From the Guardian, New York Times to the Washington Post, every critic has ranked Joker: Folie a Deux as pretentious, boring, and plain bad. Everyone including most Joker fans seems to be very disturbed, even angry that the sequel did not meet the expectations of an exotically violent entertainment that Joker: Folie a Deux was supposed to provide. They all seemed to have missed the point that it’s exactly what the movie sets out to do and does brilliantly. It refuses to provide the expected. It challenges the set rules of all genres and makes the DC comic book supervillain into a super fragile human being. They refused to understand that Joker: Folie a Deux is more about Arthur Fleck than the Joker.
A closer look into the original Joker will tell you that Todd Phillips set out to prove that the DC supervillain is a split personality, having suffered brutal child abuse. Therefore this was coming. To me, Joker: Folie a Deux is the most exciting mainstream movie experience in recent times. Sitting in the practically empty Landmark Theatres in Chicago, I was swept away by the powerhouse musical noir.
An act of atonement
Back in 2019 when, during the climax in Joker, Arthur gave into the madness of his costumed alter ego and shot the brains out of a preening talk show host on live TV, the entire crowd at the Searchlight Cinema on Hollywood Boulevard erupted in applause. The hero-fication of the psychopath and opportunistic nihilism received huge critical acclaim and superlative success at the box office as well as at the Oscars. Only to prove that all and sundry wanted and needed to celebrate mad violence in a society gone wrong.
To me, Phillips’s Joker: Folie a Deux is clearly an act of atonement for the sins of his earlier film. It’s a movie of disguised ideas that offers extremely grim entertainment. It clearly seems to say, “Guys, I’m not going to provide what you are expecting”. The classic climax at the iconic Manhattan staircase is a re-assertion of this irony of refusal. Arthur is rejected by his bewitching love Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, ‘cause she loved the Joker more than Arthur since the former provided more “entertainment”.
Lady Gaga’s outstanding sad, slow version of the song That’s Entertainment proves that no matter how much the Joker wants to be his original self, there is no place for Arthur Fleck in this crazy world of violence. Where “entertainment” is a celebration of the psychopath. Where being human is doomed.
Joker: Folie a Deux kicks off in the courtroom where Arthur Fleck is periodically brought in for the hearings on the murders he committed in the earlier film. The film keeps shifting from the courtroom to an Alcatraz-like Arkham State Hospital, linked from the sea by a road to a Manhattan-like Gotham.
Brendan Gleeson plays the brutally abusive prison guard, in the cold, gritty Arkham shot in shades of blue. Catherine Keener as Maryanne Stewart is effective as the tired pro bono lawyer who desperately tries to prove that Arthur is a split personality having an abusive, traumatic childhood. She tries to prove that Joker is the “Mr Hyde” side of Arthur who is responsible for the murders and not Arthur himself. The courtroom scenes shot in shades of brown are extremely well written and are as melancholy and moody as the rest of the film. They reject the usual clever repartee of a courtroom drama, focussing on how each witness who once cared for Arthur in Joker, denounces him as a scary animal. They include Sophie Drummond the single mother and also Garry Puddles, the former partner clown of Arthur, who Arthur did not kill.
Dark and painfully enthralling
An absolutely stupendous Lady Gaga is Arthur’s lover Lee Quinzel, a patient at Arkham. Lee apparently grew up in the same neighbourhood but is the spoilt daughter of rich parents. She too had an abusive father and had turned into an arsonist by burning down her parents’ apartment. Lee gets obsessed by the Joker in Arthur and they form a deadly romantic pair. She even does the cops sexual favours to enter Arthur’s solitary cell. To me, this is Gaga’s finest performance considering the highly layered, manipulative, negative role. The scene where during the screening of the musical, Band Wagon, Lee starts a fire by burning the celluloid and tries to escape with Arthur singing Gonna Build A Mountain, is an extension of Joker and is outstanding.
