Review: "Joker: Folie à Deux" is a soporific musical at war with itself
I don't know why I went to see this movie
Rubbernecking is never a good idea.
While driving, you see a wreck on the side of the highway. The conscious, responsible part of your mind tells you not to look; it’s dangerous to take your eyes off the road, and even if it wasn’t, you know it would be in ill taste to stare at someone else’s potentially deadly misfortune. But the crash causes a long wait in traffic, and you sit there long enough that by the time you pull even with the wreck, you can’t help yourself. Curiosity wins, and you take a gander. Inevitably, you feel bad for looking. Either it was just a minor fender bender, and for all the flashing lights and sirens there was never anything to see in the first place; or it’s something horribly gruesome, and you’re presented with an image you’ll never be able to shake, concomitant with the guilt of rudely intruding on another person’s tragedy. You peel your eyes away, drive off, and wish you had resisted the temptation.
This principle holds for cinema, too. There was no reason for me to look at Joker: Folie à Deux; the first film, from 2019, is comfortably one of my most detested films of all time, and I saw no evidence Todd Phillips and company had developed the brains or skills necessary to produce a worthwhile sequel. But boy were there a lot of flashing lights and sirens: Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn? A promised shift in genre into musical territory? Months and months of competently constructed trailers playing over and over again? A set of spoiler leaks online promising a final plot point so stupid and/or brilliant I kind of wanted to see it for myself? I’m only human. Everybody finds themselves rubbernecking now and again. And so there I was, at 3:00 PM today, having sat in traffic long enough to stop and survey the crash.
It turned out to be a fender-bender.
Folie à Deux is a bad movie – there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ car crash – but it isn’t a disaster. It’s garden-variety incompetent, a confused and muddled sequel with some good ideas and some bad ideas, all executed with a pretty uniform shrug of indifference. The checks have cleared, everybody got their Oscars last time around, so what’s left to prove? Phillips and company don’t feel the need to be as grossly, nihilistically provocative as they were the first time, nor do they show any interest in pushing the envelope to try something new. As a musical, Folie à Deux is utterly inert, made with the exact opposite of passion or verve; as a courtroom drama, it’s laughably inept, completely ridiculous but not in a way that makes things even a little bit fun. Those two broad halves never meaningfully build on one another, and though the whole thing only clocks in at a bit over two hours, it feels interminably long. This is the first draft of a script, scattered ideas in search of a meaningful structure, executed with technical competence but no soul. Neither, though, are there any real sparks – anything to get particularly angry about, or to feel moved by. Mostly, it just produces boredom: an overwhelming sense of why are we here? It’s like taking your eyes off the road to look at the fender-bender: why did I bother?
The first Joker was much more akin to rubbernecking at a flaming, gruesome wreckage. It produced in me nausea and fury, not indifference. There are two reasons for this. First is because Joker is an act of unadulterated and unapologetic artistic plagiarism, a movie cribbing so heavily from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy – not just in plot, but also in cinematography, and mise-en-scene, and overall cinematic grammar – that it is impossible for any authentic or individualistic artistry to shine through. I would take generic Marvel slop any day of the week over Joker, because at least those films don’t dissect the bodies of landmark masterpieces and prance around in their skin suits to feign artistic worth. Just as Donald Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and Elon Musk is a stupid man’s idea of a genius, Joker is an edgy teenager’s idea of ‘cinema,’ something that can only be categorized as such if you’ve never experienced the real thing. It is the quintessential “I liked this in high school” movie, like Donnie Darko or the films of Kevin Smith: a young person’s first blush with a movie that is trying to be unique, distinctive ‘art,’ not just a ‘product,’ leading them to think it must be a towering masterpiece. Embarrassment inevitably follows upon revisiting these films later in life, with more wisdom and experience, and realizing they were not, in fact, groundbreaking. I do not cast these stones without having sinned: Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was my most obvious version of this in high school. It happens to all of us (though I will submit that Joker is magnitudes worse as a film than any other example of this phenomenon).
