Review - Joker

Well, here we are folks, this is where modern life has gotten us. It's 2019 and the most controversial, upsetting, fear-inducing movie of the year is a movie about the bad guy of that rich dude who dresses in leather and punches homeless people, directed by the man who brought us every single God awful Hangover movie. We can get more into all the "society" stuff later if you stick around that long but first, let's try and actually talk about the film, because that's what I'm good at, not broad cultural commentary. The story is of a man named Arthur Fleck, who... Seems off. He has a disorder where he can't stop laughing but it seems like there's more than that, something broken far deeper inside. In the day, he is a long suffering clown-for-hire but in the nights, he's an aspiring comedian, incapable of getting a single laugh. In this position, he becomes more and more downtrodden, being crushed under the grinding wheels of late capitalism in an absolutely textbook manner (as in genuinely, I've written essays on tropes like this). More and more and more, he is worn down, until he eventually cannot take it anymore and... Well, there's no point going into it, because while that would technically be a spoiler, you also know exactly where it's going. It is a story that ventures down a well trodden path, but in fairness, the path is well trodden for a reason.

A movie about the bad guy of that rich dude who dresses in leather and punches homeless people, directed by the man who brought us every single God awful Hangover movie

As I was watching the film, I kept being surprised by the calibre of cast who had been brought into this. Robert DeNiro is the most impressive get, essentially giving the opposite role of the one he gave in The King of Comedy. These days, it's just rare to see him putting any effort into a performance so I was just glad he did a solid job. There are also a bunch of superb character actors putting in wonderful work in the odd scene here or there, some stand outs for me being Zazie Beetz and Bryan Tyree Henry from Atlanta and Marc Maron, who has been impressing me in GLOW most recently. All are great and get given somewhere in the range of one scene to a handful but all of them (and many more that could take up an entire review between them) give added depth to a world that could be vacuous. The focus though, understandably, has landed on the title character himself, played by Joaquin Phoenix.

Phoenix has been one of the best actors working for a little while now, delivering career defining performances in films like her, The Master and You Were Never Really Here and with Joker, he has a mountain the climb, faced with the legacy of Heath Ledger's Joker, as much as the impact of his own filmography. Personally, I don't think there should be too much comparison, as both are in wildly different films, offering wildly different things, films that have various levels of dependence on them, even if they do obviously play the same character. With The Dark Knight, the film surrounding Ledger is rock solid and could function without him, but his presence destabilises the foundations in a way that makes the audience pray for their destruction. Joker, however, is built off of the back of Phoenix. That's fine, the man is brilliant here and I worry that message may get a little lost, but it requires the audience to dedicate so much of themselves to him that it can become really taxing. I'd also offer the issue that comparing his performance here to a similar role in You Were Never Really Here drains this film a little. Sure, here he is lean and scrawny whereas there he was meaty and intimidating, but the inner turmoil of the character is the same and I just find the approach in Ramsay's film much more interesting than the one here. Maybe that's a hot take, but it's where I stand and that's that.

This is a film that has skinned better films and is now parading in those skin suits

I'm going to start breaking some hearts here as we get into where the film stumbles a bit, but I'll throw out some more positives first. The film looks great, with cinematography from Lawrence Sher bringing the misery of Gotham to appropriate life. It's funny because the filth he films here looks far more beautiful than the beauty he was seemingly going for in a visual mess of a film from earlier in the year, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. There's also a brilliant score from Hildur Guðnadóttir, whose smaller roles on Arrival and Sicario have taken her to her current apex here, bringing strings to some of the most horrifying effect they've had outside of horror this year. There's a caveat to all of this though, and that caveat comes in the form of director Todd Philips. I apologise, because this may be more informed by exterior context than the film itself, but I have not been able to get it out of my mind while watching and processing the film. Philips is a director most famous for the Hangover franchise, a comedy series that was never even that great to start with, that eventually found itself at the bottom of a barrel you might mistake for comedy. In a recent interview, Philips said that he wanted to leave comedy because "woke culture" was ruining it, but good jokes transcend time. Lazy, unoriginal and blandly offensive jokes (like the ones in the Hangover trilogy) do not. That's my soapbox on that, but I bring it up to emphasise the fact that this is not some kind of genius vision, this is a film that has skinned better films and is now parading in those skin suits, seeing if anyone notices. That isn't necessarily a problem, it just means that for those who are familiar with, say, the mimed guns of Taxi Driver or the delusional idol worship of King of Comedy, this is a film that is clearly happy to swim in the wake of the films who first crested those waves, as opposed to break that new territory itself.

Before we get to wrapping those whole thing up, I do want to talk about the controversy the film has garnered. Like the films whose skin it wears, Joker is essentially a cinematic Rorschach test, comparable to (among many works of art) something like A Clockwork Orange. For me, with both of those films, I find it impossible to enjoy the company of the two leads and while I don't find their violence enjoyable, I also don't take pleasure at their suffering. They are films that lift a carpet to expose filth, intended without comment. You, as a viewer, bring whatever you want to it. You can be repulsed by them or you can identify with them, but at the end of the day, these are just films. They should not define your being. There's also been the age old debate about "violence in films causes real life violence", that has caused most screenings of Joker in the US (including the one I was at) to have police hovering nearby, just in case anyone pulls any stupid shit. That is complete nonsense, the issue is always in the individual, not in the film, and I hope that anyone reasonable watching Joker only has debates about its cinematic merits, not whether it poses a danger to society. With the amount of laughter and clapping there was in my screening, I do have slight doubts about how the film is being perceived, but that should not be taken as some omen that this film will inspire violence in the masses. Frankly, the only ethical debate that this film should be provoking is if it's okay that there's a big dance number to a song by Gary Glitter, infamous convicted paedophile? Was I the only one who spotted that?

This really could not be a more "2019" movie

Joker is not the masterpiece some are proclaiming it to be but neither is it an unwatchable train wreck. I'd compare it to something like Ad Astra, which I reviewed last week. Whereas that was hidden, difficult and occasionally too cold, Joker is obvious (sometimes far too much so), easy but very effective. Both do different things but deserve to be discussed with equal legitimacy, flawed and interesting in ways worthy of discussion. Despite being set in the eighties though, this really could not be a more 2019 movie, for better or for worse. The worry I have is that with all this increasingly toxic discourse, it will be a film whose reputation I hate by the end of the awards season that it will undoubtedly be a part of, though I pray for more evenhanded reactions as more eyes see the film. That (all of that, sorry, that was a huge amount of writing this week) all leads to me giving Joker a score of a