REVIEW: "Joker" - a disastrous mess of an origin

"Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there? . . ."

2019 has been defined by the most unlikely duo. writer Chaig Mazin and director Todd Philips, the creators of the Hangover trilogy, have both produced pieces of media that have proven some of the most important and widely discussed of the year - to wildly different results. Unlike Mazin’s Chernobyl miniseries, which was a resounding success, Philips’ Joker is an entirely different beast.

Set in the early 1980s, Joker follows Arthur Fleck, played by the always fantastic Joaquin Phoenix, a man living with tremendous mental illness and poverty in Gotham City. Through a series of events that slowly break his psyche, Fleck goes from being an average citizen to the famous villain the Joker.

Before I begin to discuss the multitude of faults within the film, I must make two concessions. Although by no means a good film, Joker does excel in a few notable areas. The mise-en-cine through out is fantastic, most notably Lawrence Sher’s cinematography and the production design of Mark Friedberg, and the score from Hildur Guðnadóttir, and the performance from Joaquin Phoenix is solid, but faulters at points due to a lackluster script.

To discuss the great problems of Joker is to look at the film at three different levels - the first being the narrative, the second is the strength of adaptation, and the third the underlying, problematic politics of the film.

Narratively, the film is a disaster. It’s a dull, uninteresting tale that takes far to long to get anywhere. The film wastes its energy by following boring, purposeless subplots and characters that prove to be inconsequential at best and a result of amateurish stupidity at worst.

The story only finally arrives at the Joker by the very end. Only the last 20 minutes actually feature the titular character doing villainous things. Instead of delivering the promise of being a ‘Joker’, it follows the personal drama and problems of Arthur Fleck, the man who will become the villain. It fills the full runtime the the background information of the character that should just be the first act, or told in flashback.

The fully formed Joker emerges

As an adaptation, it fails. Frankly, it’s insulting that this is considered an adaptation of the Joker. Phoenix doesn’t play any recognizable version of the character to the film’s own detriment. The Joker loses all of his menace and dread and terror to make room for a story that shouldn’t belong to him.

Pulling the ‘bad adaptation’ card is a risky film criticism. Why does the strength of adaptation matter to a film’s quality? Often times I agree with that sentiment. Many films that I greatly adore and bad adaptations, yet great films. However, in this movie it does matter because of its political statements and social commentary, which we will discuss later.

The Joker is not a person in the traditional senses. He’s an idea. He is the product of a city, of a

society, that is so fundamentally broken that it produces this great, seemingly unbeatable evil. The Joker’s origin is left mysterious on purpose. The point is that you can’t define who exactly he was. He could be anyone, because Gotham city is so damaged.

But a Joker origin film could work, it rewritten into something more abstract. You can approach it in two different ways. First, simply make the origin all the flashbacks and have all sorts of different stories about how the character came to be. Second, taking notes from I’m Not There (2007), a film about legendary singer Bob Dylan, and tell multiple stories of people who could all become the Joker, but played by different actors. Giving the Joker one solid, fleshed out origin ruins the point of the character.

Finally, we approach the dangerous contemporary politics of Joker. Philips paints a sympathetic character for us to attach ourselves. Making a story with the villain as the central character is difficult. You don’t want an audience to actively hate your protagonist. That’s why films about criminals often give the leader characters some sort of redeemable quality: a love interest (see Ocean’s Eleven), an aging parent (see Baby Driver), a child (see Suicide Squad), or a sympathetic, understandable motivation or goal (see Avengers: Infinity War). This becomes problematic when we see this occur in something like Joker.

Todd Philips directs Joaquin Phoenix 

The Joker in Philip’s world is portrayed as some sort of a hero: a figure to be worship by the poor of the city. The rich lord over the poor of Gotham City - constantly beating down upon them and propagating a system of inequality. Out of these desperate cries comes a hero: a madman who is unafraid of the one percent: the Joker. Eventually, the film ends in a chaos inspired by the Clown Prince as the poor rise up against their overlords.

This can be interpreted in two ways: either Philips wants to us like the Joker, which is a scary endorsement of violence, or he wants us to criminalize the Joker, which gives us a scary message about political action and a plea to civility.

It is amazing that fans have embraced such a flawed, broken garbage fire of a film. Currently sitting as the highest-rated film on IMDB and with a 4.0 average rating on Letterboxd.com, I begin to think that mainstream audiences have no strength of judgement. Joker is a pale imitation of far greater works, most notably the films of Scorsese. It takes notes from these great films about broken people and deforms them into something terrible. The point of films like Taxi Driver or Fight Club is that the characters are ultimately the bad guys and aren’t our heroes.

However, Joker lacks any of the nuances. Philips made a film playing on the most basic. thoughtless interpretations of these aforementioned films and made those sentiments into a feature: a feature which doesn’t understand the underlying meaning of anything going on.

Joker is a messy, failure of an attempt to humanize one of the most deranged and dangerous villains in fiction. Philip’s movie provides a poor attempt at recapturing the power of much old, better movies, but lacks the nuance and care that made those ones work. Instead, Philips presents us with a film that is a bore narratively, insulting as an adaptation, and scary politically. Joker is a problematic film that is destined to live in infamy.

Score: 2/5

Joker Quick Facts

Directed by Todd Philips

Written by Todd Philips and Scott Silver

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz

Released October 4, 2019

122 minutes