Second, and even more importantly, is the pure, disgusting nihilism that animates Joker’s every impulse. The degree of plagiarism the film engages in is itself nihilistic, of course; the idea that the way one makes a comic-book movie ‘art’ is to strip out all comic signifiers and replace them with Scorsese homages is offensive to Superman, Spider-Man 2, Batman Returns, Into the Spider-Verse, and every other great superhero movie that has found true cinematic ambition in enthusiastically embracing its comic-book source material. But the nihilism that really offends me in Joker is the way its entire text functions as brain-dead apologia for the ‘lonely male shooter’ archetype in line with every conservative’s response to mass shootings: It’s not the guns, it’s mental health! The film is uncomfortably pulled between grossly demonizing Arthur Fleck’s mental illness and blaming society for grossly demonizing Arthur Fleck’s mental illness. Of course, you can’t have it both ways: the film constantly does the thing it critiques society for, drawing a line between ‘mental illness’ and ‘mass shooter’ and then tut-tutting the audience for that line being drawn, as if to say ‘look what you made me do – this was just inevitable.’ The hypocrisy undermines the entire film, and leaves it with very little to say about the extremely loaded imagery it presents. It cannot meaningfully engage with the idea that our broken social services abandon people who need help when it also says, explicitly, that a bullet to the head is “what you fucking deserve” for crossing “a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash.”The film doesn’t ultimately ‘critique’ anything, but instead glorifies the self-aggrandizement of pathetic white men who think they’re owed the world’s attention, even if that price must be paid in blood. I hate it, deeply and abidingly. It is an epochally terrible movie.
I do not hate Folie à Deux; it is not an appreciably better or worse movie than its predecessor, though it is a markedly less unpleasant experience to sit through, in part because it lacks the ambition or follow through to ever do anything that could be described as ‘provocative’ or ‘offensive.’ I will give the first movie this: It knew what it wanted to be, even if what it wanted to be was derivative and noxious. Folie à Deux doesn’t have a clue; comprehensively confused in genre and in theme, its scattershot emptiness would be breathtaking if it weren’t so soporific. The colorful, boisterous musical presented in the marketing is a far cry from the actual film, which is for the most part a very long and very dull courtroom drama dryly reexamining the events of the first movie (I’ve already seen it compared to the infamous Seinfeld finale, where Jerry and friends are put on trial for their misanthropy, and that’s actually a decent comparison, albeit one that’s unfair to Larry David’s efforts).
To be fair, there are kernels of good ideas at work here: Fleck (returning Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix) having to grapple with the way his ‘Joker’ persona has become a larger-than-life media sensation no individual man can possibly bear, and ultimately buckling under its weight, is the right thematic direction, if a sequel must be made. Phoenix gets a few big moments to play those complicated emotions near the end, and they are far and away the best scenes in either of these movies, the only ones that feel like they have something real to offer above and beyond stolen stylistic signatures or thoughtless provocations. But it’s too little too late, drops of water at the end of the desert path that is Folie à Deux’s many terrible musical ‘numbers’ (if they can be called that) and its even worse grasp of courtroom drama. It is hard to mess up a big courtroom scene; there’s inherent drama in that setting, a focused and theatrical space to present big ideas and reveal character under pressure. Folie à Deux finds a way, though, in no small part because the courtroom scenes are so holistically ludicrous that it throws a giant wrench in the film’s otherwise stark separation of fantasy and reality, with the judge inexplicably letting Arthur do whatever he wants, up to dressing like the Joker and brutally harassing a witness who was also a victim in his crimes.
More problematic is Phillips’ lack of interest in developing the people who make up Joker’s supposed ‘fanbase.’ We hear a lot about them, and we see some giant crowds outside the courthouse, but at no point do we come to understand what, exactly, Arthur Fleck means to these people: why murdering Robert De Niro on live TV would endear him to thousands, and ultimately lead to something of a terrorist uprising. This is where ‘Harley Quinn’ (Lady Gaga) is supposed to be the film’s crucial addition, an individual representative of that adoring public whose relationship with Arthur traces the complicated relationship he has with criminal infamy. Gaga could certainly pull that off; A Star is Born proved she’s a fantastic actress, and she and Phoenix are good together here. But while this character is named Harleen Quinzel, the part as written, directed, and costumed never actually evokes Harley Quinn in any meaningful way. There is no connection to the existing character beyond the broad idea of ‘a woman obsessed with the Joker,’ and no interest in engaging with Harley’s personality or playfulness. Yet even as Harley has been hollowed out, nothing has been added to replace what’s been lost. She is an empty, blank slate of a character. What she sees in Fleck, or why she wants to believe in the myth of ‘the Joker,’ is a perpetual mystery, her interiority resolutely denied to the audience at every turn. Gaga does her best; there is a spark behind her eyes promising a rich inner life, were Phillips ever interested in granting us access. Instead, she is stranded, and Arthur’s romance with her is as hollow as his relationship with those adoring crowds. It’s all theoretical, an idea written on a napkin and never sketched in full.
