by Rob DiCristino
On second thought, maybe Don’t.If a generous and thoughtful optimist — certainly not me, but some hypothetical person — were to hold Todd Phillips’ Joker up to the light, wipe off a few layers of grime, and look at it from just the right angle, there’s an argument to be made that they might see something genuinely provocative and interesting. It’s hard to entirely dismiss a movie that makes a billion dollars at the box office and brings home a pair of Oscars, after all, and despite the callow recklessness with which it mishandles themes and images from far better movies, there’s no denying that Joaquin Phoenix’s first turn as the Clown Prince of Crime made an impression on our popular culture. It’s a great looking movie, at least, and we had to get Phoenix his apology Oscar at some point. And you know what? Cinema is for everyone. Joker is some kid’s first comic book movie. It’s some couple’s first date movie. It’s some edgelord teenager’s first manifesto draft. It may be politically infantile and ethically irresponsible, but, you know, he dances on the steps! That’s cinema, right? Right? Is this thing on?Well, our friend Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is dancing again, this time with a partner. Joker: Folie à Deux picks up a few years after the events of the first film and finds Fleck institutionalized after murdering five people — actually six, but he’s kept one quiet — including a late night talk show host on live television. Arthur, somehow even more gaunt and sallow than he was as a free man, has settled in at Arkham State Hospital, where the guards (including Brendan Gleeson’s Jackie) allow him reasonable access to cigarettes provided he regales them with one of his classic jokes every now and then. Arthur has his share of fans at Arkham, you see, especially Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a dusky pyromaniac who claims to have seen the Joker TV movie at least twenty times. As Arthur’s lawyer (Catherine Keener) encourages him to separate himself from the Joker persona in preparation for trial — in other words, to hang his defense on the idea that he suffers from dissociative episodes — Lee begs him to instead bury Arthur and send in the clown, to lead the voices in his head in a raucous chorus of psychotic joy.
And sing, he will! If Joker was Todd Phillips’ homage to The King of Comedy, then Folie à Deux might be his One From the Heart, a musical romance that sets Lee and Arthur’s courtship against the backdrop of Gotham’s Trial of the Century. As Arthur endures psychologist interviews, competency hearings, and other head fakes toward contrition — including another TV appearance, this one with a well-coiffed Steve Coogan — he and Lee serenade each other with Top 40 favorites like “What the World Needs Now” and “Get Happy,” sometimes staging variety shows or rendezvousing on shoebox theater rooftops crafted in Arthur’s imagination. All the while, DA Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey, sporting just one face for now) builds the state’s case against Arthur, bringing in familiar friends like Zazie Beetz and Leigh Gill in order to properly illustrate the depths of Arthur’s depravity. But as public opinion swells in favor of Arthur and his mad new love, Gotham’s elite hold their breath for yet another sign that their iron grip on law and order has finally come undone.Actually, that last bit’s not exactly right, is it? Sure, Joker was — when it felt like it, anyway — about institutional inequality, the ways in which the mentally ill and economically downtrodden are cast off by those in power. Arthur Fleck is a victim of abuse, we’re shown, abuse that stems from our society’s unwillingness to prioritize healthcare and education over profit and mass consumption. Remember Thomas Wayne, whose possible parentage of Arthur literalized the one-percent’s brutality and vilification of those they consider Less Than? Well, someone at Warner Brothers Discovery must have given Todd Phillips a stern talking-to on that score, because Folie à Deux happily recenters blame squarely on Arthur’s shoulders. The Joker isn’t real, he eventually claims. Arthur is just a crazy guy who wanted attention, someone whose loneliness and ostracism made him a popular — but ultimately meaningless — mascot for a self-absorbed public. That Arthur continues to play that game is the true injustice here, the film insists; Arthur will never be powerful, and that’s his own fault.
And there might even have been something to that had Folie à Deux put any craft or thought into its musical numbers, if it had used the essential artificiality of the genre — which the film explicitly calls out by having the inmates watch a relevant clip from Minnelli’s The Band Wagon — to dramatize Arthur’s struggle between fantasy and reality, to even comment on how Joker’s immature handle on its messaging spawned public movements that Phillips has since vehemently disowned. Not only does that not happen — the musical numbers vary between daydreams and real life with seemingly no lasting effect on the latter — but Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver fail to make any compelling thematic case in its place, literally hanging Arthur out to dry in a climax that tries to distract us with metatextual Easter eggs long enough for us to forget how empty and soulless the last 140 minutes have been. Joker may have been reckless, but Folie à Deux is positively cowardly, a film with absolutely no ideas masquerading as a knowing takedown of its audience’s expectations.What were we expecting, anyway? Well, a bit more from Academy Award nominee Lady Gaga, that’s for sure! While Folie à Deux’s trailers make it seem as though Lee is the film’s driving force, that it’s Gaga’s bombastic charisma that seduces Arthur back into the limelight, the thirteen-time Grammy winner spends most of the film mixed amongst onlookers in the courtroom gallery or strung up alongside Phoenix, with fewer than a handful of moments — let alone entire scenes — to make something real out of a character so far removed from Arleen Sorkin and Margot Robbie’s incarnations that anyone blind to the value of IP recognition might wonder why they bothered calling her Harley at all. It’s simply criminal to ask a performer of Gaga’s talent to play second fiddle in this way, to give her not one — not one — chance to belt out a significant solo number. It’s another baffling failure from a movie so openly antagonistic to its audience that by the time the credits finally, mercifully roll, we’ll wonder what we did to deserve such a cruel practical joke.
Joker: Folie à Deux is in theaters now.
Wait... They got Gaga and she gets no solo? Wtf?
ReplyDeleteLook, I applaud Warner for trying something different, which is something I like about their stuff. It doesn't always work, but they try. But I'm stuck at the title, and I speak french. I'm just wondering why they'd use this title, other than trying to make it sound more artsy?
To clarify: She gets to sing, but there are no big, bombastic Gaga-esque numbers that really let her uncork it. They're almost always duets (and subdued ones, at that).
DeleteOh, you were clear, buythat's not enough when you get somebody like her. Imagine A Star Is Born without her belting it at the big show midway through the movie
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