it was deliberately designed to foster hopelessness and despair. Arthur is on seven different medications and has a neurological condition that makes him break into uncontrollable fits of manic, high-pitched laughter. He hero-worships a tacky TV host, Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), and aspires to be a stand-up comedian, but can only find employment in a professional clown agency. As soon as you meet him, you get a sense of a person who’s already teetering on the edge.
For roughly a quarter of the movie, I was absorbed in Arthur’s miserable existence and the bleak portrayal of urban decay. As it went on, however, the story felt less like a gradual descent into insanity, and more like a series of repetitive events that keep Arthur’s journey on the same flat line. Instead of building on top of each other, most of the plot points could have been reshuffled and I doubt I’d be able to tell a difference. In the end it simply becomes tedious to see Arthur wronged and let down again and again and again.
A subplot involving Arthur’s neighbour, a single mother, at first seems promising, with a potential to show a different side to the character, but it doesn’t amount to much. Neither does the subplot about Arthur’s parentage and a teased connection to Gotham’s most famous son. Its only payoff, it seems, is to play with the audience’s expectations and knowledge of comic book lore during the overlong finale.
The movie does come back to life at the very end, with a couple of genuinely tense and gripping scenes where things finally stop happening to Arthur and he’s actually making choices. But then it just goes on and on, and then it tacks on an “edgy” ambiguous ending that feels like a massive copout and a refusal to commit to the story. Similarly, the movie may touch on the hot button issues like social inequality and mental illness, but it then backs out of exploring them in a meaningful way, so they simply sit there. But it sure does want you to think it tackles them, because it keeps spelling them out through characters’ dialogue in the least subtle way possible.
I’m still glad I watched a movie that at least has an ambition to make a comic book movie with seriousness and gravitas, and despite my frustrations with the script Joaquin Phoenix’ performance is just as memorable as Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. We’ll see if Todd Phillips does a more satisfying job with what looks like a frankly bonkers sequel later this year.
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