Joker: Folie á deux, 4/10
What a weird movie.
The extremely polarized reaction got me curious enough to go see this. Plus I want to support less formulaic and derivative big profile movies just out of principle. The verdict this time being that I'm glad I went to see it, but don't really need to ever watch it again.
I'm extremely conflicted about how to feel about this movie. There are ways to frame it as a meta masterpiece, a $200 million troll, the exact kind of movie Joker himself would make. On the more cynical side you can see it as a haphazard, creatively bankrupt bore that only knows how to throw spaghetti at the wall in the hopes that something will stick. It's clearly reaching for some big ideas and concepts, but either fumbles them all on purpose in some grand "fuck you" statement, or simply lacks the aptitude to actually use them properly. On paper it's really easy to justify some of the choices they made:
- The musical numbers being framed through the lens of a frayed psyche makes total sense, and is actually really clever in bridging the ever-present issue with movie musicals: are the numbers diegetic or not?
- This movie's version of Harley Quinn makes fits as an analysis and takedown of the idolatry the original movie created, echoing real-life such cases like the women who wrote Manson love letters.
- The media circus Fleck finds himself in should be a great vehicle for some really incisive commentary on the media landscape, televized trials and the perversity with which we elevate psychopaths
But man, so much of it is just so
boring. Like, this movie has maybe 85 minutes worth of story torturously stretched to over 2 hours for negative gain. Most of the first hour of it is just heard repeating information you already know and going through a psych analysis of Fleck anyone with a brain could have inferred from the first movie. I was genuinely dozing off when the scene where
Joker decides to represent himself happened, and then the movie finally came alive. The second half is much more engaging, feeling like a gritty, high-budget episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
It's not a totally worthless film: it doesn't feel like a cash grab purely by virtue of it being so weird, and you can tell the people doing it actually cared. Phoenix is still great, even if his performance is much more subdued compared to the first. There's some great cinematography to be found, the 70s period detail is still enjoyable, and there's some real care put into the musical numbers. Unlike some people, I didn't find this movie to be that much of a "fuck you" to the people who really fell in love with the first.
But neither have I really an idea what it actually was. Maybe that's the joke: that the movie is as confused about its identity as Fleck himself is. It tries all sorts of things, and basically none of them work. There's work and care put into the musical numbers, but A) none of them really move the plot forward, they're more there to reinforce things we already know, and B) some of them are cut to so abruptly and out of nowhere that they feel more than anything like random inserts. The obvious attempt at deconstructing and analyzing the first film falls flat because the movie's sledgehammer subtle about it, and just repeats information we already know. The dynamic between Joker and Harley (or "Lee" in this case) being basically an inversion of their norm is interesting, but it feels inconsistent and limited. In the comics Joker and Harley can tear up Gotham on a rampage of super-crime, in this version the most they can seemingly do is petty theft and attempted prison escape. If the movie focused on it more and actually had some consequence to it, then it'd be a different story.
There is a rather poignant moment at the end where after
the courthouse gets blown up Fleck ends up having to almost literally escape from himself. It's a really effective moment and a cool visual, and hints at a much more interesting film than what precedes it. Like most of what I listed in the above paragraph, it feels like it was thrown into the movie in the hopes that this random mish-mash would provide something great or at the very least interesting, but sadly neither really happens. What we ended up with was a confused, meandering, boring mess.
Lastly, my biggest piece of evidence for this being the kind of movie Joker himself would make is that it cost
200 million motherfucking dollars to make. I'm sorry, but there's got to be some sort of money laundering, tax evasion or budget theft going on here. The movie has like three locations, the main cast consists of maybe 10 people with Phoenix, Gaga and Brendan Gleeson being the only big names, and aside from the very end there's basically no big setpiece moments.
Babylon, a notoriously lavish and visually indulgent film, had close to only half this movie's budget. What in the everloving hell happened here?
letterboxd.com
hello. It got canceled because of a tax loophole and Warner brothers. Stinking, they wouldn't get any money from it if they released it and paging all their bets on The Flash and Joker 2.