The rest of the film is dark and painfully enthralling where Arthur, trapped inside the malignantly devilish Joker, tries his best to redeem himself. The somewhat non-linear structure is packed with extremely layered but fragmented sequences, which stand out as a whole like the epic structure of Bertolt Brecht. One of them is in the courtroom, where the costumed clown sacks his attorney with a kiss, decides to defend himself and interrogates Puddles. The entire cross-examination is a tussle between the clever Joker and the sensitive Arthur.
Todd Phillips is also the writer of this sequel and irrespective of the writer-director Paul Schrader’s snide remarks, to me, Phillips’s writing matches up to Schrader’s brutal scripts ( from Taxi Driver to Light Sleeper ). It has been clearly evident that Phillips has been inspired by Scorsese, De Niro and Schrader but is now pushing the borders of the new wave noir, which seems to have stagnated over the years.
The fact that Todd Phillips made Joker 2 into a part-time musical is a clear step in that direction. Like it or not, it immediately forces you to look at the comic book supervillain in a romantic, passionate light. The dosage of wisecracks is just about right and the songs come as compensation. Phillips keeps shifting the mood and pace from dark comedy to doomed melancholia, to and fro, much like his main character’s split personality. It’s here that Phillips as director achieves mastery. Unlike Schrader, I fell in love with the two primary mentally unstable characters, Lee and Arthur, purely because of their unpredictable vulnerability.
Though Phillips doesn’t show it, I have a sneaking suspicion that the car bomb explosion that blows up the court was an act of the arsonist Lee Quinzel and not the raging mob outside. After Arthur denounces the Joker in him, Lee feels betrayed. When she dresses up and paints her eyes like Harley Quinn to attend the final judgement it is clear to me that she has become the Harley Quinn in one of the versions of the graphic novel and will attempt to kill Arthur by blowing up the entire court. That Arthur manages to escape and meets up with her at the iconic Manhattan staircase, where she rejects him with a song and Arthur is arrested, is icing over the cake.
In case you’ve read all the versions in DC comics, you’ll find the chemistry between Arthur and Lee as dangerously romantic as Joker and Harley Quinn. Only here, the roles are reversed. Lee is the one toying around with the Joker. Gaga does an incredible job of displaying this incoherent passion.
Phillips’s choice from the American jukebox is remarkable. Each song actually heightens the meaning of the scenes. When You Are Smiling, Gonna Build a Mountain, I’ve Got The World On A String, That’s Life, If My Friends Could See Me Now, When the Saints Go Marching In… one after another, each number is a sheer revelation like the final song Send In The Clowns in Joker.
Phillips’s refusal to shoot the songs like a Broadway musical, in static situations, where the actors actually sing as if they are speaking, makes the pain or joy far more palpable. Then again, the songs come in fragments and not as a whole. They are brutally cut midway to a cold dialogue scene. The most interesting aspect is that nothing is traditionally fulfilling in this movie. You are left either hanging or disturbed throughout this collage of genres and very slowly the brilliance sinks in. It did sink into me as I sat through this musical-cum-courtroom drama-cum-graphic novel-cum-noir.
Irrespective of what you readers might feel, I have come to believe that Joaquin Phoenix is one of the most powerful American actors today. His sullen, gawky, brooding, unpredictably sad Arthur Fleck will remain a testimony of the struggle for sanity in this violent world. If De Niro’s Travis Bickle is the most iconic study of the struggle for sanity in a mad, bad world, Phoenix’s portrayal of that same struggle has a certain pathological pain which is certainly rare.
The most poignant moment of the film is where Arthur sings, If You Go Away, the Neil Diamond hit, on the phone to Lee. It’s the most haunting moment of romance I have seen in recent times. The raspy, almost quaky rendition of the great song made my viewing worth everything. We all know that Joaquin Phoenix can sing for a living, having watched his fabulous performance in Walk The Line as Johnny Cash, singing all the songs himself. This almost whispering version takes the song to a whole new level, gifting the movie with its most powerful moment.
I strongly believe that the Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix combination is as cinematically exciting as the Scorsese and De Niro combo. Joker 3 will not be possible anymore because of the stunning, fateful twist in the end which I shall not reveal. Yet I shall eagerly look forward to more films with this duo.
