"Let’s give the people what they want,” Lady Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn) declares at a key moment in Joker: Folie a Deux. That seems odd coming from a film that is committed to giving audiences quite the opposite.
After a haul of $1 billion at the box office, the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, 11 Academy Award nominations and the first-ever Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix, director Todd Phillips knew it would be carte blanche for him when it came to the inevitable sequel to 2019’s intriguing if ultimately superficial Joker. Five years later, Phillips, armed with a follow-up with ample promise and potential but little in terms of premise and plot, has, unfortunately, squandered that opportunity.
Joker: Folie a Deux wastes the bulk of its 139-minute runtime indulging in dreamy if mostly pointless musical reverie, commits an abominable mistake by doing very little to showcase a spectacular Lady Gaga and stutters and stops the already paper-thin plot by almost rehashing the first film in a long-drawn-out court trial.
Taking place two years after the events of its 2019 outing, we meet Arthur Fleck aka Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) being held in a corrections facility awaiting trial for the murder of five people, one among them being talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) who Fleck had shot dead on live television in the first film. As we go along, we learn that there is also a sixth victim, much closer to home.
In Arkham, though, Fleck is a model inmate and, thanks to heavy medication, seems sedate and withdrawn most of the time. That doesn’t stop the prison authorities (led by Brendan Gleeson) from mistreating him, most often for entertainment.
As a reward for his ‘good behaviour’, Fleck gets to join music therapy sessions where he meets Lee, a highly-strung, and as we quickly learn, an ‘arsonist’ admirer of Joker, who has lived a traumatic childhood herself. Finally feeling seen and in love, Fleck stops taking his medication, which results in the inevitable — we get to meet Joker once again.
His lawyer, Marianne (Catherine Keener), and his doctor’s line of defence anyway is that Arthur has “another person living inside (him), and that it was this other person who committed these crimes”. Assistant DA Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey), the prosecutor, however, thinks he was fully aware and is pursuing the death penalty.
Joining hands on the script once more after the first film with Scott Silver, Phillips attempts a continuation story but what they come up with is a largely unwieldy sequel, messed up (and we mean that literally and figuratively) in ways more than one.
The sliver of a silver lining, however, is that Folie a Deux doesn’t stick to the tried-and-tested formula of the first film and attempts to make a swing for the fences. The biggest swing is flipping the genre of the film.
Since his incarceration, we get to know that Fleck has become a star, and outside the gates of the asylum, his followers have only grown more rabid. A TV movie has been made about him and a book written on his serial-killing spree. When Lee and Arthur’s relationship blooms, the film takes its most dramatic leap — it becomes a musical.
Long musical sequences, which include a ’60s-styled variety show, midnight jazz club and a rooftop dance number, routinely push themselves into the narrative. They jump between reality and fantasy, and pretty soon, it becomes difficult to tell which is which. You often think that they might be playing only in Arthur’s head, and then you realise that may not be the case.
The music, song ’n’ dance — with an exceptional Gaga in her element, raging and roaring and giving the film its heft and heart — add colour and flair to the palette but don’t really do much for a film whose plot is already stretched far too thin.
Folie a Deux delves predominantly into songbooks of the ’50s and ’60s to dig out some classic tunes — ranging from Frank Sinatra’s That’s Life to Barbra Streisand’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered to Stevie Wonder’s For Once In My Life — performed by the couple at various points in the film. But rather than conveying events or emotions to the audience, the barrage of songs merely slows down proceedings.
Folie a Deux’s predecessor focused on the origin story of Joker, turning one of the most colourful and notorious pop-culture villains of all time into a bleak but largely compelling story of a man’s psychological degeneration in the face of a brutish society. There was nothing called ‘comic-book entertainment’ about Joker.
That Folie a Deux attempts a detour even while retaining the DNA of the franchise is commendable. But even though this newfound stylistic vigour helps extend the shelf-life of Phoenix’s Joker, giving the character a different dimension, by the time the end comes, this incarnation feels kind of exhausting.
It also doesn’t help that the film gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga. It not only keeps Gaga away from the film — robbing it of much of its spark — but also seems to be saying nothing new.
The film may indulge its shift to a musical a little too much, but to be honest, it is Gaga who makes it worth it. Bold, all-embracing, immersive, she renders Lee into a hugely compelling character, making you wonder why Folie a Deux didn’t make more use of her. Watching Phoenix — whose masterful portrayal extends from the first film to this one, making him slip into one of the most complex characters in cinema like second skin — and Gaga inject new life into these songs is a unique spectacle.
What, therefore, is bewildering is Phillips’s refusal to address his film as a musical. On various platforms, including at CinemaCon in April this year, the director has constantly reinforced that Folie a Deux is not a musical. “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It is just that Arthur does not have the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.” Having watched the film, one can’t disagree more.
In the end, it is a baffling experience watching Joker: Folie a Deux, a movie certainly not made for fans but also seems to have been made for no one. By the time it attempts to recreate the chaotic feel of the first film and takes a few crazy risks, you are kind of done with it. Quoting Barbra Streisand in a subversive manner, it neither leaves you bewitched nor really bothered. Bewildered, yes.
Priyanka Roy
I liked/ didn’t like Joker: Folie a Deux because... Tell t2@abp.in
