Joker: Folie à Deux has madness in its title and in its conception – it’s a bold thought experiment that hasn’t translated into a good movie. If it had stopped at the half-hour mark I’d have said it was brilliant, a genius move, but it goes on and on with its attempt to weld the comicbook thriller to the musical and wears out its welcome, but still won’t leave.
It opens more or less where the original Joker left off – no, hang on, there’s a short Looney Tunes-style cartoon first, also featuring Joker – before director Todd Phillips cuts to live-action footage of a broken Arthur Fleck (a shockingly emaciated and tortured Joaquin Phoenix) aka Joker banged up in Arkham State Hospital where he’s undergoing psychiatric assessment to see whether he is sane enough to stand trial for the murder of TV host Murray Franklin (played back then by Robert De Niro) live on air.
From here there’s not much in terms of plot – Arthur meets Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), the sort of woman who likes a jailbird; he is assessed by various healthcare professionals and legal eagles and rolls his eyes as they spout caring-sharing epithets; and he gets his day in court. But there was never much plot in a Fred Astaire movie and that – in a fuck you to the fans – is more or less what Phillips gives us here.
There’s a clip of The Band Wagon early on. Which is a story about popular culture (a musical) being hijacked by high art, until Fred Astaire saves the day with a last-minute remodelling of the musical in trouble. Out goes the Faustian high concept and in comes a breezy series of “let’s do the show right here” numbers, including songs like That’s Entertainment. The massive irony being that Phillips has done exactly what The Band Wagon warns against by injecting the musical into a supervillain movie. He’s Fausted it all up.
That’s Entertainment crops up here, too, sung by Gaga, alongside other old barnstormers, like That’s Life, If You Go Away, Close to You, Bewitched, If My Friends Could See Me Now and Get Happy, some of them done in the full Hollywood fantasy style Vincente Minnelli might have directed, others done downbeat, with little scratchy voices in the woe-is-me real world.
Some are very good – asylum guard Brendan Gleeson gets a few numbers and is very effective, and both Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga (as you might expect) also get a few belters.
But after a certain point I started asking what the point of all this was. Is it ironic counterpoint? Satire? It’s certainly not a proper musical, if only it were. It’s more akin, artistically, to Lady Gaga’s dress made of meat – a sensational one-off statement. But the more you see of it, the less impressed you are, the more you start wondering how it’s going to smell in a couple of days.
Phillips has a point to make in the character of Arthur Fleck/Joker – about celebrity and how fame and infamy have collapsed into each other – but it is an inanely crass one. The film is actually at its best when it sticks to its first thought and plays about with the musical as a form, asking whether a tune sung by a self-regarding murderous psychotic weirdo is as catchy as when Astaire sings it.
Since it’s part of the DC Universe (a reboot of the DC Extended Universe), it’s a superhero movie, of sorts. But it stands apart from its Batman and Superman stablemates in much the same way that Ang Lee’s Hulk (another case of a movie with a missing definite article) stands apart from the Marvel pack.
Both are interesting failures – Joker 2 got thumbs down reviews and bad box office – but time will probably do for Joker 2 what it’s already doing for Hulk. There is a fan fiction aspect to Todd Phillips’s weird metafilm, which would be much better if it was much weirder. Perhaps a re-edit with 45 minutes of material removed would give it a new lease of life. Maybe a fan somewhere who’s handy with Final Cut is already having a hack at it.
Joker: Folie à Deux – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
