"Joker: Folie à Deux" review — Musical sequel is an unmotivated slog
“Got a joke for us today?”
The first film I ever seriously reviewed for this blog was Todd Phillips’ Joker just a little over five years ago. It’s not a review I’m particularly proud of — I have oft debated unpublishing the post — but I keep it available on this site as a testament to how much my voice has evolved since. Despite my pervasive distaste for the film, something that has not changed since I was eighteen, Joker holds a special place in my heart. It’s the film that began this five-years-and-counting compulsion to write about the films I see in the theatre as some way of processing my experiences. I can’t simply dismiss a film that began such an enduring hobby. Stepping back into the grime-coated streets of Phillips’ Gotham City felt familiar, bringing me back into my much younger self. But it was not a familiarity I enjoyed. The streets still reek of the pungent self-obsession that made the original such a chore. By only his second Joker outing, Phillips is already running out of steam. With no Scorsese movies to steal from and a premise that leaves the film spinning its wheels with nowhere to go, Joker: Folie à Deux is a complete nightmare.
In the world of the film, it’s been only two years since the Joker murdered late-night talk show host Murray Franklin on live television, arrested for the murder of four others, and incited a major riot in the streets of Gotham City. This universe’s Joker, a failed comedian by the name of Arthur Fleck (played by Joaquin Phoenix), now sits locked up in the maximum security wing of Arkham Asylum. His lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (played by Catherine Keener), is trying to get him deemed fit enough to stand trial, which, if they win, will let Arthur heal in an actual hospital and not waste away in the abusive, brutish Arkham. If they lose, however, the young, upstart assistant district attorney Harvey Dent (played by Harry Lawtey) is pushing for the death penalty. But all of Stewart’s progress with Arthur, and the attempts to squash the “Joker” personae that has caused so much trouble for them in the past, is threatened when Arthur meets “Lee” Quinzel (played by Lady Gaga), a patient in the minimum security wing, who shows an unhealthy obsession with the Joker and schemes to break Arthur out of prison.
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| Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux. Photo via Warner Bros. |
If you’re unfamiliar with Phillips’ very specific take on the Batman mythology, you might be confused by this premise. Don’t worry. As someone who has seen both films, I am still confused. These two films bear no immediate resemblances to the Clown Prince of Crime you might be familiar with through the countless Batman screen adaptations and comic book storylines. The first film owes more to Scorsese than anyone else and is in essence just an extended rip-off of Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982). Characters and locations in this film share no more than a name with their comic book counterparts. Phillips doesn’t concern himself with fidelity in this adaptation. He strips away the purple suits, the exaggerated theatrics, and the deranged plots of the Joker and Harley Quinn in service of what is fundamentally a courtroom drama. In and of itself, this is not a problem. I am an advocate for filmmakers altering the source material if it serves a more interesting story. But the issue here is that Phillips fails to replace any of the iconography or characteristics with anything interesting. It just leaves the viewer with the ever-present, inescapable question of “Why?”
Why? Why tell this story this way? As a Batman movie, Folie à Deux sucks all of the camp, character, and excitement of the original comic books or other versions of these characters. As a courtroom drama, this film is a chore because Phillips doesn’t understand how the genre works. Here, we only ever rehash events from the first film with no depth, nuance, or complexity added. It lacks the verbal fortitude or skill to carry such a stationary genre. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall is an excellent counterexample here, a film that is full of clever writing and compelling quandaries into the nature of justice. As a dark psychological exploration of the frailty of the human mind and the dangers of mental illness, or whatever self-aggrandizing buzzword the marketing campaign and die-hard defenders of the movie want to use, I can’t take it seriously because it’s a Batman movie. We’re still telling a story about a guy who dresses up like a clown and goes on murderous rampages, except this time, he’s a social outcast and annoying to watch.
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| Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux. Photo via Warner Bros. |
The screenplay from Scott Silver and Phillips gives so little for the actors to work with, leaving behind a string of half-developed relationships, vapid character arcs, and a storyline that, frankly, goes nowhere interesting. Joaquin Phoenix tries his hardest to bring some sense of pathos to Arthur, but the character goes from being pitiful to being annoying. Lady Gaga is here. It would have been wonderful if Phillips gave her any sort of personality, motivation, or characteristics, but he didn’t, and so we’re left with a version of Harley Quinn that exists just to sing songs. The film lives in an upsetting fantasy land of an ultra-bleak, ultra-depressive urban landscape. Perhaps some might interpret the film as some sort of anarchist indictment of how social systems fail the underprivileged, but Phillips misses included anything sort of real message on “society” or poverty. Instead, it’s just tacky, exploitative poverty porn in a desperate attempt for artificial sympathy for the devil. That’s not to say that supervillains can’t be depicted as tragic, empathetic figures, but this juxtaposition of the “Joker” branding and the DC universe with the abuse endured by a man who’s depicted with significant brain development issues and mental health disorders just rings as gross.
One of the most talked about aspects of the film is its pivot into the realm of musicals. The musical angle works surprisingly well. It keeps at least a portion of the film rooted in something other than the relentless bleakness of Phillips’ DC universe. It’s also refreshing to see Phoenix given material that at least somewhat resembles the performative, extravagant personality of the character he poorly imitates, even if it feels like too little, too late. Phoenix and Gaga are both strong vocalists and, in the various fantasy worlds of Fleck, each paying homage to Hollywood musicals of eras past, the two play off each other very well, even if neither is totally convincing as supervillainy’s top manipulative power couple. But then the film comes crashing back into the uninteresting, uncompelling real-world Phillips has formed where the drama is non-existent, the story moves nowhere, and the themes are flimsy at best.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
There are aspects of the film that do work. Lawrence Sher’s cinematography is beautiful in a superficial way. It reminds me of an Instagram photographer who just bought a film camera and moved to New York City: they’re pretty pictures, but they only ever emulate the work of others. In Sher’s case, he’s playing dress-up with New Hollywood. Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is quite moving — she won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for the first Joker film in 2020 and went on to compose for Todd Field’s Tár and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (both 2022) — but feels out of place in a film that’s so creatively bankrupt. These two strong creative components cannot save a film with nowhere to go and nothing to say. The whole film feels like an exercise in purposelessness. Where the first film could ape enough from Scorsese to at least float, Phillips here is left to drown. The most frustrating part of the movie is just how boring it is. With no narrative thrust nor compelling characters, it just feels like a distasteful slop that can only ever imitate and never originate.
There’s just nothing to engage with in Joker: Folie à Deux. Phillips is so desperate to take this edgy, “mature” angle with a character that’s fundamentally a cartoon character. It’s a film that is only ever self-indulgent in its vein aspirations to be something it’s not. Nolan can get away with the more “realistic” take (a word I don’t like but will use here for lack of a better term) because he embraces the excitement and action of superheroes. Reeves can get away with the moody visuals and grimy set pieces because he embraces the heightened reality of this world and the camp inherent to the Batman mythos. Phillips, however, in his need to be taken seriously has made a film that can only be laughed at, like a sad, failed comedian.
Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing in theatres.
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