Let’s rip this band-aid off quickly: The musical elements of Folie à Deux are horrible. Irredeemably bad. Completely vestigial and almost entirely unnecessary, yet taking up a massive amount of the film’s run-time. Every performance is monotonous, a sort of mumblecore, soft-spoken version of a ‘Great American Songbook’ jukebox musical, with Phoenix and Gaga both directed to half-whisper their singing, all of it captured with dull, staid camerawork and a complete lack of energy. What is the point of a musical if it is not permitted to be boisterous? When Arthur first breaks into song to express romantic revery, why is it all captured in a single, slow take, Phoenix singing at a low, even volume with no variation? Is that what ‘love’ is in this film? The visual and aural equivalent of concrete? Characters break into song in musicals because their hearts and minds are so full of feeling that it must burst from their bodies and break the reality of the diegesis. Rob Marshall is one of the worst directors of the 21st century, but even he gets this: his Chicago, which Folie à Deux borrows from liberally in separating ‘song’ and ‘reality,’ leaps in energy when the characters enter the stages of their minds and sing. Phillips cannot muster the slightest tonal shift. Even when his characters fantasize themselves on an elaborate talk-show set, or in an homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart, the tonal dial does not move. In most cases, when a director who has not previously done musicals gets to work in that space, they do so gleefully, like children getting to play in a new sandbox. Phillips seems either scared of the material or angry at it, tamping down to the talent of his performance to such an oppressive degree. Gaga gets to sing a big, full-throated cover of Sinatra’s “That’s Life” over the end credits, and it’s so much better than anything in the film itself, because it’s the only time anyone gets to actually belt a song. Phoenix’s voice is nails on a chalkboard, from start to finish, which I can only imagine was a conscious decision, given that he sang just fine in Walk the Line twenty years ago, in character as Johnny Cash. My mind cannot comprehend these choices.
It seems that without an obvious Scorsese analogue to rip off, Phillips is directorially adrift. The cinematography is fine, the sets look good, and there are a few striking images (like the lipstick smile shown in the first trailer), but it’s mostly just workmanlike, uninspired. Everyone punches the clock, does their job, and goes home. There is no tangible ambition to the production. It looks polished, but the idea this cost $200 million – more than twice the first film – is baffling; the only way to imagine that much money on screen is if Phoenix and Gaga were stuffing the pockets of their costumes with their undoubtedly exorbitant paychecks.
There is a shot near the film’s end of Fleck being chased through traffic by multiple people dressed as the Joker. How can an image that good, that symbolically loaded – a man being pursued by doppelgangers, the id taking form to pursue his body in waking reality – pass with such a whimper? The film’s very last beat – which I’d had spoiled for me, and which raised my eyebrow enough to want to rubberneck in the first place – plays out much the same way. I won’t spoil it here, save to say it sounded, to me, like an interesting gambit; I wanted to see how they would justify it. The ultimate ‘disappointment’ of the film – if it is possible to be disappointed by something one had no expectations for – is that its build up to that ending is so half-hearted and scattershot, and the moment itself played so apprehensively (the big crucial gesture happens in the far background of the final shot, in soft focus, more like an easter egg than a central idea) that the potential boldness of the gesture feels like a shrug of defeat. ‘Let’s just get this over with, and put this whole ‘Joker’ thing behind us.’
That is, perhaps, the highest praise I can give this sequel: it lays bare the hollowness of this endeavor so completely that I cannot imagine even the first film’s most ardent appreciators defending this one. It is a classic ‘Emperor Has No Clothes’ situation, a naked figure with delusions of grandeur gesticulating to us that its body is garbed in finery. The first film gesticulated much more passionately, and convinced many more people that it was clothed in fine fashion. Folie à Deux won’t fool anyone. It won’t be talked about much, except to express disappointment, and it won’t prompt much debate. For that, I’m kind of grateful; after our long national nightmare, we can finally put this whole ‘Joker’ thing behind us.
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