Joker, a new take on DC’s Clown Prince of Crime, will go down as one of the year’s big missed opportunities.
Director Todd Phillips, mostly known for his Hangover movies, apparently got the green light to do whatever he wanted with the Joker mythos. He managed to get Joaquin Phoenix, pretty much perfect casting, to sign on for the title role. This was a chance to tell a dark origin story from Joker’s point of view.
Phillips blows this chance.
Phoenix is otherworldly good as Arthur Fleck, a severely troubled clown and standup comedy wannabe (and momma’s boy) with a condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably at inappropriate moments. He physically and mentally disappears into the part, to the point where you may become concerned for the actor’s well-being.
He accomplishes this in a film that has a major identity crisis, in that it wants to be a DC movie utilizing a DC icon without really existing within DC lore.
Could that have been OK? Sure, but the movie builds to a conclusion that frustratingly teases the great Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel. It borrows elements of that great work, but only enough to tease.
So, why not do a film that tells the story of The Dark Knight Returns entirely from the Joker’s perspective, instead of dancing around Batman lore in a way that feels like you are just trying to be cute and clever? The experience of watching this left me, ultimately, unfulfilled. Many borrowed elements from comic books, Bernie Goetz, Death Wish and Martin Scorsese movies are thrown into the pot, resulting in a muddy work that feels oddly routine given the crazed and wonderful performance at its center.
When we first see Fleck, he’s dressed as a clown, spinning a sign and generally having a good time. He promptly gets his ass kicked, and not for the last time in this movie. We then see him in therapy and living in poverty with his quirky mother (Frances Conroy). Fleck slowly but surely starts to lose all sense of his humanity as he grows into a criminal monster.
We’ve seen all the plot mechanizations before in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. Heck, Phillips even casts a game Robert De Niro to play a talk show host that winds up being a nod to Miller’s David Letterman riff (David Endocrine) in The Dark Knight Returns. At its most derivative, the screenplay echoes A Beautiful Mind, filmed in a way that feels like a hackneyed Shyamalan twist.
Is the violence too much? That would be based upon your personal threshold for fake mayhem and make believe in movies. I for one was appropriately shocked at times by how visceral the movie got, and can say this goes well beyond your typical Avengers movie or the playfully crazed violence of something like, say, Deadpool. The violence in this movie is ugly, extremely downbeat, and leaves you with knots in your stomach.
Phoenix does a thing with the hysterical laughing earlier in the movie, where he shows Fleck struggling as it hurts his throat and challenges his smoker’s lungs. As the film progresses, it appears that the Joker’s hysterical laugh muscles are strengthening, a sort of training for his future criminal career where that laughter will cause no pain, and flow out of him with no need for lozenges afterwards.
Touches like these, and depicting Gotham very much like a pre-Giuliani New York City in the ’70s (I assure you folks, that place was a hellhole), are impressive.
All the good is done in by the paint-by-numbers plotting. Fleck’s standup comedian aspirations don’t make a whole lot of sense, other than providing a convenient plot device to reach the movie’s predictable finale. Everything to do with Fleck’s mother plays like a poor man’s Psycho. For a movie that was supposed to be an entirely original approach to the Joker, nothing really feels original other than the spark of creativity Phoenix brings to the enterprise. It’s boringly familiar.
Joker won the Golden Lion for Best Film at this year’s Venice Film Festival? That voting panel must’ve been on mushrooms.
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2019.
Be careful you gave a bad review of this masterpiece of a movie LOL you could get death threats like a lot of other film review weres for telling the truth
fax
Terrible review, not because you didn’t like, it just seems like you barely watched it. Multiple things you say make it seem like you were barely paying attention…
“Phoenix does a thing with the hysterical laughing earlier in the movie, where he shows Fleck struggling as it hurts his throat and challenges his smoker’s lungs.” – The character has a disorder where he can’t control his laughter and he tries to fight that, causing his wheezing and choking.
You seem like a hack who just needed to pump out an article about this movie.
“So, why not do a film that tells the story of The Dark Knight Returns entirely from the Joker’s perspective, instead of dancing around Batman lore in a way that feels like you are just trying to be cute and clever?”
Are you sure you are a movie reviewer and not a teenage kid trying to project on someone else? The whole purpose of this movie was to give Joker a background of how he could become such a psychopath. This isn’t a Marvel film where the backstory of a hero or villain can be summed-up in some catchy millennial watered down phrase.
Your criticism is literally “Okay but I wanted the movie to be about something else”.
What you call an identify crisis, others call expanding of the universe, which was once again the point of the movie – a thrillingly real, close to reality way of how a person could become so mad and descend into darkness due to mental-illness and external factors.
Saw this film yesterday. Agree with the author of this article completely. The story was boring. I felt like the director was trying to make a 70s throw back film and show how artistic he was, but ended up looking pretentious. Phoenix was great, as always, but the movie was a great letdown.
I love films that are a change from the explosion filled action standards we get shoved in our faces, but alternatives must have that special something to grab the audience. This film did not have that. Great and accurate review.
You should NOT review movies if this review is any indication of your ability.
Rediculous Review
I think you were on mushrooms. Its a masterpiece
This review makes me think you didn’t see the same movie. It was a masterpiece and your jealousy of the fact it is already nominated for awards is glaring at the end of your hitpiece.
Luckily the 40 thousand reviews who aren’t paid critics give it over a 9/10
This review brought to you by the guy who gave John Wick 3, 4/5 on rotten tomatoes.
Clearly you like your movies to be safe, predictable and boring.
This movie was not for you, it’s a critique of people like you.
Either the voting panel was on mushrooms or you’re a fuckin walnut. I’m putting my money on the latter.
A walnut? Alright, then.
Spot on with the formulaic plot construction, but I don’t see many attempts to be clever. Maybe the blending of some of Art’s delusional fantasies with reality, but a lot of that stuff was pretty well prefaced with the talk show delusional episode. There are subtle points, such as the social commentary being somewhat politically neutral and ambiguous, but still pointed and quite sobering.
I think the stand up aspiriations are pretty critical to understanding Joker’s torment. He intends, even longs simply to bring joy and laughter into the lives of others, and is greeted instead with derision and rejection. Being a clown and seen as a fool is one thing, but as a stand up comedian there is no face paint and red nose to hide behind. Its just you up there, and the rejection and embarassment is far more personal.
Couple that with Arthur being off his meds and the mother’s story arc, the revelations and subsequent disassociation with his identity as a well-meaning incel mama’s boy, and I think we have the makings of a psychopath like the Joker. That might make the whole Norman Bates-esque mother aspect a bit more than just a rehashed trope. Without it, what’s left for a back story?
Agreed 100% with the depiction of violence, it is sudden, visceral and disturbing, and is one of few things that reminds the audience that Joker is a villain. The unraveling of Gotham and its society into a burning, chaotic mess is not entirely his making, but mostly circumstantial. Maybe the “pre-Giuliani” state of Gotham could have been developed a bit more, those angry mobs did seem to pop up out of nowhere. Just a little bit.
Overall, I think Todd Phillips acquits himself quite well. For me, this is memorable, which isn’t something I could say about any of the Avengers, Spiderman, Iron Man etc. films.
I like the points you make SuperLead. To tell you the truth, I battled a bit on whether or not I liked this movie (Usually, if I’m battling hard, it means I didn’t like it in the end). There were some interesting attempts at being a deeper comic book movie, but I too often found myself guessing what was going to happen. I just think this was such a great opportunity to do something mind blowing, and it all struck me as sort of hollow and typical in the end. That said, Phoenix rocks in the role, and it’s almost worth seeing to witness what he does. Almost.