JOKER MOVIE REVIEW
To say that Joker is a disturbing
film would be to give the word disturbing weight that it wasn’t designed for.
Joker is frightening, haunting and so problematic that I had trouble speaking
for hours after watching the film and lost some sleep. That sounds dramatic,
but it's how I respond to films and this character - one of pop culture's
greatest villains has the power to do that. Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark
Knight was the stuff of nightmares.
To look at him was to look into the heart of
darkness. But, in Joker, director Todd Phillips and actor Joaquin Phoenix take
it further. They place us inside his head. We see what causes a mentally ill
loner to blossom into an unhinged killing machine, and we sympathize with him.
We're repulsed by him, but we're also rooting for him to tear down the
indifferent smug establishment.
The Joker unleashes anarchy and we smile with
him as he watches the world burn. The film gets into your bloodstream, because
it's so skillfully crafted. At the center, of course is Phoenix as the Joker.
But for most of the film, we don't see him as the crown prince of crime.
This is an origin story and the
formidable Joker is a wretched clown for hire named Arthur Fleck. Phillips and
his co-writer Scott Silver reimagined the comic book world, so Joker is a
period film with a gritty, frayed Scorsese-style quality. The CGI is at a bare
minimum.
The film is set in the late 1970s-early 80s
New York and carries the DNA of films of that era like Taxi Driver, The King of
Comedy, Dog Day Afternoon, Network. DOP Lawrence Sher and art director Laura
Ballinger do a masterful job of rendering an urban hell. Gotham is quite
literally a mess because the sanitation department is on strike.
There's trash everywhere and the
residents seemed to be stewing in stench and sickness, especially Arthur.
Arthur's mother calls him Happy, which is a grand irony because as Arthur tells
us, he hasn't been happy for one minute of his entire life. Most people treat
Arthur like the garbage that they're side-stepping on the pavement and his
tenuous grip on reality slowly comes about.
As he says, it's enough to make anyone crazy. You've never seen crazy done like Phoenix does it. Arthur suffers from a condition that makes him laugh uncontrollably, but this laughter is like a breath away from tears. There are scenes in which he barely seems human.
Phoenix is so thin that when he
removes his shirt, you can see bones sticking out at impossible angles. Arthur
is pathetic, but his eyes flash a gleam of the delight that comes from having nothing
to lose. When he kills, his angular wiry body seems to reverberate with power.
Phoenix is practically in every frame of this film. He's hypnotic and he holds
Joker together.
The other actors which include
Robert De Nero playing a talk-show host Arthur worships are eclipsed by
Phoenix’s show-stopping performance. In any case, the film is so intensely
focused on Arthur and justifying his descent into madness that it doesn't
substantiate the other threads of the narrative, like a subplot of a romance
with the neighbor. Yes, Batman makes an appearance, but he's a child. At one
point, Arthur writes in his diary the worst part about having a mental illness
is that people expect you to behave as though you don't. Ultimately, though the
film doesn’t take this insight anyway. Joker gives us a view of a deranged
world, but it never attempts to offer more than a simplistic causality.
As social commentary, it's pretty
thin and morally spacious. Joker is artful nihilism. And despite its dazzle,
it's hard for me to get behind that.
Comments